The Connelly family of "Carolina" lost all of their money in the Civil War. It is never said exactly how they lost their money, but they did retain all of their land and their antebellum mansion. So in present day - 1901 - they are cash poor, land rich. They get by running up bills they can never pay because an ancestor was a Civil War hero, and that still means something here. The Tate family of Pennsylvania is sharecropping on the Connelly land, but then the father dies suddenly, leaving his daughter Joanna (Janet Gaynor) and her two younger brothers to work the land. Mrs. Connelly (Henrietta Crosman) agrees to let the Tates stay and she'll collect the rent when their crop comes in.
But Mrs. Connelly is horrified when her son Will (Robert Young) begins to have feelings for Joanna, ruining her plans to marry Will off to a wealthy Charleston girl and maybe solve the family's financial problems. She thus sends Will on an errand to Charleston, and while he's away, tells Joanna that she's evicting her before she can harvest her crop AND that Will went to Charleston to get married. This would be news to the wealthy girl, who makes it clear in Charleston that she just considers Will a boy toy. Complications ensue.
I am confused by this film on several fronts. Most of all I'm confused by the fact that everybody treats Joanna like she is Ray Consella from Field of Dreams mowing down his cornfield to build a baseball stadium when she decides to plant tobacco. People have been farming tobacco since Virginia was first settled in the 17th century, but, OK, I'll go with this alternative theory of southern farming and say a gal from Pennsylvania was the agricultural pioneer here.
The film does paint a realistic picture of dementia in Will's Uncle Bob (Lionel Barrymore) - He wanders in and out of cogent lucidity. When he's "out of it" he gets into Joanna's personal space, mistaking her for an old lost love. There's actually a story behind this besides Bob's dementia.
Then there is the frank depiction of racism and class boundaries in the post Civil War South. Uncle Bob throws around the word that shall not be named with wild abandon. But then he spots a black servant girl he fancies, and he begins flirting with her. Also, when Mrs. Connelly tells her black servants to get her some flowers, they have no problem uprooting Joanna's entire garden to obtain them. When she objects the servants demonstrate through their language that poor white people are at the bottom of the social barrel and they will take her flowers if they so please. Disney owns the Fox film library at this point, and let me just say that this will NOT be showing up on Disney+, I guarantee it.
