Thanksgiving with the Matriarchy: THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME (TVM-1978)

This rare and delightfully strange TV movie, based on the Thomas Tyron novel, makes fine post-autumnal equinox-style viewing. It's all in the name: harvest, home, and it's about family, and agrarian matriarchal cults that bring back the old ways via agrarian paganism... but.... I've said too much already. They may be listening, the cornucopia held up to the door to hear my whispered clacking.

Anyway, 'tis a strange feminist-phobic film of some fair equality about the evils of both city life and the older, simpler ways. David Ackroyd (no relation to Dan) stars and sounds just like a hopped up Cassavettes as the nosy parker who can't stop investigating the mysterious death of some shunned girl seven years past. (He's an artist, writing a book about the place). Normal New England life carries on without but cross the covered bridge into "the Coons" and you're in another world. Co-starring a young Rosanna Arquette as the daughter, quick to drink the Kool-aid so to speak, and Joanna Miles as the wife whose years of expensive therapy can't compare with a few simple home remedies from the town's matriarchal leader, the "Widow Fortune" (Bette Davis, having quite a time of it). Similarly Arquette has asthma in the big city but viola - one massage from Fortune and she's better than any inhaler can make her. TV vets like Linda Marsh as a neightbor, Lina Raymond as a sexy single brunette with scary eyes for Akroyd and a 'touched' daughter with second sight who picks the corn maiden and corn king every seven years. Michael O'Keefe, rocking a great New England accent, plays the first choice for king, but his fancy longing to use tractors instead of horses proves his undoing. 

I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and I never saw the end. Mother made me go to bed beforehand and I didn't dare displease her. I missed the ends of countless movies in those hard years, a symbolic blindness all my own. But I heard the end from mom at breakfast, and in this way I never forgot THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME.

It's a long slow burn over two nights --we get lots of weird little touches but the horror elements do take their time to arrive. What did the blind neighbor--once an outsider like Akroyd--see too much of?  Who cut out the tongue of the nosy ragman who keeps snooping and poaching in the forbidden woods patrolled by trigger-happy bootleggers? Why do women run everything like some Neil LaBute nightmare come to life? Why is Akroyd's tone-deaf ignoring of the idea that some secrets are better left unknown not result in a sooner shunning? It all builds to a slow relentless head on 'Harvest Home' the big secret ceremony of which only women are invited and no man may witness, except the corn king, of course. 

This wasn't the only late 70s matriarchal TV going on in the late seventies - there was also STAR MAIDENS (A 1976 British-German TV series about a planet where women dominate) and ALL THAT GLITTERS (Norman Fell's evening soap with a similar theme). Is it pure coincidence none of the three are on DVD, or even VHS, or are ever screened? Same goes for movies like FRAULEIN DOKTOR. What are the men in charge of shepherding TV and film to DVD so afraid of?

Is it the perfect family film to see on YouTube while your dad watches football, or your grandparents aw gee over the family fare that chokes TCM on holidays? It would. Long live the sisterhood of the scythe!