The Southerner

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Isaiah Y A profound story of America greatly directed by a Frenchman, Jean Renoir Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 12/27/20 Full Review Audience Member A gripping film about how hard life was before, and about how little it took to overthrow a person's dreams Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/14/23 Full Review paul d This is a deeply realistic film about the lives of poor farmers struggling to survive. It also has a lyrical, poetic and deeply humane quality about it. The story of ordinary people struggling, often losing, yet remarkably resilient and optimistic, was billed at the time as 'a story of America', which fits perfectly. To capture the feeling of this film, think of a quieter version of a Frank Capra film, with lots of elements from The Grapes of Wrath. A beautiful film. The one off note in the film for me was Beulah Bondi's portrayal of the grandmother, who seemed to be the result of one-dimensional over-acting. But if it pleased Jean Renoir, who am I to complain? Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member If you can get past the horrible grandmother, this is a beautiful and great film. Why Renoir had Bondi perform in this cartoonish way almost ruins the film. Stay with it though. Its gritty, real, touching and brilliantly acted (even if Scott is too polished to come off as a dirt farmer). Betty Field shines. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 05/07/20 Full Review Audience Member Effective and all-too-real. The plight of the rural, uneducated southern white was a major problem, but filmmakers never addressed the bigger injustice: the plight of the totally disenfranchised,poverty-stricken black people who had no way to succeed in the 1940s. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/16/23 Full Review Audience Member One of a handful of films from Jean Renoir's American Period (roughly 1941 to 1947) that saw him tackle American themes but never straying too far from his interests in class and economic justice (that were most prominent in his greatest film, The Rules of the Game, 1939, and even La Grande Illusion, 1937). Here, Zachary Scott plays a cotton picker with a young family who decides to strike out on his own as a sharecropper (renting some of his former boss's land and including a share of the crop as payment). His wife, Betty Field, enthusiastically throws herself into fixing up the farm and sowing the field. His grandmother, Beulah Bondi, complains endlessly but is sweet deep down. Renoir manages to lend some human feeling to the proceedings and the relationships among the family and between Scott and his mean-spirited neighbour (J. Carroll Naish) seem authentic enough. It's a tough life but Scott and his family tackle it in a good humoured way (most of the time). In some ways, this is almost a neo-realist view of the (poor white) South, though I reckon things would have been even harder for some. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/04/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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