I Walk the Line

How a man becomes a loaf of bread

Not to be confused with the 2005 biopic of Johnny Cash (although the soundtrack features several Cash songs), "I Walk the Line" (1970) stars Gregory Peck as a taciturn Appalachian sheriff who suffers a mid-life crisis and falls for some pretty young thang (Tuesday Weld), the daughter of a generational moonshiner. The sheriff turns a blind eye and everything's fine, but for how long?

You can't go wrong with Gregory Peck. Although I've only seen about a dozen of his movies over the years he's always been an unvoiced favorite of mine. He's tall, (seemingly) noble, masculine, likable, determined and just has an unshowy star quality. Here he plays his usual self with the exception that, facing a mid-life crisis, he makes dubious choices and hurts those connected to him.

Tuesday Weld was 26 years-old during filming and is easy on the eyes. Her character maintains a naive quality even though what she does is wrong. I suppose you could say she's more ignorantly amoral than malevolently immoral.

The film was shot in the beautiful Appalachian hills of North-central Tennessee. The courthouse square scenes were shot in Gainesboro, but the dam scene that opens the movie (and is shown again later) was shot at Center Hill Dam. The Drive-In movie sequence where they are watching the 1969 Jerry Lewis movie "Hook, Line and Sinker" was shot at the Green Hills Drive-in in Carthage (hometown of Al Gore), about 45 minutes from Gainesboro. During the production Gregory, Tuesday, director John Frankenheimer and other cast & crew members stayed at the Holiday Inn in Cookeville, TN. All the buildings in Gainsboro are still there (including the pool hall) except the first store that was cattycorner to the courthouse (where the sheriff shops), which was torn down. A small portion of the film was also shot in Northern California, in a little town called Colusa, the seat of Colusa County, but I can't tell which specific scenes. Much of Colusa's...