The Southerner (1945)
Directed by Jean Renoir

Film Review

In 1944, Jean Renoir followed his well-honed propaganda piece This Land Is Mine with a film that could hardly be more different but which offers a similar heart-felt hymn to the freedom of the individual.  The Southerner, a boldly naturalistic adaptation of George Sessions Perry's 1941 novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand, is arguably the finest of Renoir's six American films, the one that is most recognisably the work of the fearless auteur who had previously crafted such masterpieces as Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) and La Règle du jeu (1939).  It is an unusual film for Renoir, the only one of his films (other than his subsequent The River) which champions family life.  It marks a tentative return to the realism of Renoir's early sound films, albeit one viewed through the prism of American melodrama.

The Southerner is the most American of Jean Renoir's films but it is atypical of American cinema at the time because of its uncompromising depiction of the hardships endured by ordinary American citizens.  Renoir does not attempt to ennoble impoverished workers as John Ford had done with his The Grapes of Wrath (1940); he depicts them as honestly as he can, as ordinary folk fighting an uphill battle against misfortune and malice.  The director's flair for visual poetry (most apparent in the almost dream-like possum hunt) and his habitual optimism take the edge of what might have been a bleak drama.  The film's parochial subject matter and trenchant realism were against the spirit of the time but this did not prevent it from being a moderate success.  It earned Renoir his one Oscar nomination for Best Director and took the Best Film award at the 1946 Venice Film Festival.

It is the simplicity of Perry's story that first attracted Renoir to it.  There is no plot as such, just a series of episodes in the life of a young family struggling to survive as the father doggedly (and recklessly) tries his hand at being a solo farmer.  The characters are sympathetically drawn and authentically played by a talented ensemble, with Zachary Scott and Betty Field both at their best as the free spirited farmer and his supportive wife.  Beulah Bondi provides entertainment value as the pathologically tetchy grandmother, whose endlessly whinging never lets us forget the extreme hardship endured by the central characters.  J. Carrol Naish manages to bring an undeniable pathos to his portrayal of the brutally misanthropic neighbour Devers, a rogue with more than a touch of Boudu about him.  Renoir's compassion for his fellow man, irrespective of their moral makeup, is brought out through this gallery of arresting character portrayals.

It was whilst making The Southerner that Jean Renoir fell in love with America and came to regard it as his new home.  On becoming an American citizen, he later remarked, he felt that he had been born a second time.  This newfound sense of belonging is powerfully felt in The Southerner, and in Sam Tucker's struggle to make something of his dusty strip of Texas land there is a glimmer of a self-portrait.  Like Sam, Renoir would have his fair share of setbacks and his next two American films - The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) and The Woman on the Beach (1947) - would be flops.  Renoir's American dream ended in bitter disillusionment and ten tears after he made his fondest tribute to the American way of life he was back in France, returning to the Land of the Free only after he had retired from filmmaking altogether.

Film Synopsis

Sam Tucker is a young migrant worker who scrapes a living toiling for others on the cotton fields of Texas.  When his uncle, another cotton picker, dies from sunstroke, Sam decides to go it alone and invest his meagre savings in a smallholding, hoping to strike it rich with a bumper cotton harvest.  With the help of his wife Nona, children Jot and Daisy and cantankerous Granny, Sam soon converts the derelict shack that goes with his land into a habitable dwelling as he sows his first field of cotton.  A hermit-like neighbour, Devers, grudgingly allows Sam to take water from his well but refuses to give him milk when Jot falls ill.  Harmie, the town grocer, comes to the family's rescue, sending them a cow when he marries Sam's widowed mother.  Devers and Sam put an end to their feud when the latter catches a legendary catfish and allows his neighbour to take the credit.  Just as Sam's dreams of making it as an independent farmer are about to be fulfilled disaster strikes...