Love! Hate! Pride! Passion! Rampant, Riotous In the Heat of a Southern Sun!

Erskine Caldwell's steamy novel God's Little Acre was given a film adaptation in 1958. A heavily grayed-up Robert Ryan plays Ty Ty Walden, the patriarch of a slovenly backwoods family. As Ty Ty digs around his farm in search of gold (which he has yet to find), his son in law Bill Thompson (Aldo Ray) carries on an adulterous affair with the sluttish Griselda (Tina Louise). Comedy relief is provided by the dimwitted Pluto (Buddy Hackett). Others in the cast include future TV stars Jack Lord as Buck Walden and Michael Landon as Ty Ty's albino farmhand. A flop when first released, God's Little Acre made back its cost on the TV rental circuit; today, it is in the public domain, available to everyone, even the "under 18s" who were prohibited from seeing it back in 1958.


God's Little Acre is a 1933 novel by Erskine Caldwell about a dysfunctional farming family in South Carolina obsessed with sex and wealth. The novel's sexual themes were so controversial that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice asked a New York state court to censor it. The novel was made into a film of the same name in 1958.


Since God's Little Acre contained scenes of (what was then) explicit sexuality, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice took Caldwell and Viking Press to court for disseminating pornography. More than 60 authors, editors, and literary critics rallied in support of the book, and Judge Benjamin Greenspan of the New York Magistrates' Court ruled in its favor. The court case is still considered a major decision in the establishment of artists' First Amendment rights in freedom of expression.[1] Caldwell counter-sued the literary society for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
In 1947, the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, also banned the novel for being pornographic.
Having sold more than 10 million copies, the book remains one of the most popular novels ever published.

Release Date: August 13, 1958


Distrib: United Artists