THE SOUTHERNER (1945) B/W 91m dir: Jean Renoir

w/Zachary Scott, Betty Field, J. Carrol Naish, Beulah Bondi, Percy Kilbride, Charles Kemper, Blanche Yurka, Norman Lloyd, Estelle Taylor, Paul Harvey, Noreen Nash, Jack Norworth, Nestor Paiva, Paul E. Burns, Jay Gilpin, Jean Vanderwilt, Bunny Sunshine

From The Movie Guide: "A remarkably naturalistic portrayal of one family's struggle to start a farm in the South. With the coming of autumn, Scott, a man hardened by his years of working fields for other people, decides to work his own land on the advice of his dying uncle. He is given a plot of unused, out-of-the-way land and packs his wife, Field, and his children Sunshine and Gilpin, grandmother Bondi, a dog, and all of their possessions onto a beat-up truck. What they find is a plot of unkempt, though workable, land and a dilapidated shanty that isn't fit for animals. The family gets settled in, fix the front porch, put a fire in the stove, and do their best to make the space livable. When Scott realizes the well doesn't work, he pays a visit to the neighboring farm which, after years of toiling, has become what Scott hopes his will be. The farm belongs to Naish, an embittered man who cannot appreciate the success of his hard work without thinking about how it caused the deaths of his wife and child. Naish is less than hospitable and only reluctantly agrees to let Scott use his well on the condition that Scott supply a new rope when the old one wears thin. As time passes and winter arrives, Scott and his family plow the land and ready it for a cotton crop. ...

"THE SOUTHERNER, Renoir's most critically respected American film, is a superb depiction, in spirit if not in historical authenticity, of the plight of the farmer. The southerner of the title is not only the heroic Scott, but also the angry Naish (who, like all Renoir's 'evil' characters, has his reasons for being so), the obstinate grandmother, and the unbreakable Field. As with such great pictures as OUR DAILY BREAD, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, and the brilliant government documentaries of Pare Lorentz to which THE SOUTHERNER is most similar (PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS and THE RIVER), this picture makes characters of the land, the cotton, the plow, and the water, granting them the same importance as the actors. In THE SOUTHERNER, man is just another element which makes up the whole of the natural world; he is not in control of the divine elements but subject to them. With the original Hugo Butler script (he later dropped out of the production, in reverence to Renoir who, Butler felt, could rewrite the script however he pleased) of the [George Sessions] Perry novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand, Renoir and his producers, [David L.] Lowe and [Robert] Hakim, were able to convince Hollywood to make their film.

"Not surprisingly, Renoir, a native of France who had only been in the US since 1940, found it difficult to fully capture the dialogue and dialect of the southern people. Nunnally Johnson, who had scripted THE GRAPES OF WRATH, was first brought in, followed by William Faulkner (both received no screen credit). who that year also had a hand in THE MALTESE FALCON and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Faulkner, who had known Renoir since the director's first American film, SWAMP WATER, and felt he was the greatest contemporary director, would later remark that working on THE SOUTHERNER had given him more pleasure than any other Hollywood production."

From the website www.albany.edu, these notes on the film prepared by Kevin Hagopian of Penn State University:

"It was a strange exile. Jean Renoir, son of the painter and already, at 27, the acknowledged patriarch of the French dramatic film, arrived in the United States in February of 1941, a refugee from the tragedy of France's fall. The Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game were masterpieces, clearly, but just as clearly not formula pictures. Studio executives were vaguely impressed by his reputation, but confused about just what sort of pictures to assign him. During his six year stay in America, Renoir would direct five films, all but one of them fascinating but faulty, each one marred by a small flaw --- a weak performance or a vague premise, something that made it not right, not quite Renoir.

