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Home From the Hill

Directed by Vincente Minnelli.
With Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, George Peppard.
US, 1960, 35mm, color, 160 min.
Print source: George Eastman House

Minnelli followed Some Came Running with another outsize widescreen epic of sexuality in small-town America, in this case William Humphrey's Faulknerian saga about an overbearing Texas rancher's efforts to induct his introverted son into "the company of men."  Robert Mitchum stars as the macho, philandering patriarch who battles frigid wife Eleanor Parker for the loyalty of their soft-spoken offspring Theron (George Hamilton). Another of Minnelli’s sensitive young men—after John Kerr’s characters in The Cobweb and Tea and Sympathy—Theron is an adolescent torn between a bullying father and a disappointed, smothering mother. His character naturally looks for help from Rafe (Peppard) a friendly ranch hand of his own age. Ultimately, Theron’s dilemma proves a dead end, and the narrative shifts to Rafe—the only one able to negotiate the impasse within the family, an impasse freighted with all the weight of the war between the sexes and within the genders. The height of hyperbolic male melodrama, Home from the Hill supports its critique of masculinity through daringly baroque mise-en-scène, with Minnelli using camera movement, costume and décor incisively to illuminate and critique.

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