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Anthony Mann and writer Ben Maddow (here fronted by Philip Yordan) apply an extremely broad stroke in their adaptation of Erskine Caldwell's novel of a white trash family and its patriarch's fruitless quest for gold, as a potential workers' reclamation of the shuttered local mill simmers in the background. Robert Ryan chews the dry scenery in giant mouthfuls as TyTy, a hapless widower barely reining in his two daughters (played to buoyant perfection by Tina Louise and Fay Spain) while toiling away in a literal sea of holes. Buddy Hackett lurks on the periphery as a corpulent candidate for local office desperately wooing TyTy's daughter, Darlin' Jill (Spain), whose bathtub scene is a frisky riot almost impossible to imagine having been lensed in the mid-1950s. Butchered over the decades by regional censors, we present a fully restored print from the UCLA Film and Television Archive.