Deep Valley
Directed by Jean NegulescoIn the rural hills of Northern California, Libby Saul is a young woman held fast by circumstance. Isolated on her family's failing farm, she lives under the weight of a bitter, domineering father, Cliff Saul, and a mother, Ellie, too worn down to intervene. Libby barely speaks, stutters when she does, and has retreated so completely from the world that the arrival of a road construction crew on the adjacent land registers as a kind of shock. She watches the convicts working the chain gang from a distance, separate from the other hands, already half in love with the idea of someone else's confinement.
When a prison break scatters the work crew, one convict – Barry Burnette, volatile and desperate – takes refuge on the Saul property. Libby hides him. What begins as pity shades into something more complicated: she recognizes in Barry a man who has been crushed by the same forces of confinement that have defined her own life, and the bond that forms between them is less romance than mutual recognition. The local sheriff, Akers, tightens his net, and Jeff Barker, a foreman with more conventional designs on Libby, adds another layer of pressure. Allegiances on the farm shift as the danger closes in, and Libby's loyalty to Barry places her against every authority she has ever known.
Deep Valley occupies an unusual position within the noir cycle, less urban than most, built around entrapment and release rather than crime for profit. The fugitive-love structure recalls earlier Depression-era outlaw pictures, but Negulesco and screenwriter Salka Viertel are primarily concerned with the cost of passivity – with what happens to a person when the will to live is suppressed long enough that it can only re-emerge through transgression. The film is as much psychological study as thriller, and it is Lupino's performance, controlled and almost silent for long stretches, that determines its moral weight.
