“The Southerner”—directed by Jean Renoir—is one of the least trashy and commercial movies made in years. It tells about the first year spent by a very poor Southern tenant family on a farm whose ground hadn’t been worked in years, and whose house is the shabbiest of shed-like makeshifts. During this year all five members of the family (father, mother, two children and grandmother) nearly starve and freeze; the son almost dies of pellagra; a rainstorm destroys the first cotton crop; a depressed neighbor wrecks the vegetable garden and twice almost murders the father. But the life of the family through all this is a rewarding one, because of the goodness, courage and integrity of the people, which seems to be what the movie is trying to show. The farmer and his wife (Zachary Scott and Betty Field) are sensitive, strong, persevering people, who are given a more generous number of emotions and more natural ones than are usually given heroes and heroines; the only two Hollywood disfigurements are that the hero sometimes seems too talented—as when he snags fish out of the water with his hands—and the heroine has a little too much beauty-parlor polish.
I have never been in the South, but the movie doesn’t strike me as being particularly Southern. There are one or two Negroes as extras in a limp introductory episode; the characters speak a pleasant, mild approximation of Southern speech and look more like New Yorkers than Southerners I know do; and the movie is so divorced, I think, from an identifiable environment that it seems to be taking place in a generalized American farm country. I still think it is often an accurate portrait of American farming people, with a lot in it that is thoroughly good and sweet. It is especially admirable because it gets about freely into believable locales and, in the case of its men, is extremely well cast and acted.
I particularly liked Zachary Scott’s performance, and those parts of the movie in which Renoir has visualised the action so well that you seem to be present in the events as an unseen member of the Tucker family. This happens when the family drives up to the house for the first time and then explores the decayed structure (for once, there is a study of a house that is nearly long and detailed enough, and one in which the director does something as unusual as to use his camera as if it were the eyes of the family as they move into the house and around in it), and during occasional indoor scenes when dialogue is so well handled that there is no feeling that the action is being staged in the manner of a play for an audience. I like the unhoked-up, credible love and hope in a celebration around the first lighting of the stove; the humor in a shot taken from some distance away from the house, of the father pushing a caved-in section of the porch roof into place; the radiant prettiness of an intentionally romanticized dream episode; the reality of a scene at the doctor’s office. Much of the humanity in the movie is due to the talented, completely believable playing of Scott; his ability to walk, talk and act as though he had never been to a city, to make small reactions—like a glance, over the dinner table, at his wife showing a sudden respect—count heavily, and his ability to make terrifying moments, like his looking toward the sky and asking God a question, seem natural to a humble, unassuming man.
Director Renoir’s idea of a beautiful shot is a prettier, more obviously composed one than I care for, and too often the reason for walking an actor under a large tree, posing his head against clear sky, sending him into the forest to hunt possum, or almost drowning him in a flood, seems to be simply to film some scenery that the director likes. But unlike almost any other Hollywood director, Renoir tries to make every shot count for as much as possible, and the fine, naturalistic work he has done here has turned out some of the only true scenes of American country life that I have seen since films like “Tol’able David.” The weight of the movie as a whole is much lighter in effect than I think it should be to be important as a work of art about Southern tenant farmers, but the interest of everybody connected with it is in the direction of art.
Besides “The Southerner,” the best of the current movies I have seen are: “Story of GI Joe,” “Pride of the Marines,” and the documentary, “San Pietro.”
September 10, 1945