Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

DKosty123 This take on the struggles of poor Americans in the south trying to make a go of it when they move onto a run down farm has a lot of the family type of stuff as a novel on America's depression should. Most of the cast of this is not as well known as the Henry Fonda Joad family epic, but that is different in a significant way. The Joads are in the process of trying to escape the dust bowl. This family relocates to the run down farm at the beginning of the film and then the story goes through their day to day living torments.French Director Renoir does a fine job assembling a story that makes a lot of sense and shows farm life struggles in a different way. The most famous cast member to me is Percy Kilbride who would go on to be Pa Kettle. In this movie he is a store clerk he eventually gets married and has a big wedding party nearing the end of the film. Since his bride is not Ma Kettle that makes him a bigamist though there is no relation between the films. Even though this is not the most famous cast around, the performances here are very well acted, and the cast makes the story more believable. The ending after a major climate changing event, is a real life ending. For the folks who survive, life goes on regardless. It is a lesson that needs to be taught more to a generation right now who has the idea that Climate Change is the end of everything as we know it. Climate change is not an ending, it is a disaster that leads to a new beginning by those who survive. There is way too much gloom and doom and too many people getting rich peddling such nonsense.

LobotomousMonk Based on all the historical evidence, Renoir was granted independence in the making of The Southerner and it shows in his direction and control of stylistics. The pastoral setting is explored with great depth of field, while characters are staged in depth through windows like in many of Renoir's French films (M. Lange, La Chienne). The story is the epitome of apropos - "if you're working for a big outfit, maybe you don't get rich but you still get your pay even if the crops is bad. But the little guy who is growing his own, if his crops is ruined, he's got nothing left". This warning given to Sam Tucker sets up the drama of the story while also commenting on the methods of producing the film itself. The mobile framing and long take pans accompanied by voice-over dialogue would be quite unconventional for a Hollywood audience and are much more in tune with the kind of documented eye of social cinema which Vigo promoted. As much as the stylistics are European and Renoirian in origin, the story is a corny slice of Americana - to live on the land you own, catching trophy catfish, grandma watching over things from her rocking chair. It speaks to America... even ironically lies to America. "Land needs rest like a man. That's why the Lord invented Sunday" is of course ridiculous given that Sunday was invented by the citizens of the French Republic. Renoir makes the most of the realism that can be achieved through exterior shooting on location and not on the studio sets. The house that is used literally sits on a crooked foundation creating impact on the viewer where skewed perspectives juxtapose with prospects of hopes and dreams. There is no class conflict in this film... the conflict plays out within the working class. Renoir falls back on some decoupage classique but frames a great fight sequence through it. The most unRenoir element of the film is the portrayal of the wife who supports 100% her husband and at no point creates even the slightest amount of stress of strife for him... she is in effect a cardboard cutout "woman folk". For all the massacring of Renoir's films in the cutting rooms, The Southerner could do with the removal of anachronistic misogynist traditional values in some of his Hollywood films. Renoir always believed in egalitarianism for women especially, so one can see that as much as The Southerner is considered "independent", Renoir was still bound by the puritanical values of the society to which his film would be distributed.

bkoganbing During his American exile period Jean Renoir turned out some really interesting films. The best of these is The Southerner which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Director. This film is clearly the ancestor of that Sally Field classic from the Eighties, Places In The Heart.The Southerner is the story of a poor white family in the rural south named Tucker. Zachary Scott who wants very much to farm on his own land takes an option from Paul Harvey and plants cotton on it. He was advised by friend Charles Kemper that it's a whole lot easier to be working in a factory or working as a farmhand on someone else's land as you're guaranteed a paycheck and you won't starve.But that goes against that great frontier tradition of 40 acres and a mule and the people who homesteaded and developed their own land. It's an ingrained American dream, not like the Europe where Jean Renoir was taking a hiatus from due to World War II. In fact The Southerner is a great tribute to Renoir's ability to soak up American culture and values. He really depicts the rural American South quite well. What's not shown here are black people, but in point of fact they would not be sharecropping near any poor white people at that time. Still the lack of them is a major flaw in the film.Both Zachary Scott and Betty Field do a great job at playing these very simple, but indestructibly sturdy Tuckers. Their two children live with them as well Scott's ancient grandmother Beulah Bondi, made up to way beyond her years even then. J. Carrol Naish has a nice part as a bitter neighbor who resents the fact that Scott might just make a go of it on land that cost him a couple of family members. Former silent star Estelle Taylor plays Naish's daughter and old time vaudevillian Jack Norworth has a small role as the local physician.Norworth's part is involved with Scott and Field's son coming down with pellagra, common among the poor people of the south who did not get a decent diet. Fresh milk every day went a long way and that's the reason that schools started giving out milk to the children way back in the day and still do.Besides a nomination for Renoir, The Southerner also received Academy Award nominations for Best Music Scoring and Best Sound. Sad to say for Renoir his film did not get to take any Oscars back to France when he returned.The Southerner ought to be seen back to back with Places In The Heart which has black people very prominent in the cast and does not shy from racial issues. Still even with that major flaw The Southerner is a deserved film classic.

jacegaffney The movies (the old movies, that is) are a wondrous thing. You can be convinced of a fixed opinion about a film and then, poof! just like that, your mind is suddenly changed. This happened to me the other night when re-visiting Jean Renoir's 1945 THE SOUTHERNER on Turner Classics Movies. Truthfully, I never liked this highly acclaimed picture and have always held that Renoir's enforced exile to Hollywood after his greatest work, LA REGLE DU JEU, flopped in France in 1939, was, on balance, a disaster; now after seeing THE SOUTHERNER again I think I might have been over these many years a tad too harsh.At the very least, THE SOUTHERNER need be commended for what it is not. It is not THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Beulah Bondi, God preserve us, is not Jane Darwell (As a matter of fact, her cussedly grandmother is a glorious antidote to Darwell's revered stereotype.) Zachary Scott is, surprisingly, more credibly human than and (predictably) less saintly than Hank Fonda. Renoir's mise-en-scene looks like John Ford's in its simplicity but is without Pappy's characteristically annoying cliché visual embellishments. An added plus is Betty Field's beauty as Scott's resilient wife.THE SOUTHERNER is a significant film even if it isn't a great or important one for it might be with this independently produced picture by one of the notorious Hakim brothers that Renoir's interests shifted almost entirely away from character and psychology and toward a more exclusive focus on the effects of environment on human perspective and on the way time shapes the soul through the change of seasons. This philosophical take was expanded to include the acceptance of death when he went to India six years later to film Rumer Godden's autobiographical novel, THE RIVER. Thus, the shift to something religious and quasi- Eastern in outlook probably first took effect for keeps in Renoir's work with THE SOUTHERNER.I'll always prefer the more dramatically eventful, cosmopolitan Renoir of France and the thirties over the more innocent, meditative vagabond that came afterward but I am now willing to admit that the great challenge of his work as a whole is that he is never more sophisticated than when he is being most simple and never more simple than when he is at his most sophisticated.Was this review helpful to you?