The Country Heir

In a sun-dappled New England county whose maples bleed amber and whose barns sag like penitent monks, a taciturn young squire—last scion of a bloodline pickled in cider and debts—returns from war-torn Europe to find the ancestral orchard mortgaged to a smiling vulcher in a straw boater. The film, stitched from the frayed silk of William Watson’s scenario, unspools as a pastoral fever dream: estate sale wagons rumble across frost-bitten stubble, auctioneers bark like carnival barkers, and the heir, Harry Sweet’s angular shoulders wrapped in a threadbare trench coat, stalks the furrows like a man searching for his own ghost. Florence Lee’s widow—luminous, lamp-oil-scented—haunts the edges of every frame, clutching a deed that might be a love letter or a death warrant. Between silos and cider presses, the pair trade glances sharp enough to core apples; their courtship is a slow-motion duel fought with silences, IOUs, and the occasional stolen kiss that tastes of tannin and ruin. When the final gavel falls and the deed slips from one trembling palm to another, the camera lingers on a single russet leaf spiraling into a pail of rainwater: inheritance, romance, and the American pastoral curdled into one bruised elegy.