Autumn Passion

By J.C.

I Walk the Line is Director John Frankenheimer's second film in a row (the other was The Gypsy Moths) about the quiet terrors of small-town family life and a middle-aged man's irrevocable course toward self-destruction. The theme is both difficult and promising, but in each film it is subordinated, not to say submerged, in melodrama.

Sheriff Tawes (Gregory Peck) is a righteous, brooding Tennessean overtaken by the sterility of his existence. His unattractive daughter asks him inane riddles at the supper table, his wife (Estelle Parsons) quotes marriage advice from the Reader's Digest and his senile father jabbers from the porch swing. When the sheriff questions a young mountain girl named Alma McCain (Tuesday Weld) about a traffic violation, he sees her as a chance--perhaps his last --for freedom, rebellion, sexual gratification, maybe even love. Alma's father (Ralph Meeker) sees a chance for something too: protection for his illegal moonshine still. So he encourages his daughter to seduce the sheriff. Alma succeeds, and Tawes is forced to cover up for her father. Undone by all this, the sheriff wanders vacantly around town. His passion for Alma makes him an accomplice when her father shoots a deputy sheriff. It leaves Tawes wounded and ruined as the McCain pickup truck, with Alma aboard, rumbles off into the mountain mist.

Tuesday Weld is an understandably desirable love object, a genuine Lolita, but she can make little sense of her rather muddy character. Ralph Meeker, as the ruthless moonshiner, is all sinister smiles and barely repressed violence. The music, sung by Johnny Cash, is slick and unemotional. The main flaw is that the love affair between Alma and the sheriff lacks the qualities of desperation and frustration that would make it convincing. Alvin Sargent's script does not help matters much with such ritual movie Southernisms as "Eat your beans, Grandpa" and "Would you like a Dr Pepper?" Peck succeeds in conveying the sheriff's vulnerability but never his passion.

Time was when Frankenheimer's movies (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds) were charged with an almost tangible visual energy, but recently his style has become so severely formal as to be almost academic. He is still capable of tour de force camera work (like a stunning crane shot that travels slowly across a deserted house, making every brick and notch of wood come alive for the eye) but then no one has ever quarreled with his technical vituosity. It is his story sense that has come increasingly into question.

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