Jennifer Jones is Ruby Gentry, a poor North Carolina swamp girl loved by blue-blood Boake Tackman (Charlton Heston), who nevertheless marries someone from his own background. Ruby marries the richest man in town (local gentry), and when he dies avenges herself on Boake.
"Ruby Gentry...can now be seen to be one of Vidor's finest sound films and the culmination of those films which immediately preceded it-Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, Beyond the Forest, (etc.) The outsider, the social reject, had been one of the director's favorite concerns since the beginning of his career. This had become the dominant theme of his postwar work.... Ruby Gentry is a more controlled and coherent film, much of it typically Fifties in its look and feel, but pure Vidor in its sympathy for and redemption of the ‘girl from the wrong side of the tracks.'
"This ‘swamptrotter,' as Heston calls Ruby, had wandered in and out of Vidor's most personal films...display(ing) the same kind of vulnerability and humanity which Ruby evinces even at her most whorish and ‘evil' moments. This is perhaps the point at which Vidor comes closest to Renoir and his dictum that ‘everyone has his reasons'....
"Although Ruby does ultimately acquire the last name of Gentry, the status the word implies eludes her. The wages of her ‘sin' is not death but continued ostracism; she will always be trash in the eyes of the nice people from the right side of the tracks to whom Ruby's aspirations and sensuality were sufficient reasons in themselves to reject her. In Vidor's eyes however, she does acquire a quality which had become increasingly important to the harried director in the autumn of his career. Ruby Gentry has acquired dignity." --Charles Silver, Museum of Modern Art