You won't be disappointed!

Simply Perfect

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

If you've read Gone with the Wind trivia, you know that hundreds of actresses vied for the role of Scarlett O'Hara. A twenty-year-old Susan Hayward was one of them, and to make up for her loss, Hollywood made Tap Roots ten years later. She stars as a feisty, flirty Southern belle on a large plantation just before the outbreak of the Civil War. There are two men in the picture: one she loves through thick and thin, even when he chooses another woman; and a strong, gruff one she bickers with who vows to make her love him. Sound familiar?Well, sorry Suzy, but Tap Roots is no Gone with the Wind. The acting is ridiculously over the top, the characters are thinly written, and the only likable one in the film is Boris Karloff, a friend of the family who's Native American and completely accepted by everyone-which is not very realistic for that time period. I was rooting for Suzy and Boris to get together, since he was the only one in the movie who seemed to care about her, but since the film was trying to mirror the 1939 epic, that ending seemed unlikely.Unless you absolutely love Susan Hayward, you're not going to want to watch this wannabe. Raintree County is a better pseudo-remake, and Scarlett is a thrilling sequel. Tap Roots is just stinky.

Among the hundreds of hopefuls for the role of Scarlett O'Hara was young Susan Hayward who was about as unknown as you could get when David O. Selznick was testing potential Scarletts. Almost a decade later Hayward got to play a lead as a southern belle in Tap Roots. Although there are some superficial resemblances to Scarlett O'Hara in Morna Dabney this film is not Gone With The Wind by a stretch.This is set in Mississippi at the beginning of the Civil War. The Dabneys are the local Cartwrights in the area, a proud plantation family with the requisite slaves. However they regard the Lebanon valley area and all its residents as serfs blacks and whites and Russell Simpson the head of the clan correctly sees that if Lincoln is elected and there is civil war, it's going to end badly for the south and life which includes slavery ownership for him is at an end. So his solution is for his part of Mississippi to secede from the rest of the state and declare neutrality. But Simpson dies and his son Ward Bond sends out a call to all who don't favor secession to join him in his valley fortress and keep the impending Civil War out.Bond has two daughters, Susan Hayward and Julie London and a son Richard Long. Hayward is courted by cynical newspaper owner/editor Van Heflin, the Rhett Butler of the piece and Whitfield Connor a soldier set to leave the army and fight for the south. Hayward has them both panting hot and heavy for her and her love life gets hopelessly entangled with the politics of the Civil War.There were pockets of Union sentiment all over the South during the war. Not everyone wanted to fight for some planter's right to own people. But nowhere was there anything like this recorded in the history of the era. Union sympathizers simply hunkered down and waited for the war to end however it would. Hayward and Heflin are a pair of my favorite players and they were both good, doing as best they could to carry a preposterous plot premise. Ward Bond has a great scene going totally mad as he sees his valley being shot to smithereens by the Confederate army.Boris Karloff is also in the cast. He plays a Choctaw Indian medicine man who seems to be the only one around and he's a retainer of Russell Simpson, a kind of Dabney family guardian. I'm sure the book on which Tap Roots is adapted better explains his presence, but he seems grafted into the film as far as I could tell.Tap Roots is far from the worst film Hayward and Heflin were ever involved in. Still if Universal Pictures thought they had their own Gone With The Wind, they fell way short of the mark.

Yeah,it bears more than a distant resemblance to "Gone with the wind" .And short weight at that,cause its running time does not exceed 110 min.Even the characters recall the classic: there's the black slave ,a poor man's Scarlett,her old man ,her suitor (Van Heflin ,sort of Rhett Butler) .Melanie is represented by a sister played by Julie London whose part is so underwritten she has almost nothing to do (unless a brief romance with Clay counts).I do like Susan Heyward and Van Heflin but directing is listless in the first part.The second part is much better and includes really worthwhile scenes: the battle in the swamp ,the old Hoab (Ward gave the best performance IMHO)shouting "this is my land" ,then aimlessly wandering among the fighters and finally cursing his unfortunate daughter.The ending looks like (one more time) the ending of the first part of GWTW when Scarlett finds her father senile from shock and a devastated property!So roll up your sleeves,the tap roots are still here.The last scene between Clay and Morna is also a good moment ,although their characters lack substance .And however ,the very subject of the movie was particularly interesting:people who want to stay neuter ,to live their life in peace (one must note ,however,that they did not disapprove of slavery).Like this?try these......Band of angels ,Raoul Walsh The Raintree County,Edward Dmytryk Friendly persuasion,William Wyler

Universal seem to have thrown a lot of cash at these sub 'Gone with the Wind' shenanigans but really should have paid more attention to the script. Although a potentially interesting idea - a small valley tries to stay neutral during the US Civil War - the movie concentrates almost exclusively on a vapid central romance lifted almost wholesale from that earlier Selznick classic.Van Hefflin tries hard to inject the kind of dangerous humour that Clark Gable brought to Rhett Butler but Susan Hayward is hopelessly miscast as the young, flighty Southern belle. An excellent actress in the right circumstances, here she looks far too sensible for the role and resorts to a permanent wide-eyed stare to convey youth and innocence. She merely looks like a startled rabbit.Elsewhere, what should have been the pivotal role of the valley's patriarch is simply not given enough screentime, thus reducing Ward Bond to the occasional ineffectual splutter and the climax to an empty, mechanical spectacle devoid of emotional resonance. Boris Karloff brings a touch of class to the role of the friendly native American retainer but Julie London is wasted in a thankless role.Overall, it's the kind of picture that the studio must have presumed would make itself and this lack of commitment results in a significant lack of quality.