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Movie Review: Home from the Hill (1960) [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-07  

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SPOILER ALERT!

I have never seen a pig in real life. I have lived all my life in one city or another, so I did not encounter any pigs the way one might who lived on a farm. I don’t recall seeing a pig in a zoo. Nor did that surprise me. I went to the zoo to see lions, monkeys, and elephants, not to see farm animals like chickens, cows, and pigs.

And so it was that my earliest familiarity with pigs was by way of cartoons. There was Porky Pig in the Looney Tunes cartoons, and there was Three Little Pigs (1933), produced by Walt Disney. In this story, the pigs were harmless creatures, in danger of being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf. As for Porky Pig, he was simply comical, not threatening to anyone. My parents taught me the nursery rhyme “This Little Piggy,” and when I was five years old, I had a piggy bank.

Eventually, I saw real pigs in the movies. It was clear that taking care of pigs on a farm was not a manly chore. Slopping the hogs was a task often performed by a woman while her husband was out plowing the north forty. Even children were capable of dealing with these animals. In Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood leaves his young son, who is around twelve years old, to take care of the farm for a few days, telling him to keep the hogs that have fever separated from the rest. In this movie, Eastwood plays a humiliated version of the Man with No Name, who has been reduced to the ignominious role of a hog farmer.

In The Wild Bunch (1969), after William Holden and his companions have wiped out an entire fort of Mexicans, bounty hunter Strother Martin arrives with his cohorts, and seeing all the corpses that can be looted, exclaims, “This is better than a hog killing,” suggesting that killing a bunch of pigs can be great fun.

In Hud (1963), there is a rodeo somewhere in the middle of the movie. There are dangerous events in a rodeo, especially riding a brahma bull. But then there is a little comic relief, the pig scramble, where a bunch of pigs are greased up, and the challenge is to catch one. Paul Newman decides to participate in that event. He tries to get Patricia Neal to come along and watch, but she decides to stay home, saying, “I don’t like pigs,” referring to Newman, punning off the fact that the word “pig” is used to characterize someone as disgusting.

The pig might even be used for barnyard sex. In Deliverance (1972), there is a cracker that has apparently been used to having sex with pigs. Of course, those pigs were sows, you understand. Nothing queer about this fellow. But Ned Beatty reminds him so much of a sow that he just has to pull his pants down and pork him in the butt, even going so far as to twist Beatty’s ear, making him squeal like a pig.

In other words, given what I learned from cartoons and movies like these, I had no respect for pigs. As a result, I was somewhat taken aback when I found out that the Fourth Labor of Heracles was the Erymanthian Boar. Was this worthy of Heracles? Granted, he had to bring the boar back alive, which would be a bit of a challenge. Still, I dismissed it as the result of having to find twelve labors for him to perform. Someone was running out of ideas, so he came up with this one for lack of imagination.

But I was really confounded when I read about the Calydonian Boar Hunt. It seems that there was this boar that was killing the cattle and laborers of Oeneus, King of Calydon. So, there was nothing for him to do but to send out heralds, inviting the bravest fighters of Greece at that time. Over a dozen showed up, most of whom I barely recognized, but which did include Theseus, Jason, and Atlanta. “It took all these guys to kill some pig?” I said to myself in disbelief. And not just any guys, but heroes of mythological stature. I am clearly not alone in this. There have been movies based on Jason and the Argonauts, and there have been movies based on the Trojan War. But I have never seen a movie about the Calydonian Boar Hunt.

I have seen Home from the Hill (1960), though, in which killing a pig is a big deal and a major plot point. However, I suppose I should start from the beginning.

The title of this movie comes from the poem “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson. After the credits, the last two lines of this poem are presented as a prologue, but the entire poem is short enough to quote in full:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

I’m not much on interpreting poetry, but I think I can handle this one. The “author” is someone that has reached the end of his life and is reconciled to it. The last two lines have the word “home” in it. It is common for someone that approaches death to want to go home, whatever that is for him. At the end of Gone With the Wind, for example, Rhett Butler tells Scarlett that he may go back to Charleston, where he was born, in hopes of finding peace. In the novel, unlike the movie, it is clear that Rhett is nearing the end of his life.

