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"This Earth Is Mine" (1959)
Director: Henry King. Cast: Rock Hudson, Jean Simmons, Dorothy McGuire.
 Filmed at what is now Rubicon Estate, with workers appearing as extras, this film is even more winecentric than "Sideways," and just as accurate. Its portrayal of the issues that divided Napa Valley in the 1930s still seems prescient today. Also, some of the gender-preference innuendo in Hudson's dialogue is pretty interesting now.
A Douglas Sirk-style twisted melodrama set at the end of Prohibition, "This Earth Is Mine" has never been released on video or DVD, although it can be seen on bootleg copies or TV movie channels. This CinemaScope film is crying out for a big-screen revival at a San Francisco movie house like the Castro or the Balboa.
Claude Rains, around 70 at the time of the movie's release, plays the patriarch of a Napa Valley family who still insists on making fine wine every year, even though sales to the public are illegal. Hudson is his ambitious, callous grandson who is convinced the family and its neighbors can make a lot more money selling their grapes to bootleggers in Chicago.
In this steamy version of Napa life, loveless marriages are arranged to bring desirable vineyard parcels, such as Stags Leap, into the family. Affairs of all types, even incestuous, are never out of the question, though the price will be high. And the Valley is exclusionary, classist and racist.
Hudson's mother, played by Anna Lee, says at one point: "Andre is thinking of selling Stags Leap. Cutting it up into little parcels. Selling it off to all the riffraff that come flooding in here because the price of grapes is high."
Rains plays a noble character, believing that wine grapes are a gift from God. "The grape is the only fruit that God gave the sense to know what it was made for," he says. The film gives simple-to-understand descriptions of both the winemaking process and how to taste and appreciate wine.
Yet for all the great wine bits, the most memorable moment comes after Simmons tells Hudson that she loves him.
"I love you too," he says, looking away behind him. "I love a lot of things ... people don't know I do."
Then the camera cuts to a couple dancing, with the man in the middle of the screen, right where Hudson was looking. Hudson walks over to the man and says, "Do you mind?"
"Mind what?" is the reply.
Hudson says, "Changing partners."
Now we understand.
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