God’s Little Acre

God’s Little Acre (1958) gets right the comic tone of Caldwell’s 1933 novel. It correctly conveys the tensions between town and country, between the rural dirt farm of Ty Ty and the town life and affluence of Augusta. It preserves the family structure and other characters from the novel. It fails in a number of fundamental ways. While the film is almost always interesting, it frequently strays in confusing and unsatisfactory ways from the plot of the novel. Fraternal jealousies do not lead to murder in the film. Only Will Thompson (Aldo Ray) dies, by accidental gunfire, after he turns on the power at the cotton mill. The raw sexuality of the novel is missing. It could never have been properly conveyed in a 1958 film, and even today it would possibly push the limits of what mainstream films can do. I think specifically of the scene in which one of the men has sex with Darling Jill in front of the rest of the family.

One failure of the film is its attempt to make Ty Ty noble. He invokes God at the end of the film and seems redeemed from his hole digging ways. He seems more interested in the welfare of the family, in keeping his sons alive, than he does in finding grandpa’s gold. He seems able to look above the horizon in a way that the character in the novel, an abysmally depressing novel, never does.

The novel suggests that environmental conditions of the prevailing economy, the conflict of agriculture vs. commerce, and human sexuality control the actions of the characters. There is no free will, and the one person who attempts to exercise free will, Will Thompson when he turns on the power in the cotton mill, is shot to death. He is the figure of masculine power and sexuality in the novel, the one individual who asserts himself, has the women he wants to have, and he is shot down. The film suggests some of the same dynamic relationships, but softens and weakens them. The film lacks the hard unrelenting edge of the novel, its clinical indifference to the characters, especially to Ty Ty.

The characters in the film do not look like people who live on a farm and spend their days digging holes looking for gold. They look too well fed, too well dressed, and they sweat only a little. The women walk around in high heels and starched dresses. The men appear to be only lightly soiled after a day of shoveling dirt in a fifteen-foot deep hole. These people and their ways of acting and talking and dressing are overly sanitized. They live in a house much too big for a man who is able only to barely subsist.

Ty Ty in both the novel and the film is possessed by the lust for material things. His oldest son Jim Leslie has gone to the city to marry a wealthy woman. His daughter’s husband Will Thompson eschews life on the farm and chooses another kind of enslavement at the cotton mill. Ty Ty chooses not to farm and instead digs holes for 20 years in the hopes of finding gold which his grandfather supposedly buried there. Why he believes the gold is there is never made clear. Ty Ty digs holes in search of elusive treasure for the same reason Will Thompson works at the cotton mill. It is the choice of affluence and material things over the virtues of farming. This is the dialectic established in the film, and though it is suggested in the novel Caldwell doesn’t idolize farming and does not suggest that farming in some way creates virtue in the breasts of those who till the soil.

The film is schizophrenic in a way. It is broad comedy at the beginning as we watch Ty Ty and his sons dig holes and rely on the albino Dave Dawson (well played by a young Michael Landon) to divine the true location of the gold. The comedy of the film is like the broad comedy of a comic strip, whereas the comedy of the novel is focused at people so different from most of us readers of the present day that they seem almost like alien beings. Somewhere past the midpoint, however, the nature of the film changes, and one senses an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to portray the family in a more sympathetic light, especially Ty Ty and his struggle to quell the tensions rampant among his sons. By the end of the film, with its somber and tragic scenes, one almost forgets the broad comedy of the opening scenes and the digging of holes.

I am reminded throughout this film and the novel it is based on of Faulkner’s story “Lizards in Jamshyd’s Courtyard” and the false treasure out at the Old Frenchman’s Place. Did Faulkner borrow from Caldwell, or vice versa? Could Caldwell have seen the 1932 Saturday Evening Post version of the story that later became the penultimate chapter of The Hamlet? I am also reminded of Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying, who sometimes seems more like the Ty Ty of the film than the Ty Ty of the novel. But these are subjective and unreliable judgments.

The film’s conclusion seems to suggest that Ty Ty is such a crazy fool that he really isn’t to be taken seriously. Greed, ambition for wealth, seems in some way to be responsible for the tension and discord in the family (not to mention sexual jealousy which the film makes far less of than the novel does). At the end of the film everyone is happily tilling the field, planting cotton seed. Griselda and her husband seem happy with one another, at least for now. But when Ty Ty strikes an old metal shovel with the plow blade and decides that the shovel is a sign from God, he starts digging again. Is this just a brief interlude or the beginning of another 20-year cycle? The suggestion is the latter, that old Ty Ty will just never learn, and that despite all the suffering and unhappiness in the film it all really doesn’t matter because these characters are rural redneck farmers and you can’t really expect any better of them (which is pretty much what Caldwell suggests too).

The cotton mill episode is more effectively treated in the novel and is an exploration of how industry—one extension of the comer-oriented world of the modern city and of modern America in general—exploits the individuals. In the film Will Thompson is accidentally shot. In the film he is brutally and cruelly shot by two henchman for the cotton mill owners, who show no concern for the many people who have been put out of world. The aspect of labor vs. owner disputes is watered down in the film, and therefore one of the more controversial aspects of the novel is softened, just as the graphic sexuality and violence of the novel is watered down, erased, or blurred.

The production values of the film are strong. There is good black and white cinematography. The music by Elmer Bernstein seems to me out of touch with the subject of the film and a little precious. Robert Ryan as Ty Ty is excellent, as is Tina Louise in her role as Griselda (Tina Louise is the future Ginger of Gilligan’s Island—she was a wasted talent—this film shows she could act). Buddy Hackett is strangely but appropriate cast as Pluto Swint, the buffoonish, clownish candidate for sheriff and suitor of Darling Jill. Darling Jill herself seems miscast and lacks the sexuality of the character in the novel, while Tina Louise is the burning female character in the film in every way.

For the most part, the film portrays the rural unlettered farmers as simpletons unable to make practical decisions or to lead practical lives. Although Caldwell shares this opinion, for the most part, he sees the farmers as victims of economic and environmental forces. In general, this is a film that has been overlooked and should be better known.