The title of the movie Home from the Hill suggests that the death in question will be that of a hunter. In the opening scene, there are several men hiding among the reeds, preparing to shoot some geese about to fly overhead. One of the hunters is Captain Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum), big landowner in some rural county in East Texas. Another is Rafe Copley (George Peppard), who notices that one of the dogs starts looking off to the left. Rafe sees what the dog sees and pushes Wade to the ground just as we hear the sound of a shotgun going off. In so doing, he saves Wade’s life. Wade is hit in his shoulder, but today is not his day to die.

The other hunters catch the man that shot Wade. Wade doesn’t know him, but he is apparently supposed to know the man’s wife. The man tells him to leave his wife Ellie alone. Wade tells the man that he must have problems at home, meaning that he isn’t able to satisfy his wife sexually, and so she has to look elsewhere for that. As far as Wade is concerned, any self-respecting man would leave a wife that cheated on him, not try to get her lover to quit having sex with her. Having sized him up, Wade tells the other hunters to let the man go, even allowing him to keep his shotgun. Wade isn’t worried. He can tell that this fellow isn’t man enough to shoot him again, saying, “You don’t have another shot in you.”

The doctor that treats Wade says he is going to get killed one of these days, if he keeps poaching on other men’s preserves, but Wade says that he figures he has the right to cross over another man’s fences whenever he’s out hunting. Needless to say, the words “poaching” and “hunting” refer to Wade’s habit of having sex with other men’s wives. It turns out, as we learn from his conversation with Rafe, regarding the wife of the man that shot him, that Wade doesn’t know which one she was, even though the husband said her name was Ellie. We also learn during this conversation that Wade does more than just employ Rafe for various purposes. He also supports him for some reason.

When Wade gets home, his wife Hannah (Eleanor Parker) has already heard the news by way of three anonymous phone calls. She comments that the husband that shot him had only been married to his wife for three months. Three months? Most women have to be married for at least two years before you can reasonably expect to have a chance with them.

Anyway, if Wade can’t remember which one Ellie was, he must have had a lot of women during that three-month period. Like the doctor, Hannah says that one of these days some husband will kill him. Inasmuch as Hannah and Wade no longer love each other, she doesn’t much care if Wade gets himself killed, except to ask what she will tell their son. Wade says to tell him it wouldn’t have happened if there was something for him to stay home for. Hannah says that they won’t tell him anything and walks out of the room.

Their son is Theron (George Hamilton), who is seventeen years old. We see him walking around town on Saturday night, not quite knowing what to do with himself. A bunch of men, the hunters that were with Wade in the opening scene, are sitting around whitling or playing a harmonica. One of the men refers to Theron as Wade’s boy, but another corrects him, saying he’s Hannah’s boy. In fact, he’s such a momma’s boy that Wade has never taken him hunting with him, so they figure Theron doesn’t even know there is no such thing as snipe hunting at night. When Theron walks near them, they start conning him into going snipe hunting.

They leave him out in the middle of the woods, holding a sack and blowing a birdcall. Two hours later, Theron still hasn’t shown up. The men are surprised, one saying that most figure out they’ve been had after fifteen minutes. They are about to go get him when Wade shows up looking for Theron, saying his mother is worried about him. They take him out to where Theron is, still holding the sack and blowing the birdcall.

In a community where hunting is held in such high esteem, Theron has suffered the ultimate humiliation. When they get home, Wade follows Theron to his room. Theron wonders why he was so easily fooled. Wade tells him that he would have taken him in tow long ago, were it not for a promise he made to his mother when Theron was born. “To keep me in short pants for the rest of my life?” Theron asks, indignantly.

“Something like that,” Wade replies. He looks around the room. It is said that a person’s room is like an animal’s lair. By examining what is in a cave where an animal lives, you can tell what kind of animal it is. In the center of Theron’s room is a table with his stamp collection on it and some rocks that he has been collecting as well. Off to one side is a telescope. Hanging on the wall are picture frames displaying various collections: butterflies, seashells, arrowheads. Also on the wall is a large map of the world. We see a badminton racket and a tennis racket. In addition to a bed, there is a turquoise-colored armchair. Finally, there is a small fireplace. “This is a boy’s room,” Wade says. “Come on downstairs. I’ll show you how a man lives.”

