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byneddiedingo · 2 years ago

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Betty Field and Zachary Scott in The Southerner (Jean Renoir, 1945)

Cast: Zachary Scott, Betty Field, J. Carrol Naish, Beulah Bondi, Percy Kilbride, Charles Kemper, Blanche Yurka, Norman Lloyd. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Jean Renoir, based on a novel by George Sessions Perry. Cinematography: Lucien N. Andriot. Production design: Eugène Lourié. Film editing: Gregg G. Tallas. Music: Werner Janssen.

The Southerner is perhaps the best of the films Renoir made during his wartime exile in the United States, which is not to say that it ranks with his French masterpieces that include Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête Humaine (1938), or Rules of the Game (1939). It does, however, stand up well against the better American films of 1945, such as Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock), or Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl). It also earned him his only Oscar nomination as director: He lost to Billy Wilder for The Lost Weekend, but he was presented an honorary Oscar in 1975. The film was also nominated for sound (Jack Whitney) and music score (Werner Janssen). The Southerner feels less authentic than it might: Renoir was unable to overcome the Hollywood desire for gloss, so Betty Field looks awfully healthy and well-coiffed for the wife of a hard-scrabble cotton farmer whose family lives in a shack with no running water and whose youngest child almost dies of "spring sickness" -- a form of pellagra caused by malnutrition. Zachary Scott is a little more credible as her determined husband, Sam Tucker, a cotton picker who decides to start farming on his own. The role is a sharp contrast to his performance the same year in Mildred Pierce, in which he's a slick con man -- the kind of role he found himself playing more often. The cast also includes Beulah Bondi as Sam Tucker's grandmother, J. Carrol Naish as the Tuckers' stingy neighbor, and Norman Lloyd as the neighbor's nephew and man-of-all-work, who tries to drive the Tuckers off their land. Renoir is credited with the screenplay along with Hugo Butler, who did the adaptation of a novel by George Sessions Perry, but it was also worked on by an uncredited William Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson.

#The Southerner #Jean Renoir #Betty Field #Zachary Taylor

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dweemeister · 8 years ago

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The Southerner (1945)

Directed by Frenchman Jean Renoir, The Southerner’s drama takes place far from the Western front as seen in Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1936, France), even further the upper-class shenanigans found in The Rules of the Game (1939, France). The setting is rural Texas, a part of the United States with no equivalent in France. With the people in The Southerner – adapted from George Sessions Perry’s 1941 novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand – occupying a space sprawling and isolated, appealed to Renoir not for the story, but the raw emotions involved and that the characters:

...attain a level of spirituality of which they themselves are unaware... all the characters [are] heroic, in which every element would brilliantly play its part, in which things and men, animals and Nature, all would come together in an immense act of homage to the divinity.

Hollywood, in its depictions of twentieth- and twenty-first century rural America, has largely dismissed that divinity of which Renoir speaks of. Leave it to an outsider to recognize that and show it in a movie. Renoir, who had fled his homeland due to the advances of Nazi Germany, found himself frustrated with Hollywood’s producer-oriented Studio System. He had been allowed unfettered freedom in France’s director-first systems, and was most comfortable in such environments. Released by United Artists (UA), The Southerner would essentially – despite the fact UA was considered a major studio – be an independent production. And before the end of his career, Renoir would note that The Southerner (his third American film) would be the only American film of his that he would be truly satisfied with.

Sam Tucker (Zachary Scott), his wife Nona (Betty Field), and his Uncle Pete (Paul E. Burns) are migrant sharecropper farmers picking cotton in Texas. The migrants are white, black, and Latino in a brief visual, sociological representation – perhaps the questions raised there can be the basis for a future movie. One day, Uncle Pete collapses from the intense heat and, knowing his heart too weak to continue, urges Sam and Nona to, “Work for yourself, grow your own crops.” Sam is inspired to do just that – securing a plot of land, taking his wife, the children Daisy (Jean Vanderwilt) and Jot (Jay Gilpin), and Granny (Beulah Bondi) to their new home to become an independent tenant farmer. It is not easy. Uncooperative neighbors (J. Carrol Naish and Norman Lloyd), being at nature’s mercy, the “Spring Sickness” (Pellagra), starvation, and other obstacles emerge in the first several months of Sam and Nona’s endeavors.

