Gone to Earth Reviews

I was deeply surprised to discover this little gem of a movie. It was released after the crowning achievements of The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, and while Gone to Earth is not their equal, it is a minor glory that deserves a reappraisal and discovery. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger also give us a glimpse of what star Jennifer Jones’ career and performing styles could have been without her puppet master.

Not that David O. Selznick didn’t try to extend some oppressive control over the project, but Powell and Pressburger ignored them and made the movie they wanted to anyway. In a moment that perfectly illustrates how he harmed her career over time, Selznick eventually brought in director Rouben Mamoulian to shoot new scenes, made extensive edits, renamed it as The Wild Heart, and removed the emotional and sexual complications from the narrative. Jones’ character no longer has much agency and is an object that is reacted upon before eventually becoming a sacrificial lamb.

That version is probably more well-known to American audiences and that is a damn shame. Gone to Earth is a film just crying out for Criterion to get its hands all over it allowing for a rediscovery. It’s a film of glorious excess, in colors, in emotions, in symbolism, and in Jones’ performance, perhaps the finest of her career.

Jones won an Oscar for playing a saint, but she was always more interesting in parts that allowed her to indulge in her emotional intensity rather than repressive or girlish roles that seemed to dominated her career. It’s just more fun to watch Jones go into heat and become a wild woman in the process as her carnal urges cause chaos to everyone within her orbit. Gone to Earth allows her to blossom as it fully dives into these traits, and Jones betters her sexual live-wire in Duel in the Sun here.

Gone to Earth tells the story of Hazel (Jones), a woman in constant commune with nature and her pet fox, and the love triangle she finds herself in between a buttoned-up parson (Cyril Cusack) and a horny lord (David Farrar). Hazel’s pet fox, Foxy, becomes an extension of her own life and ultimate fate, and the opening chase from unseen hounds is a tip that what we’re about to watch is a tragedy in motion. The Archers play the whole thing as a fable of the conflicts in paganism and Christianity, in nature and civilization, and how heaven and hell are well within reach on the mortal coil if you know where to look.

Jones’ Hazel doesn’t just know where to look, but finds herself frequently wedged between the two and warring within her emotional intelligence and unbridled sexual needs. It’s all right there in the opening scene, a tremendous sequence that ranks high in the Archers filmography, as the confluence of sound design, sumptuous color, and Jones’ performance make it all at once a horrifying nightmare and a symphonic piece of fairy tale-like artwork come to life. This sequence is repeated at the very end with a completely different outcome as the hounds chasing both Hazel and Foxy come to represent so much, the complexities of love, desire, sex, religion, and propriety descending on these two to snuff out their bright lights and freedoms.

I believe it’s the mystical and fable-like overtones that keep Gone to Earth from tripping up on its own tortured melodrama, and it’s a reminder of just how wonderful the Archers are at tackling this material. Hazel frequently refers to a book left behind by her mother, and her fateful choices are never completed without the book’s presence as if she were looking for spiritual guidance from the trees and hills of the Welsh landscape and not in the confines of patriarchal religion that tries to confine her. Within Jones’ performance we believe that this woman can hear and speak with the wind, with the faerie folk and superstitions lingering around in her imagination.

Gone to Earth bombed at the box office during its time, and its failure would mark the beginning of the end for not only the Archers, but for Jones’ glory days as a leading lady. This is not shocking as even by the standards of a creative duo that made an ouroboros film out of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, and set Chaucer’s infamous tales in WWII, Gone to Earth is a deeply strange, compelling, and beautiful film. It’s as hard to pin-down as the barefoot heroine running through the hills, and we’re as enthralled by the men in her life by her and her journey as they are.