Spencer's Mountain

Clay Spencer works a quarry in the mountains of Wyoming. He lives with his wife Olivia and their nine children in a house handed down from his grandparents. Clay does not go to church, makes fun of the minister, drinks with his friends, and in whatever time is left builds the house he has always promised Olivia with his own hands. Then his eldest, Clayboy, is admitted to college, the first Spencer to go. But there is no money, and the boy's head is on a girl. Clay has to decide what to give up. Delmer Daves directs; a hundred and eighteen minutes, with Henry Fonda as Clay and Maureen O'Hara as Olivia, adapted from the novel Earl Hamner wrote out of his own childhood. A few years later Hamner turned the same material into a television series: The Waltons.