Johnny Cash’s songs act as a sort of Greek chorus to Gregory Peck’s Tennessee sheriff falling headlong into a tender trap. Buried alive in middle-aged rural respectability, Peck is knocked off the straight-and-narrow by the inexorable draw of Weld’s Alma McCain, daughter of a moonshining family headed by Ralph Meeker. Their impossible, delusional romance plays amid rolling autumnal landscapes, with Weld excelling in the ambiguous part of untutored seductress and naïve femme fatale, driving usually upright Peck into a rare welter of emotional confusion, alternately plangent, boyish, and stoic as a cigar-store Indian with suffering wife Estelle Parsons.