Trailer
Plot summary
Raintree County, Indiana, in 1859, is home to John Wickliff Shawnessey, who is drawn to the legend of a raintree said to grow in a large and dangerous swamp. Nell Gaither is his college sweetheart, but when Susanna Drake, a wealthy belle from New Orleans, visits the county, John begins an affair with her. Susanna goes back to the South, then returns to Indiana and tells him she is carrying his child. Out of honor and duty he marries her, and Nell is left heartbroken. The couple travel south to meet Susanna's family, where John, an abolitionist, does not fit in with their world.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Raintree County (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Montgomery Clift was nearly killed during filming: tired and hungover on the evening of May 12, 1956, he drove into a telephone pole, breaking his nose, cutting his lip and fracturing his jaw in three places, and production was shut down for two to three weeks.
- David Lewis, hired as producer when MGM revived the project in 1955, said the studio fought the casting of Elizabeth Taylor as Susannah Drake: "They felt that she was neither a good actress nor a potential box office star."
- During filming in Danville, Clift ran naked through the town, so a policeman was stationed outside his hotel room door at night to stop him leaving; he also ordered his steak "blue-rare" and ate it with his fingers.
- Raintree County was the first film shot in a 65-millimeter anamorphic widescreen process originally called MGM Camera 65, later renamed Ultra Panavision 70, which gave an extra-wide 2.76:1 image and was used again for MGM's 1959 Ben-Hur.
- Delays over the issues with Clift and Taylor, plus extravagant sets, made the film the most expensive US-based film in MGM's history; Edward Dmytryk never directed for MGM again, and the film did not recoup its cost.
- Edward Dmytryk wrote in his autobiography, It's a Hell of a Life but Not a Bad Living, that he found "a hundred containers" of every kind of drug and a leather case fitted with needles and syringes in Clift's hotel room, and once found Clift so drunk his cigarette had burned out between his fingers.
- The swamp finale was shot in the real swamps of Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee, where the huge gnarled tree is a bald cypress; the crew artificially decorated it with golden leaves and blossoms to create the "golden rain" effect.
- Producer Carey Wilson said he had Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Janet Leigh in mind for the female roles, while Robert Walker and Keenan Wynn were considered for the male lead; Van Heflin and Gene Kelly were also on the studio's shortlist.
