Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Jones (Duel in the Sun, The Song of Bernadette) delivers a "powerful performance" (The Hollywood Reporter) as a strong-willed Southern beauty from the wrong side of the tracks in this bold, sweeping drama co-starring Oscar winners Charlton Heston and Karl Malden. She was raised in the rugged swamplands. He was born into wealth and privilege. Yet, from the moment Ruby (Jones) first laid eyes on Boake (Heston), she vowed to have him for her own. Now, the residents of the small tidewater town will do everything in their power to stand in her way. But they've never seen a passion like this one...and they've never met a woman like Ruby!

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Since neither of the principals is cast in a sympathetic light it is a credit to King Vidor's sensitive direction that Jennifer Jones, as a Ruby Gentry who is often more physical than delicate, gives stature to the delineation. A spirited and passionate creature, she generates voltage in tight-fitting jeans or evening gowns as the girl who could learn to hate as easily as she loves. Charlton Heston, as Boake, is a convincingly muscular and indomitable gent, whose attempts to better his lot destroy him. Karl Maiden's charactrization of the compassionate, self-made tycoon who knows he is second in his wife's affections but is willing to make the best of it, is smoothly underplayed and credible. And James Anderson, as Ruby's psychopathically religious brother, who kills her lover; Tom Tully, as her swamp-bred, roughly loving father and Bernard Phillips, as a Yankee doctor, who self-effacingly adores her, add proper color to the proceedings.

As has been noted, King Vidor has taken full advantage of the misty swampland; of the rough-hewn hunting lodge kept by Ruby's people and of the prevalent caste system whose mellifluous accents cannot hide its implacable differences. But these, after all, are secondary characteristics. "Ruby Gentry" is purveying pure, old-fashioned passion, corny and uncut, and she doesn't care who knows it.