It’s 1859, a young idealist, John, lives in Raintree County, Indiana. He’s had a girlfriend since high school, Nell, but she is overshadowed by beautiful Susanna, a very rich girl from New Orleans. John and Susanna have an affaire and she gets pregnant, so the young man leaves Nell heartbroken. The new couple moves South, by her family’s house, and little by little we start to know a past full of shadows and, above all, a tragedy occurred to her mother, considered insane, during a fire, also involving her father and a black slave, his concubine. Susanna suspects to be the biological child of the slave but she soon shows her mother’s insanity. She pretends to be pregnant to force John to marry her. The Civil War starts, he becomes a teacher and his son Jimmy is born. After three years Susanna shows symptoms of paranoia and ends up in a mental hospital, where she is found by John. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the end of the Civil War, Nell and John meet again and Susanna decides to sacrifice herself and go away with her 4-year-old son. Her body will be found next to sleeping Jimmy. The film had many problems on set, because of for Liz Taylor’s heavy costumes and the torrential hot, but especially because of Montgomery Clift’s car crash, since he had to be operated and both his face and his performance change after that. Liz Taylor had an Oscar nomination that year but she didn’t win.
