Vincente Minnelli’s widescreen color melodramas for MGM are all very special, and this adaptation of William Humphrey’s sprawling 1958 saga of an overpowering Texas landowner and his family (with echoes of Giant and The Big Country) is one of the finest. Mitchum—whose Captain Hunnicutt was intended for Clark Gable—got along very well with Minnelli (they’d worked together a decade earlier on Undercurrent), but less well with his younger co-star George Peppard, who asked Mitchum if he’d studied the Stanislavsky Method. “No,” said Mitchum, “but I’ve studied the Smirnoff Method.”