The comedy depiction of rural residents and their natural habitat is a peculiar pattern in classical Hollywood. Most often, this is a favorable situation, dominated by the rural over the urban, historically conditioned by the old antithesis of natural and cultural principles, which so happened to the heart of even the most sensitive zealots of sentimentalism. However, the comedic beginning entails an ironic view of such an idyll, the autochthons of which still live in vain in their local “golden age”, sometimes quite in vain without taking advantage of the preferences of the modern. In the film, such a character is naturally the father of the family, who simply ignores legal discourse, which causes a natural suspicion of the authorities, one of whom has a subjective tooth on the main character. However, the plot of the film is meaningless, it is extremely accessible, so we will not turn the review into a synopsis, but let us say this.
Legal discourse fundamentally determines the specifics of American cinema, just as the world ocean once washed land on all sides in the model of a flat Earth. The intrusion of representatives of the “law” into the illegal world as a pre-legal one (the exchange mechanism still miraculously operates in it, reducing even the factor of money to a statistical error, which here, it seems, is practically not necessary at all), causes indignation at the level of generic, not personal. That is to say, the Redneck world is the salt of the earth on which all races have found true freedom, having thrown off the yoke of colonialism for the first time in history. However, a lot of films have been made in which an exclusively ethnographic view triumphs. If instead of a typical agrarian family there were some conditional Poles-settlers, the eccentricity would simply go off scale. It would be a world of hopeless Peisans whose misplaced traditions would be laughable. But in our film, despite all the irony, at some level, it's quite serious. On this family, as the archetype of healthy “Americanness,” the land of Liberty is held. Precisely where the legal is not yet open, there is no room for duplicity and deception. The American principle of honor is not European. This is not an aristocratic concept, but a democratic one. Anyone can contribute to some fictitious homogeneity of white America, and the rural man does it more than others, because not by knowledge of the laws, but by his very spirit, which suddenly appears to be more important than them, but nowhere violates them, he certifies a deeply conservative image of the world with its healthy family, related ideals, neighborly values and the absolute triumph of the notorious Common Sense. It is clear that this film is a perfect mainstream of then Hollywood, above the bar can not even jump, because it was deliberately created so. It should be remembered that within the cinema in various countries there is its own production, more than other tapes certifying the ideals of the always right-wing sane majority (as most think). It is by its accuracy that the film is interesting. There is nothing original in it, but one can vividly imagine what a state, society and a person is for “decent” Americans of the late fed 1950s.
6 out of 10