This Month

I Walk the Line is the film that might have resulted if Lolita had been written by Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me). It finds Gregory Peck playing a not too bright Tennessee sheriff who falls in love with the teenaged Tuesday Weld (in real-life age 27). But wouldn't you know there's even more complications than their age difference. Not only is Peck already married but Weld's father (Ralph Meeker of Kiss Me Deadly,1955) is a notorious moonshiner. So to ingratiate himself with daddy, Peck arranges to keep the moonshiner's stills from being found. Unfortunately it's something he can't do forever, especially when the sheriff's deputy is a bit jealous of his boss's jailbait sweetie.

I Walk the Line, which was partially filmed on location in Tennessee, has a literary pedigree just like Lolita. It's based on the 1968 novel An Exile by Madison Jones, a Nashville native and writer-in-residence at Auburn University. No less than Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren said Jones was "among the best of his generation." Adapting the novel to the screen was Alvin Sargent who later wrote Ordinary People (1980), Nuts (1987) and Bobby Deerfield (1977).

The first thing to be changed was the title. The film was originally titled September Country but was changed to I Walk the Line based on Johnny Cash's 1956 hit song. In fact, Cash re-recorded the title song and ended up with enough material for a soundtrack album. One of the songs from the film, "Flesh and Blood," even became a number one country hit in 1971.

Director John Frankenheimer originally wanted Gene Hackman to play sheriff Tawes but Columbia pictures insisted he use Peck since the actor was under contract to them and was appearing in two other Columbia films in release at the time. The director commented in the book John Frankenheimer: A Conversation that it wasn't a typical role for Peck. "The audience just wouldn't accept him in that part. And the sadness was that we had a bunch of very good actors in the movie: Tuesday Weld as the bootlegger's daughter Peck falls for, Ralph Meeker as the deputy, Estelle Parsons. I cast my wife's grandfather, who was eighty-two years old, to play Peck's father. His name was J.C. Evans, and the part called for him to be seventy years old. He told my wife, "If john wants me to play this old man, they're going to have to make me up to look old." He was quite wonderful. Will Geer dubbed his part eventually."

In terms of his own feelings about I Walk the Line, Frankenheimer stated, "It captured a certain part of the country very, very well. And I think we captured those mountain people very well, with their family loyalties and their inbreeding and their own kind of morality. They didn't think making moonshine was immoral, they just knew it was illegal."

Director: John Frankenheimer
Producer: Harold D. Cohen, Edward Lewis
Screenplay: Alvin Sargent, based on the novel by Madison Jones
Cinematography: David M. Walsh
Editor: Henry Berman
Art Direction: Albert Brenner
Music: Johnny Cash
Cast: Gregory Peck (Sheriff Henry Tawes), Tuesday Weld (Alma McCain), Estelle Parsons (Ellen Haney), Ralph Meeker (Carl McCain), Lonny Chapman (Bascomb), Charles Durning (Hunnicutt).
C-95m. Letterboxed.

by Lang Thompson