“Ruby Gentry,” from 1952, is one of the most scathing, furious films of classic-era Hollywood, a late-career masterwork by the director King Vidor.
The volatile blend of sex, death, money, revenge, class prejudice, religious fanaticism, and the burden of history yields an outrageous cinematic conflagration: “Ruby Gentry,” from 1952. It’s one of the most scathing, furious films of classic-era Hollywood, a late-career masterwork by the director King Vidor, who’s the subject ofVidor, born in 1894, made his first feature in 1918, as an independent; throughout his career, he produced many of his own films.
The strangeness of “Ruby Gentry” starts with the film’s very title, which is a total spoiler. The eponymous character, played by Jennifer Jones, is introduced under her birth name of Ruby Corey. The movie is almost entirely a flashback, narrated from the perspective of one of its main characters, Saul Manfred , a doctor from the North who’s a recent arrival in the cozy but somnolent seaside town of Braddock, North Carolina, where the action is set.
Boake , the scion of a grand old Confederate family gone to nostalgic ruin, is an energetic young man who returns to town, after five years overseas, with big plans: to drain swampland, plant cash crops, jump-start the town’s economy, and make his name. He has the practical sense, but not the money, to realize his ambitions.
The story is far out front, all on the surface. Saul, the insightful narrator, isn’t just a Northerner but an ineffectual intellectual who’s inept with a gun ; he’s the outsider who has no truck with the prejudices of what he calls the “stuffy, snobbish town,” and wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to marry Ruby, if only he could get up the gumption to propose.
Vidor endows “Ruby Gentry” with a flamboyant, lurid style: the starkly sculptural power of its lusty embraces, the embedding of flashback within flashback. There’s a hectic sequence of exultant passion that concludes with Boake driving his convertible gleefully into the sea and a special-effects moment of deep subjectivity and dire fantasy in a barroom mirror. The richly textured drama is delivered with a compressed, overheated rapidity that suggests contents under pressure.
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