THE honey-sweet Dixie presented in Walt Disney’s first live-action drama, “Song of the South,” shows plantation life as a paradise for lucky slaves. Hattie McDaniel, who will continue to radiate sunshine and warmth until Hollywood gets it from the atom bomb, sings and chuckles over her deep apple pies; old Uncle Remus, looking not a year over 210, sings and chuckles as bluebirds and butterflies frisk through his chicken-feather whiskers; lucky cotton-pickers, straggling home after a carefree 23 hours in the fields, sing and chuckle as the sunset drips gold all over them; the plantation owner pokes Uncle Remus in the ribs as they pass the time all day up to their ears in willows and colonial housing. Despite this hopped-up image of plantation life, “Song of the South” is still the first movie in years in which colored and white mingle throughout, and where both are handled with equal care and attention.
“Song of the South” takes place on a plantation near Atlanta which is—wonder of wonders in this age of movie plenty—smallish and run-down. The hero, Johnnie, is a cute little white boy (Bobby Driscoll) whose father can’t spend as much time at home as the little tike demands. Uncle Remus (James Baskett) cheers Johnnie up with tales about Br’er Rabbit until the unpleasant, touchy mother (Ruth Warrick) breaks up the combination. As Remus leaves for Atlanta with Johnnie matching him stride for stride, the plantation bull snags the boy, bringing Remus shuffling back.
In the best scenes Disney gives a vivid sense of child life on a plantation—unlimited space, dirt roads and grassy hangouts that are breath-taking and unfortunately long forgotten; kids moving with the effortless, coördinated manner of children. But even here there is the annoying Disney ickiness—the colored boy grins too much, the Easter-egg color sugars the otherwise genuine sets; the Dead End Kids of the plantation are hardly a step removed from the sweetness of choir boys.
As Uncle Remus, James Baskett is so skillful in registering contentment that even the people who believe in the virtues of slavery are going to be impressed and want to know his secret. He’s just as slick at his story telling. The three cartoons which are used when Remus tells his stories aren’t top-drawer Disney, but as much as anything else make the movie worth seeing. Br’er Fox is a beautiful example of cartooning genius—a fox with a strongly drawn, original personality, a modish skinniness and the breathless loquaciousness of a Holy Roller. The rabbit is a watered-down Bugs Bunny and funny in the same way.
The latest Hollywood effort to wrestle with diseased minds and their Fu Manchu machinations, a two-hour waste of high-priced Hollywood talent—“Undercurrent”—shows you and a feverish, cultured, somewhat slap-happy chemist (Katharine Hepburn) that life can be horrendous under its placid surface. This is first revealed to the chemist the day after she weds a chromium-plated, ambition-rid industrialist (Robert Taylor) who lets her show up at a Washington cocktail party in an old rag of an $80 dress. The day after this shattering, unbearably humiliating experience, she learns what a twist-brain it was who thought up such an outrage—her seemingly perfect husband with the unruffled exterior is obsessed with a maniacal hatred of his brother (Robert Mitchum), whose whereabouts has been unknown for five years. This destructive hatred arises out of the garden variety of sibling rivalry—everybody goes for the selfless, gentle, artistic brother, while even the dogs growl when Taylor enters the room.
Because there pop up some creepy characters who have in common a hatred for her husband, the wife suspects husband killed brother and snoops to substantiate the fact. This enrages husband, who becomes twice as enraged, and well he should be, when the wife falls in love with the brother whom she has never seen. A funny thing happens during the terror-ridden ending which tends to alleviate the horror somewhat. Katharine Hepburn, so ravaged by fear, opens her mouth but remains speechless. This you may want to see.
December 23, 1946