"The lone exception was the smallest of his American films, one made without big studio backing, an independent production released through then-lowly United Artists It was 1944, and Renoir was frustrated by the many unconsummated deals he’d been a part of in the last two years. A project to make Mary Webb’s novel Precious Bane with Ingrid Bergman fell through because producer David O. Selznick wanted Renoir to direct Bergman in Joan of Arc instead. Another idea was a film set in Los Angeles’ decrepit Victorian slum, Bunker Hill. Each of Renoir’s film ideas was dismissed as 'uncommercial.' Finally, producer Robert Hakim (another emigre), brought Renoir the book Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry, along with a script by Hugo Butler. It was the most uncommercial project of all, the story of a sharecropper who tries to make a go of it on his own place, some waste land his neighbors have dismissed as unworkable acreage. The sharecropper struggles against disease, the weather, even the hatred of other farmers. A surprise hit, The Southerner is one of the finest films about rural labor between John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and Elia Kazan's Wild River.

"Butler’s script concentrated on the social injustice that swirled around the sharecropper. Butler, a Left screenwriter who would soon be caught in the maelstrom of the Hollywood blacklist, saw the film as an opportunity to venture into political areas which the film version of The Grapes of Wrath had neglected. Renoir saw Butler’s narrative of class warfare as fervent and true, but also melodramatic. A Renoir story was often a will o’ the wisp, a fragile, even vague thing that sufficed mostly as a place to create memorable, melancholic characters who commented ironically on the human condition. His films were not political broadsides, but poetry. And that was how he saw The Southerner. In his autobiography, My Life and My Films, Renoir wrote:

"What attracted me to the story was precisely the fact that there was no story, nothing but a series of strong impressions --- the vast landscape, the simple aspiration of the hero, the heat and the hunger. Being forced to live a life restricted to their daily material needs, the characters attain a level of spirituality of which they themselves are unaware ... What I saw was a story in which all the characters were 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.

"Butler saw immediately the virtue of Renoir’s approach, as well as his unsuitability to it. He graciously withdrew, and Renoir went to work on a revised version of the script. On this portrait of Southern rural life and work he had the uncredited assistance of a long-time admirer of his work, William Faulkner. Renoir’s original choice for the film’s lead was Joel McCrea, but McCrea was put off by Renoir’s impressionistic script, and backed out. It was Renoir, who loved casting against type, who suggested Zachary Scott, who had specialized in playing urbane, cynical 'other men' characters. Scott had grown up in Texas, where the film is set, and knew the world of cotton planting and chopping and harvesting Renoir wished to capture on film. The film’s other major players, Betty Field, Norman Lloyd, and the indispensable Beulah Bondi, are further examples of Renoir’s eye for skilled, empathetic performers.

"Renoir owed his initial sponsorship in the United States to the legendary documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty. Renoir's style in The Southerner owes much to Flaherty, but there is something else operating in this small, eloquent film than the documentary aesthetic. It’s Renoir’s uncanny ability to create a cinematic world completely believable on its own terms, and no matter that the film is fictional. James Agee, a Southerner himself, said that the film’s possum hunt sequence 'gets perfectly the mournful, hungry mysteriousness of a Southern country winter.' Perhaps Agee saw something of the exquisite powers of observation of rural life he himself had demonstrated in his astounding journalistic elegy, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In that work, Agee and photographer Walker Evans had portrayed the lives of Alabama sharecroppers in exhaustive, almost cinematic detail. The life of the 'cropper was one of almost unrelieved physical misery and destitution, yet Agee called himself to avoid even a gesture of patronage or pity. As a film reviewer, he demanded the same from films about the lives of the poor, and almost never got it. In The Southerner, he did. Agee loved the sense of tactile reality in the film’s rough-hewn surfaces, its hardscrabble fields, and the battered but resilient faces of its people. When Agee called The Southerner '1/4 one of the most sensitive and beautiful American-made pictures I have seen,' he accurately placed Renoir’s portrait of rural life alongside the work of himself, Faulkner, Ford, and John Steinbeck. Renoir, the immigrant, offered an image of American country life as if lived from the inside, yet simultaneously seen from the outside with perfect clarity. Renoir’s own greatheartedness added to this perfect artistic tension a great depth of compassion for what is universal in human experience."

THE SOUTHERNER was nominated for three Oscars: Best Director, Score (Werner Janssen), and Sound (Jack Whitney).