In the 1950s, a poor Georgia cotton farmer and his sons search for the gold presumably buried on the farm by their grandfather but problems related to poverty, marital infidelity, unemployment and booze threaten to destroy their family.
Widower Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan) and his two daughters, Rosamund and Darlin' Jill, live in the backwoods of Georgia during the Great Depression. He also has three sons: Jim, Shaw, and Buck.
While Ty Ty searches constantly for gold on his farm, his son-in-law Will (Aldo Ray) cheats on his...
Widower Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan) and his two daughters, Rosamund and Darlin' Jill, live in the backwoods of Georgia during the Great Depression. He also has three sons: Jim, Shaw, and Buck.
While Ty Ty searches constantly for gold on his farm, his son-in-law Will (Aldo Ray) cheats on his wife Rosamund (Helen Westcott) with Buck's wife, Griselda (Tina Louise). Ty Ty has been digging for gold on his land for 15 years, searching for the treasure his grandfather left him. Consequently, the farm has suffered from many years' neglect.
Pluto Swint (Buddy Hackett) arrives to announce he's running for sheriff. Swint is invited to come around back where Darlin' Jill (Fay Spain) is taking a bath in an outdoor bathtub positioned near a handpump and spigot. She asks him to pump some more water (the camera view never dips lower than the top of the tub). Asked to keep his eyes closed, he sneaks a peek.
In the belief that having an albino with him in his quest for treasure will bring him great fortune, Ty Ty transports and wrongfully imprisons Dave Dawson (Michael Landon), a man with white hair and pink eyes, demanding that he help him locate the buried treasure. Dawson, using a divining rod, claims the gold lies on the neighboring church's land (referred to as "God's Little Acre"). Ty Ty pulls the marker out of the ground, explaining that God told him to move it, thereby absolving him from giving any gold found in this new spot to the church.
In the middle of the night Will leaves his house, followed by Griselda. He breaks open the mill's gates and enters the property. At first, she distracts him from his purpose, and they kiss. He then escorts her back to the gates and asks the growing crowd to restrain her. He re-enters and turns on the power, and the machines reactivate to the cheers of the crowd.
Hearing the rioters' assembly and the mill's power turned on, the caretaker comes from an inside office and shoots Will for trespassing. The crowd carries his body back to his house. Griselda enters to tell Rosamund the bad news, but Rosamund cries out that she already knows what has happened.
Implicitly, at this point, the tide in the county elections turns irreversibly. The populist Pluto Swint is elected sheriff, replacing the incumbent. The Walden family squabbles after Will's funeral, particularly over Griselda's actions at the mill and the numerous affections which she attracts from the other sons. The family decides to give up searching for the gold.
Ultimately, the family contentedly plows for the first time in years, with Ty Ty finding the blade of an old shovel in the ground and speculates about whether the gold might lie in that spot. As he begins digging again, the final resting place of the marker for God's Little Acre is revealed to be none other than the pond.