Apparently, Theron has never before been downstairs to see Wade’s den. The color theme of the room is cordovan. There are rifles and shotguns displayed on the wall, with additional rifles in a cabinet, every one of which is kept loaded. Also on the wall are the heads of stuffed deer, and fine fish specimens are displayed in their own section. Three hound dogs are lying around the room, ready to go on a hunt at a moment’s notice. In front of a leather chair is a bearskin rug. There is a fireplace so big that if you didn’t mind bending over, you could get yourself completely inside of it. Above the mantel is the stuffed head of a boar. Earlier in the evening, the men responsible for the snipe hunt made reference to the fact that Wade had killed the last wild boar in the county. Wade gets himself a beer, sits down in the chair, and addresses Theron, standing before him:

I had something from my father that his father gave to him. I’m going to give it to you. It’s late, but it’s not too late. You know, one of these days, I’m going to die, Theron. You’re going to come into forty thousand acres of land: cotton, beef, goats, timber. It takes a special kind of man to handle that. The kind of man that walks around with nothing in his pocket: no identification, because everybody knows who you are; no cash, because anybody in town will be happy to lend you anything you need; no keys, because you don’t keep a lock on a single thing you own; and no watch, because time waits on you. What I’m saying is you’re going to have to stand up and be counted. You’re going to be known in these parts as a man, or as a momma’s boy.

Theron swears that what happened that night will never happen again. Given that declaration, Wade tells him to throw away all those toys in his room, that from now on he’ll be learning in the woods. He will learn to hunt, not to bring meat home for supper, but to confront dangerous animals that require courage to face, because what every man really hunts is himself. This is the third meaning of the word “hunt.” The first was for food, and the second was for women. But now the word is given existential significance. In order for someone to prove to himself that he is a real man, he must put himself in danger by confronting an animal capable of killing him.

When Hannah finds out what Wade has planned, she becomes angry, reminding Wade of the promise he made her when Wade was born, that promise being the only reason she stayed, even though behind the locked door of her bedroom. Wade defiantly says that it was seventeen years ago and that he is breaking that promise. Wade turns Theron over to Rafe to learn about hunting, and after a while, Theron becomes a good hunter himself.

Then comes the night that the same men who set Theron on a snipe hunt come over to Wade’s house to tell him that a wild boar, one that has probably come over from Louisiana, is tearing up their farms. This is like the opposite of the Calydonian Boar Hunt. Whereas Oeneus enlisted great hunters to help him kill a boar, these hunters are coming to Wade to get him to kill a boar, saying they just rent the land they live on from him, so it’s his responsibility. The rational approach to this problem would be for Wade to lead these hunters in search of this boar. Then, when they found him, the whole bunch of them could have just let that pig have it from all sides. But Wade decides this is Theron’s chance to live down the snipe hunt, so he sends Theron into the woods, basically by himself, with Rafe as backup. But even that was not good enough as far as Theron is concerned, so he ditches Rafe and heads out by himself, killing that boar with one shot as it charges toward him.

A little more than a year ago, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said people need AR-15s to kill “feral pigs.” Now, I’m all in favor of banning assault rifles, but I have to admit that if I had to go after the boar in this movie all by myself, I’d want an AR-15. Wade gave Theron a rifle with a lever action, telling him he will get only one shot, and then he should climb up a tree with low branches. With an AR-15, however, Theron would have been able to just empty his clip and turn that pig into sausage. But in that case, killing that pig wouldn’t have any existential significance.

As it is, Theron is now a real man. Well, almost. Theron is still something of a momma’s boy when it comes to girls. He wants to ask out a girl named Libby (Luana Patten) to a dance, but he can’t work up the nerve. So, he talks a reluctant Rafe into asking her for him. That’s pretty dorky, but amazingly enough, she agrees to the date. Unfortunately, Theron gets the worst of both worlds. Whereas those men that took Theron on a snipe hunt agreed that he was Hannah’s boy, Libby’s father, Albert (Everett Sloan), thinks of him as Wade’s boy. Not wanting his daughter to be the next conquest of a Hunnicutt male, he refuses to let Libby go out with him.

