In black and white movies, when Van Heflin shows you his big, weepy eyes, you don't stand a chance. In glorious Technicolor, when he turns his baby blues on the camera, you have to restrain yourself from crawling into the television and giving him a hug. In The Raid, he manages to make you feel sorry for the bad guy. He plays a Confederate soldier out for revenge on the burning of Atlanta, leading a band of undercover Southerners on an attack on a town in Vermont. Included in his group is Lee Marvin, an insurance policy that you'll always have someone to hate more than Van Heflin.
While hiding out and plotting, Van establishes a new identity so that everyone in town will like him. He takes a room in a boarding house run by the respectable widow Anne Bancroft, makes friends with her son, and pretends to be a respectable Yankee. Richard Boone isn't too fond of him, especially because he's got his heart set on Anne and doesn't appreciate the competition. These are in the days before Richard Boone got typecast as a bad guy!
This movie has a bit of a slow start, but if you like Van Heflin, you'll probably want to stick with it all the way through. While he's clearly not the good guy in this movie, he's not exactly a villain, and you'll go back and forth between hoping he'll be successful and hoping he'll get exposed so Richard Boone can get the girl instead. Like this one? Check him out in the even more lovable Southern flick Count Three and Pray, where he plays a preacher who takes in a barefoot, backwoods Joanne Woodward in her first movie!
While hiding out and plotting, Van establishes a new identity so that everyone in town will like him. He takes a room in a boarding house run by the respectable widow Anne Bancroft, makes friends with her son, and pretends to be a respectable Yankee. Richard Boone isn't too fond of him, especially because he's got his heart set on Anne and doesn't appreciate the competition. These are in the days before Richard Boone got typecast as a bad guy!
This movie has a bit of a slow start, but if you like Van Heflin, you'll probably want to stick with it all the way through. While he's clearly not the good guy in this movie, he's not exactly a villain, and you'll go back and forth between hoping he'll be successful and hoping he'll get exposed so Richard Boone can get the girl instead. Like this one? Check him out in the even more lovable Southern flick Count Three and Pray, where he plays a preacher who takes in a barefoot, backwoods Joanne Woodward in her first movie!