Though this would be billed as a drama, it has some genuinely taught action sequences and it's written with a hard slang to emulate a hardscrabble Ozarks dialect. This emotional gem was made independently of the studio system, and was therefore exempt from many of the restrictions of the Hayes code.
It didn't' receive much distribution, and the director, Harry Revier made changes to the edit depending on the state he happened to be screening.
Some of the images are rather bleak, and the theme is dark, but it is a must see for any film lover, and depicts a marriage tradition prevalent in early Americas, and which continued in the region until federal laws were passed setting the minimum age for marriage. It also paints a picture of rural poverty which is neither overly sentimental nor degrading.
The production design is authentic, and times felt like a moving Brassai, or Walker Evans. In fact, Walker Evans' famous images of a white sharecropper family had been taken just two years earlier in 1936, as a part of FDR's New Deal Program.
Shirley Mills was 12 when she appeared in this, her first role. Reactionary controversy surrounds a skinny-dipping scene. However, the scene is beautifully shot, and not at all suggestive.
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