The genius of MacLaine’s performance is that she takes a character that is written, with deep misogyny, as comically ignorant and promiscuous and flips it around to make Ginny fearless and eccentric...

Minnelli... revels in the alluring decorative artifices of small-town life, which nonetheless seethe with passions that shatter the surface of decorum.

The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City.

I do not know whether or not James Jones’ censorable, over-length novel had an intelligible point of view. The partially disinfected screen version in any case occupies two hours and fifteen minutes displaying a total lack of one.