Worth: $12.00
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Cast:
Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Holly Hunter
Intro:
What makes it quite interesting, apart from the revelations themselves, is the sheer volume of home movie footage from the Fifties and Sixties.
Anyone with any interest in Johnny Cash – and anyone who’s seen Walk The Line – is well acquainted with the story of his marriage to June Carter, or at least the ‘official’ version of it. But that was of course his second marriage, and his first wife Vivian Liberto has been partly written out of the history and partly misrepresented. This documentary redresses all the imbalance and corrects a lot of grossly unfair misconceptions.
Liberto was born in 1934; she was of Sicilian descent but looked African-American – which caused her to be the brunt of horrific racism in later life. She and Cash met at a skating rink when she was 17 and he was 19, and it was apparently love at first sight. They exchanged literally thousands of letters – all of which she kept – while he was in Germany in the Air Force, married young and were very poor. This was, ironically, the happiest time of her life.
What followed after Cash’s musical career took off is recounted through extensive interviews with their four daughters Kathy, Cindy, Tara and – most eloquently and perhaps memorably – Roseanne Cash. It’s a very sad saga. Once he was famous, Cash was away and travelling almost literally all the time, leaving Liberto to raise the girls herself. Then there was Cash’s bust in El Paso…. all manner of chaos and distress… Johnny meeting June and the eventual divorce from Vivian. To add insult to injury, June falsely appropriated the credit for raising the girls and is inaccurately perceived as the person who saved him from drugs. And there are other insights here.
My Darling Vivian is an utterly standard doco in terms of presentation and style. What makes it quite interesting, apart from the revelations themselves, is the sheer volume of home movie footage from the Fifties and Sixties. People tended to document their lives back then in a way that today’s superior technology somehow can’t match.
