Rambling Rose

REVIEW
Dern earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Rose, a Depression-era orphan who is taken as a live-in maid by a respectable Southern family in 1930s Georgia. Her sexual energy bursting at the seams, Rose turns the family's traditional values upside-down and precipitates a dispute between Mom (Ladd) and Dad (Duvall) as to how best to deal with her. Ladd, Dern's real-life mom, was also an Oscar nominee for her splendid work as Rose's matronly advocate. Charmingly humanistic in tone, the film is imbued with a wonderful sense of mirth and thereby avoids getting bogged down in the potentially melodramatic pitfalls of its subject matter.