King Vidor, the furious conjuror of undoubtedly the wildest visions of good old Hollywood, a man, who (paraphrasing critic Nick Pinkerton) preferred a sledgehammer to the Lubitsch touch, created several masterworks with shades of sexual exaggeration, and most likely reached his peak in Ruby Gentry.
Born in a small town on the wrong side of the tracks, Ruby Corey (Jennifer Jones) is one of those girls next door upon whom the local men love to project their own fantasies. In reality, Ruby harbours a pent-up chaotic energy inside her, which explodes after she falls in love with the impoverished Boake Tackman (Charlton Heston). Boake however lets her down by choosing to marry rich, and Ruby herself yields to picking a wealthy husband in Jim Gentry (Karl Malden). One calamity follows another and Ruby becomes the scapegoat of a puritanical small town, while transforming into a typical Vidorian individual, invariably confronted with the monstrous collective.
In Vidor’s cinema, and especially in Ruby Gentry, the story is secondary to the director’s art. The brazen concreteness of the images and the condensation of the wildest ideas into clear-cut compositions strikes the most primitive of nerves in the viewer. (Valtteri Lepistö) (Valtteri Lepistö)
Language: English, subtitles: Finnish and Swedish