If there’s a single thing that binds most of Vincente Minnelli’s films, it’s their overt, almost painterly beauty, a tool used to frame stories that are otherwise ugly. Home from the Hill, his 1960 western melodrama, is no exception—a colorful, epic family saga that’s as luscious as it is damning.
Robert Mitchum plays Captain Wade Hunnicutt, the patriarch of the Hunnicutt family and one of the wealthier members of his East Texas community. His tremendous wealth is only overshadowed by his notorious womanizing, which has made him a divisive figure amongst the townspeople, particularly with the aggrieved husbands of his victims. At home, he has his wife Hannah (Eleanor Parker), who has grown spiteful in a loveless marriage, and their son Theron (George Hamilton sans tan), a boy made soft and effeminate (as they always seem to be in these kinds of movies) by his over-attending mother and too-busy father. There’s also Raphael “Rafe,” Captain Wade’s trusty employee.
When Captain Wade discovers that Theron is the butt of the townspeople’s jokes, he resolves himself to give his son the pygmalion treatment, which in this case means turning Theron from a sensitive schoolboy into a ~real man.~ Theron is trained, mostly by Rafe, in a bunch of masculine pursuits, and becomes a hunter who’s obsessed with showing his father just how good a shot he is. At first, Minnelli romanticizes this, and even provides us with a gorgeous, tense sequence (one that is nonetheless foreboding) where Theron must hunt down a giant boar terrorizing the community in order to prove himself to Wade and his men. All is well and good, until the cracks in the technicolor facade start to show.
As Theron matures, he also learns just how dysfunctional his family is. He falls in love with Libby, a smart local girl, and is taken aback when Libby’s father presents what he believes to be this unfounded hatred towards his family. Hannah, in her anger, tells her son that Libby’s family are probably disgusted by Captain Wade and his ways, and reveals to Theron that Rafe is actually Captain Wade’s bastard son. Theron’s life crumbles upon this revelation, as the father he has come to idolize is made pathetic by his stubborn cruelty towards Rafe, who Theron immediately recognizes as a brother.
Theron is fractured by this, and becomes the film’s tragic figure—a man who is destined to carry the burden of his parents misery. It makes Home from the Hill, one of Minnelli’s more upsetting efforts, and easily one of his best.
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Home from the Hill feels of a part with Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, a drama released four years earlier that is based on a play by Robert Anderson.
I adore Tea and Sympathy, a surprisingly poignant movie for 1956 about a young man who is also an outcast in his community for being Unlike the Other Guys. Tea and Sympathy is a kinder story, however, and Tom, its young protagonist, finds understanding in a lonely wife who sees his nature as a virtue. Tom is ostracized in the same way Theron is, but Tea and Sympathy offers a gentler, more generous POV—a happy, if bittersweet, ending a young man gets given the right kind of encouragement.
Meanwhile Home from the Hill is a cautionary tale of what parents, with their egos and value systems, can make of their children. Captain Wade and Hannah ruin Theron, and he never feels like anything but a pawn in the larger battle that wages between them. He never had a chance of becoming his own person.
Ironically enough, it’s Rafe, who’s essentially orphaned and on his own from a young age, who ends up the most together. He’s never been corrupted or pushed to follow anyone’s idea of his destiny. He’s only had his intuition as a guiding principle, and that makes him the Best Man.
Home from the Hill is available to rent on most of the platforms.