Nobody likes it? spoilers

I'm not sure if the townspeople knew right away, but I think the woman who assisted with the birth told people what Lutie had said during labor, and word spread. And I didn't understand either why Jim favored the boy after he found out it wasn't his.

I didn't like it at all.

It is interesting, but not pleasing, to see Kate Hepburn playing that kind of role, and she plays it to the hilt, like a good soldier. I don't know if she actually bats her eyelashes in the first scenes, but there is plenty of sighing and sobbing and etcetera, etcetera. When the movie---finally---approaches its end, her daughter is grown and lo and behold, she acts the same way. It's the same way female characters mainly acted, by and large, in most movies: putting their hand to their throat, dabbing at the corner of their eyes, showing a hint of a smile, all at appropriate moments. It's the way it was done, by Bette Davis and many others, and I do not mean to take a thing away from Bette Davis or from anyone. Hepburn does it here, as I say, quite well. In the beginning of the movie, she is radiantly beautiful in a different manner than she usually is. Ultra-feminine with no sharp edge.

Spencer Tracy, whether sleepwalking (as another poster says) or not, acts virtually the same in almost every scene and his constant flat, expressionless responses to his wife are appalling. That his wife winds up blaming herself for not being strong enough to tolerate him is also appalling. My feeling watching the movie was, at several points, "Oh, No, they're not going to get into showing us all THAT?" (Such as the grown children and their fates, after we've already gone through the "Giant"-like arrival of the greenhorn wife in cattle country, her attempts to reach out to the neighbors, bad weather, the nesters and the fences, and all else that goes before.) The movie is too long. "Giant" pulled it off; this one doesn't.

Good performances all around (minus Tracy, for me) don't save this tedious film.

So that's to the general point of this post that "nobody likes it."

As for the specific point about the child: every single time Tracy and Hepburn engage in what passes, between them, as an embrace, they kind of hug and pat each other on the back, and she puts her head on his shoulder. There is only one kiss in the movie, and it is between Hepburn and her lover, Chamberlain.

I didn't pick up on Brock's parentage in the birth scene with the people at the bedroom door. In later scenes, when Chamberlain and Hepburn are talking together, and (many) other things have happened and been said, it became clear to me by inference what the situation was.

I think the movie is worth seeing, but look out, it's a rough ride.

It was too long. Many of the sequences at the end of the film regarding the adult Brock were unnecessary, although the Brock story was pivotal in the reconciliation of Lutie and Jim. Some parts of it, like the sequences showing the many different sides of the adult Brock were amateurish. It's always risky to introduce major characters such as the adult children near the end of the film. As for Tracy, he was never a very emotive actor. His best roles always involved understatement.

That said, the movie satisfies as a sweeping epic. A lot of that has to do with the background character actors such as Edgar Buchanan who played their roles well. I would also love to know where they got pictures of those immense flowing grasslands and if such areas still exist today.

If you happen to run across it, it's worth viewing.