I'll never forget the Jane Wyman line, "You'll be the raisin Queen of the Tuscany Valley!", told to rival Melissa Agretti on "Falcon Crest". I can imagine how Angela Channing would have dealt with prohibition had she been around with the same power back in the 1930's. This deals with a powerful Family, once prosperous winemakers, and now unable to distribute their vintage thanks to the Halstead act. Patriarch Claude Rains isn't as ruthless as Wyman would be, and he spouts the same theories of how God invented the great for each new visitor.
The newest visitor is British Jean Simmons, his granddaughter who has been brought to the United States to marry a distant cousin in order to keep the business in the family. It's a strange custom for this strange clan, and the secrets that come out during this film excessive two hours are indeed bizarre. As decent as Rains is, he is surrounded by ruthless relatives, starting with daughter-in-law Dorothy McGuire who seems to control everybody in the family, and grandson Rock Hudson, as amoral as Rains is honest. Unable to sell the wine grapes, he decides bury them so they will replenish the earth as fertilizer, making Hudson decide to sell them to Chicago mobsters so they can make them into bootleg wine. Hudson gets a local girl pregnant, with McGuire forcing her to marry another man while Hudson is away.
The saga of Hudson's birthright becomes another subplot as the relationship between his bedridden mother (Anna Lee) and McGuire's husband (Kent Smith) is The number of characters becomes outrageous for a two hour film, and as beautiful as this film is to watch, it is simply just a mess. A theme song over the opening credits, melodramatically son, doesn't help matters. I had high hopes for this, but indeed, their vines do turn out sour grapes. The direction by veteran Henry King has this going all over the place, and superb photography (along with a beautiful performance by Rains) cannot save it.
The newest visitor is British Jean Simmons, his granddaughter who has been brought to the United States to marry a distant cousin in order to keep the business in the family. It's a strange custom for this strange clan, and the secrets that come out during this film excessive two hours are indeed bizarre. As decent as Rains is, he is surrounded by ruthless relatives, starting with daughter-in-law Dorothy McGuire who seems to control everybody in the family, and grandson Rock Hudson, as amoral as Rains is honest. Unable to sell the wine grapes, he decides bury them so they will replenish the earth as fertilizer, making Hudson decide to sell them to Chicago mobsters so they can make them into bootleg wine. Hudson gets a local girl pregnant, with McGuire forcing her to marry another man while Hudson is away.
The saga of Hudson's birthright becomes another subplot as the relationship between his bedridden mother (Anna Lee) and McGuire's husband (Kent Smith) is The number of characters becomes outrageous for a two hour film, and as beautiful as this film is to watch, it is simply just a mess. A theme song over the opening credits, melodramatically son, doesn't help matters. I had high hopes for this, but indeed, their vines do turn out sour grapes. The direction by veteran Henry King has this going all over the place, and superb photography (along with a beautiful performance by Rains) cannot save it.