This was the second entry in the Troy Donahue Hormonal Quartet of young/ illicit love (after A SUMMER PLACE; before SUSAN SLADE and ROME ADVENTURE*), all four produced, directed & written by Delmar Daves & lushly scored by Max Steiner. Donahue never recovered from the type-casting. (Our French poster is subtitled ‘The Man With the Head of an Angel.’) This is the one set amongst cutthroat Connecticut tobacco growers and it does a nifty job laying out the labor intensive, masochistic farm work. The problem comes in the interlocked romances between rival tobacco clans that make up the storyline. Claudette Colbert, who manages to look both older & unchanged in her final big-screen appearance, is Troy’s mom, hired to escort/control tobacco man Dean Jagger’s wayward daughter. But Claudette soon finds she’s being courted by Karl Malden, Jagger’s hard-charging, land-devouring nemesis. Meantime, Donahue, after a brief fling with field gal Connie Stevens (preggers by a Malden scion), sequentially falls for the daughters of Jagger and Malden who themselves are his sequential bosses! Yikes. How many ways can a pretty blue-eyed blonde boy be pulled before he’s torn in two? So he runs off to the Navy just before the third act starts. By now, Delmar Daves is dropping plotlines left & right. Heck, it’s past the two-hour mark before he gets Donahue in swim trunks! And Max Steiner can’t come up with anything to match his big swoony love theme from SUMMER PLACE. (The film's really no worse than PLACE, yet a big step down. But kudos to cinematographer Harry Stradling, the one creative guy who manages to up his game.) Sure seems hard to stay abreast of the current Teen Zeitgeist.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Three of the four pics in the quartet get reasonable circulation. Only SUSAN SLADE has fallen thru the cracks. Is it significantly worse . . . or better?
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