**7; could be a 10**

This film needs a remake. I don't at all think current Hollywood would do it, or if it did, it would somehow fumble it by trying to transpose the script into a modern treatment, but it's a perfect candidate, because it's a true diamond in the rough. But it is quite rough in ways that have entirely been ironed out in (competent) modern filmmaking.

All the parts are there: the premise, the concept, the social and societal commentary that are still all too relevant, yet a remake set in the same period would be a much needed contextual juxtaposition to the current state of American national composite culture, and home culture as it's influenced along ideological and religious lines. There's some soulful dramatic irony that I wasn't expecting from a film of the era: Gish and Powell's characters singing a duet, one using the hymn's myth as murderer's ethos, the other the ideal of love as charity. And the mob reaction later in the film a look at _ex post facto_ righteous blood-rage, from the very ones that were at best ineffectual, and at worst willfully enabling of the events they now riot over. Meanwhile, Gish's Rachel Cooper shuttles her little ducklings away from the furor.

To me, the moments with Gish were the ones that had the full intended effect, even if the end was especially saccharine and "1950s Hollywood parable". But the scene where she finds them on the bank and swats them off to the bath made me spontaneously tear up. Kindness always gets me. I don't care about a character who you've just introduced when you try to make me feel sorry for them right off the bat—but show me somebody making a simple, unobserved sacrifice, or doing something purely out of the kindness of their heart, and you've got me.

And the music! Yeah, there's the generic horn blasts on dramatic jump scares typical of the era, and that definitely dates it and hurts the presentation, but the lead theme is hauntingly beautiful, and the girl's song as they float downriver in the moonlight is simply magical, and transcends most everything else in the film's rather stilted presentation. There are some nice shots, but most only last a second at most. And the preacher's (no scare quotes here, thank you) song is insidiously familiar and lulling as a sort of thematic musical coda. I'd keep everything here, along with the period, regional dialougue, and the black and white analog photo stock.

==Skip if you don't want critique==
But there's no getting around the awkward editing and pacing. Pacing? What pacing is more like it. It's common for '50s and preceding films to have abrupt scene endings that leave the viewer somewhat disoriented, and sometimes wondering what was said, or the meaning of what was said, as it ends so unexpectedly; and this film suffers from this throughout. Still, the scenes are well acted, giving some allowances for the children's uneven performances. But it makes me wish the general filmmaking (script, editing, cinematography, pacing, directing) were more competent, because it's not nearly as polished as many other classics or more banal fare from the forties and fifties.

Also... the threat of Mitchum's Powell just didn't have the proper impact on my viewing. It was just too dated in its silly, 1950s melodramatics. It's not that psychopathic con men like that don't and didn't exist, but that this was too theatrical to put me on the edge of my seat, and the kiddie chase sequences were far too close to slapstick.