It turns out that after Wade and Hanah returned from Europe where they spent their honeymoon, Hannah then being four-months pregnant, she found out that Wade had an illegitimate, five-year-old son named Rafe. That is why she has refused to have sex with Wade all these years. And that is why Wade has become such a womanizer. And perhaps that’s why Wade now seems to prefer married women, having learned the mistake of having sex with a woman that is single. Now when he gets some man’s wife pregnant, it’s not a problem, because she’s already married. The cuckold gets cuckooed.

Meanwhile, Libby starts seeing Theron on the sly, without her father realizing it. She introduces Theron to the ways of love. And now his passage into manhood has become complete. Unfortunately, Libby gets pregnant, the very thing her father was worried about, except that she seduced Theron rather than the other way around. Just as she is about to tell Theron about her situation, he tells her that after learning about the awful marriage his parents are stuck in, and about the way his father has refused to acknowledge Rafe as his son, he has decided he doesn’t want to ever marry anyone, and so he breaks up with Libby.

She’s too nice to force him to marry her. One day in the grocery store, she runs into Rafe. In desperation, she tries to rope him into marriage, but she can’t pull it off. However, he is in love with her too, and his experience as an illegitimate child makes him especially sympathetic to her plight. He asks her to marry him, and she tearfully accepts. After all, these were the days in which a woman could be ruined for life. Her parents know she is pregnant, but she refused to tell them who the father was. They are so grateful that Rafe is willing to marry her that they leave the house to them, apparently for good. The movie doesn’t tell us where her parents went to live, but Rafe and Libby have the place to themselves. Rafe is such a nice guy that on their wedding night, he tells her nothing has to happen unless she says it happens, and he sleeps in a separate room. But not long after that, she invites Rafe into her bed, for she has come to love him now.

After she has the baby, there is a christening at the church. Those same hunters we have seen throughout the movie notice that the baby has the Hunnicutt look, and they figure that Wade must be the father and that he paid Rafe to marry Libby. Albert, Libby’s father, overhears them. He goes over to Wade’s house, quietly removes a rifle from the cabinet, and shoots Wade when he turns around.

And that’s too bad, because Wade and Hannah had just reconciled, agreeing to return to Naples, where they had been happy in the first months of their marriage. So, even though Wade was already home, in the literal sense, and had been living there all these years, this return to Naples would be a kind of returning home in a figurative sense, to a place of peace. But since the desire to return to a place that is home has a strong association with death, it is fitting that Wade ends up dying before he and Hannah can actually make that trip.

Theron discovers his dying father. Not knowing who killed him, but seeing whoever it was drive off in Wade’s truck, he gets a rifle and chases after him. When he catches up with Albert, he almost shoots him, but stops. However, Albert raises his rifle, and Theron kills him in self-defense, right after which Rafe arrives. Rafe tries to get him to come back, but Theron says he could never face Libby again, having killed her father. In addition, he probably realizes that he was the father of Libby’s baby. He tells Rafe he is leaving.

This final scene occurs near Sulfur Bottoms, a low-lying area emitting marsh gas and full of quicksand. Twice before, Theron has been warned that not under any circumstances is he to go into Sulfur Bottoms, once when Wade first brought him out in the woods to hunt, and again when Wade sent Theron out to hunt the wild boar. Having been twice presaged, this third scene near Sulfur Bottoms is of undeniable significance. If home represents death, granting the peace that people imagine they will find when they go to Heaven, then Sulfur Bottoms is that other form of death, the death that is punishment for one’s sins, the death of Hell. It is clear that Theron intends to go into Sulfur Bottoms, as a way of doing penance for the sins of his troubled soul.

In the final scene, Rafe finds Hannah at Wade’s grave. She invites him to read the tombstone. At the bottom, it says that Wade was the father of Raphael and Theron. Rafe invites Hannah to come live with him and Libby, so that she won’t be alone in the big house, and she can help Libby with the baby, her grandson. She accepts. In what is the final line in the movie, Rafe says to her, “Let’s us go on home,” once again expressing a desire for peace. It is fitting that the words are uttered in a cemetery, making the link with death once again.

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