The screenplay by Hugo Butler and Renoir – with William Faulkner (yes, that Faulkner) and Nunnally Johnson uncredited – is sparse, content to allow several scenes to pass without much dialogue. What the screenwriters are most interested in is developing the requisite pathos for the audience members – regardless of their familiarity with the harshness of a farmer’s life – to empathize with the tribulations depicted onscreen. One disaster is addressed, with some respite and time for observational humor. But oftentimes that respite is fleeting, and the drama of another potential disaster requires a response. So often the Tuckers’ behavior is one of reaction to the nature surrounding them. This serves to emphasize how their survival can be dependent on the assistance of others. When a neighbor refuses to share, provide advice, or outright sabotages their efforts, the consequences can be the difference between life and death. The Tuckers’ symbiotic connection to the land – which can be extended to all farmer growing their own crops – is presented with sentiment, without sentimentality. By letting events occur with just enough dialogue, the screenwriters make the audience dread whatever crisis might be around the corner, and allows us to celebrate with the Tuckers when those crises are overcome.

Zachary Scott (1945′s Mildred Pierce) is not and was never a household name. Second choice to Joel McCrea – who dropped out after creative differences with Renoir – Scott had typically played suave, cultured supporting protagonists or villains in his career. But his appearance in The Southerner allowed him to draw upon his Texan roots, to more genuinely portray a determined young patriarch figure tasked with keeping everybody’s spirits afloat even in the most despairing hours. There’s a bit of Gary Cooper-esque fatherliness here, which Scott utilizes brilliantly for perhaps his best cinematic performance. For Betty Field (1955′s Picnic) as the mother, her character is not relegated to just being a child-rearer. She, too, must help her husband in the fields, the construction and reparations of the farmhouse, and other daily tasks. Field could have played her character as someone needing her man to get by, but that is not the case here. As Nona, Field works with Scott as a team. And though both husband and wife might have tasks considered gendered, it always feels like a relationship of equals.

Beulah Bondi (1937′s Make Way for Tomorrow) is disappointing as Granny Tucker. The character actress, forty-six years old the year of the film’s theatrical release, had the unfortunate habit of being typecasted by casting directors into elderly mother or grandmother roles. With heavy makeup, Bondi’s character is almost a cartoon figure that obfuscates The Southerner’s rich humanism. Granny’s acid-tongued insults and stubbornness might have worked in other settings, but Bondi is overacting here. Whether this was here decision or not, it is dissatisfying work from an otherwise underrated actress. For Naish and Lloyd, it is a study of opposites. Where Naish’s weathered cynicism and gradual refusal to help his neighbors seems justified due to his character’s experiences, Lloyd’s sneering, poorly-groomed, undeveloped character reminded me of Tom from Tom and Jerry when Tom is behaving out of absolute bloodlust.

Cinematographer Lucien N. Andriot had the expanse of California’s Central Valley as his backdrop. Shot in and around Madera, California (close to Fresno) and where present-day Millerton Lake is, low-angled upward shots close to the ground or downward shots from elevated positions dominate many of the work scenes found in The Southerner. We see the details of the Tuckers preparing their land for planting and the eventual harvest. Andriot’s cameras depict these granular details between humanity and earth – including the various ways humans prepare the soil and tend to it. It is reverential, in some ways, how these actions are shown.

When stereotyping rural Americans, and particularly the American farmer, dramatists, directors, writers, all sorts of creative artists call upon the concept of rugged individualism. Rugged individualism, in the American West, implies an independent streak and assumes a rigid moral correctness among individuals in their labor. Renoir is not here to deconstruct that image nor refute it. Instead, Renoir approaches that type of narrative by presenting the Tuckers’ enterprising motivations not in isolation, but made possible with the support and concern of others. Yet that network of collective support, according to Renoir, is meaningless, without the individual motivation to even make the attempt to be an independent farmer in the first place. A level of determination – maybe even a healthy dosage of arrogance – seems necessary, too. But if that arrogance extends to a self-perception of being a master of nature, that invites recklessness and a humbling from nature itself.

Initial reception in the American South was divided. Where some condemned The Southerner as portraying people in the South as ignorant rednecks (some state officials, the Ku Klux Klan), other Southerners and organizations (like the United Daughters of the Confederacy) praised the film for its respectful portrait of an intrepid family so dedicated to their land. Poor, white Americans indeed have their narratives told more often than other groups. But even then, those in Hollywood rarely make films as tender as this.

Having passed into the public domain, numerous prints of The Southerner are available, so beware of secondhand and thirdhand copies of prints (one excellent print can be accessed here). And due to direction of Jean Renoir’s career, it is easy to discount his American works. As Renoir said himself, The Southerner is no film to be ignored, and demands a viewer’s patience and emotional understanding of the characters striving and living within.

My rating: 9/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

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