Boring, long, and too preachy.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Beneath Pedestrian.A kind of dull Southern Gothic. Poor Jennifer Jones, her hair mussed and her jeans muddy, is from the wrong side of the tracks. The good inbred folks of Thanatopolis, North Carolina don't pay no attention to her and her hunting and traipsing round. Except high-class Charlton Heston. He finds her, well, curiously attractive. But when he returns from a spell in the big city, he seems to have acquired scruples and, however much regard he has for Ruby, he's been tied to the wealthy and somewhat snooty Tracy since childhood. They get married.In return, out of spite as much as anything else, Ruby married the wealthy, good-natured, and bulbous-nosed millionaire Karl Malden. He really loves her. And she's beginning to grow fond of him too, just before he's killed in a boating accident. The community blames her. The local paper hints at murder. But -- HAH! -- Ruby is rich now and wears sunglasses and glamorous clothes. She also buys up every promissory note in sight and demands payment, which demolishes half the town's businesses and ruins Heston's plans for the future.That's as far as I want to go with the plot, for a couple of reasons. One is that I don't want to spoil it. Another is that the climax comes virtually out of the fog, a kind of deus ex maniac.What an ordinary movie this is. I don't know if you're familiar with the song "Ruby." It was a popular hit at the time of this movie's release, sung by Nat King Cole among others. If you haven't heard the tune before, that's okay. It will become an indelible part of your declarative memory by the time this ordeal is finished. It's the only music we hear. The overscore is "Ruby" and variations on "Ruby." If someone in the film turns on the radio or plays a record, the tune is always "Ruby," usually on a quivering harmonica. It's almost a relief when somebody sloshes through a North Carolina swamp and all we hear is the weird cry of the Australian kookaburra.How dull. Except for its budget, which is quite modest, and its black-and-white photography, it could easily have been a made-for-TV number on Lifetime Movies. It was directed by King Vidor, who must have been in some sort of post-ictal twilight state throughout. He allows ALL of the principals to overact outrageously. Heston would go on to much better things as he matured, but here he's wooden and snarly. Jones could be in a silent movie, where the overuse of body language is expected. Some of the characters are so bad, they're actually amusing, though not excuse enough to watch this dreary feature.

This film has Oscar winners, Jennifer Jones, Charlton Heston, and Karl Malden in an unusual love triangle. Jennifer Jones plays Ruby, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who can play with the men. She's in love with Heston's character but he can't marry her because of the scandal. But it doesn't mean that he doesn't lust after her. As a girl, she went to Mr. Gentry's home for a couple of years. Years later, Gentry (played by Karl Malden) invites her to help care for his sick wife played by Josephine Hutchinson. When she dies, he offers a proposal of marriage to Ruby. In the small town of Braddock, North Carolina, Ruby's marriage to beloved Gentry doesn't sit too well with the country club. Anyway, Heston's character is still pining for Ruby. I have to say that I liked Jennifer Jones in this role as Ruby Gentry. She allowed her to develop into a complex character than just a cardboard cut-up of the studio system.

...in romantic pairings .Their love/hate relationship compares favorably with the one depicted in "duel in the sun" which featured Jones too.This actress epitomizes romantic passion ,and no one equaled her in this field (as a French I can tell she was the best Madame Bovary I had ever seen).Ruby was born on the wrong side ,that's what we are told at the very beginning of this story of sound and fury.In the Vidor family,she is akin to Pearl in "duel in the sun" ,to "Stella Dallas" and even to Rosa in "beyond the forest".Like Rosa ,she dreams of the social ladder but unlike her,she can love and it's her downfall.Raised in a family with a fanatical brother who brandishes his Bible like a gun,she will never be able to get out of the swamp ,even with all the money in the world "You can't buy your way out of the swamp".Even when she uses it to destroy everything and all her fellow men's lives,she can still hear this pump ,which is like a beating heart.The movie is actually a long flashback ,which reinforces what the first lines are saying: Ruby was not born in the right place at the right time.

King Vidor's head-on approach to melodrama seems to be out of fashion these days when critics are more comfortable with the self-conscious ironies of Douglas Sirk. Ruby Gentry is the last and, along with Stella Dallas, the best of his "women's pictures", a taut, almost abstract depiction of a woman's ultimately self-destructive attempt to live without restraints. The object of all men's desire, she tries to turn the tables on Charlton Heston by becoming the aggressor (in their first scene together shining her flashlight on him while she remains invisible, making him the passive object of her teasing erotic gaze). Caught between the fire-and-brimstone brother out of Flannery O'Connor and the discreet condemnation of the bourgeoisie she marries into, Ruby lashes out, taking them all (even Heston) down with her and ends up cast adrift on the sea, as inscrutable as Dreyer's Gertrud.