This interesting but ultimately not very successful 70s obscurity can't quite decide how to approach its whole "hillbilly blood feud" premise: Old-fashioned blood and thunder melodrama with broad archetypes, or something more naturalistic and credible?
It winds up somewhere in the middle, with a capable cast not credible as family (of course it's not their fault that so many of the younger actors later became famous, and hence are a little too recognizable), or as rural folk. Some of them play up the "inbred yoke" cliche, others don't at all, but no one has a fully rounded character. So we don't feel much when inevitably the hostility rooted in an old land dispute-then escalated by a series of new blunders and misunderstandings-erupts into practically everybody killing practically everybody else at the final shootout.
As the patriarchs, Steiger and Ryan are maybe the least defined of all, their usual strong personalities failing to bring the roles into focus at all. It sort of personifies the film's near-miss quality that during one big chunk of the climactic mayhem, Steiger just sits in the kitchen making a sandwich, for no tangible reason at all. Anyway, a watchable film, but as with so many now hard-to-find early 70s flops, it's easy to see why this one didn't connect with audiences.
It winds up somewhere in the middle, with a capable cast not credible as family (of course it's not their fault that so many of the younger actors later became famous, and hence are a little too recognizable), or as rural folk. Some of them play up the "inbred yoke" cliche, others don't at all, but no one has a fully rounded character. So we don't feel much when inevitably the hostility rooted in an old land dispute-then escalated by a series of new blunders and misunderstandings-erupts into practically everybody killing practically everybody else at the final shootout.
As the patriarchs, Steiger and Ryan are maybe the least defined of all, their usual strong personalities failing to bring the roles into focus at all. It sort of personifies the film's near-miss quality that during one big chunk of the climactic mayhem, Steiger just sits in the kitchen making a sandwich, for no tangible reason at all. Anyway, a watchable film, but as with so many now hard-to-find early 70s flops, it's easy to see why this one didn't connect with audiences.