text: Miserable film. Not even to be compared in one breath with "To Kill a Mockingbird," or "In the Heat of the Night."<br /><br />Yes, there is racial prejudice but the film is at most ridiculous. <br /><br />Come now. Would you really have Elizabeth Patterson, of all people, guarding a jail so as to avoid a lynching? Patterson, in her day, played everyone's mother and was the landlady in "I Love Lucy" before Fred and Ethel Mertz bought the building.<br /><br />Imagine exhuming the body so that it will not come out that the black man's gun killed a white man?<br /><br />Claude Jarman Jr., who was so fabulous in 1946's "The Yearling" appears in this mess. He still had those sad eyes. My eyes would be sad too if I appeared in this awful film.<br /><br />To me, this was nothing more than a Faulkner flop all the way.