"The Southerner" (adapted and directed by Jean Renoir, whom I consider an overrated auteur and most of whose films mix greatness and ploddingness) begins very sentimentally and ends almost as sentimentally (and very, very predictably). In between, there are some surprisingly adept action scenes (two fights and braving a flooded river). More surprising even than Jean Renoir, Action Director, was to see Zachary Scott without his mustache, playing a farm-worker (named Sam) trying to make a go of sharecropping and being a heroic "man of the earth" rather than a sneering "city slicker," as he was in every other movie role that I've seen.

Beulah Bondi adds vinegar as a self-pitying Grannie waiting for her call home to the Lord (while regularly denouncing her treatment here on earth, e.g., "“When you look down on my cold dead face, in that county pine box, you'll be sorry then [long pause of three beats] — maybe!”). And J. Carrol Naish stirs in some vitriol as Devers, the spiteful neighbor seething with resentments (who takes time to explain himself in the middle of a knife fight!). (Naish, too, was usually cast as an urbanite, often a swarthy one.) Devers has a sweet-tempered daughter (Estelle Taylor) who has a yen for Sam and a sinister Southern Gothic leering halfwit son Finlay (Norman Lloyd), who, perhaps, was William Faulkner's uncredited contribution to the adaptation of Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry (the novel's title suggests that much of the corn came with the book!).

I found it very bizzare that farmer Sam (Scott) and his factory-worker brother Tim (Charles Kemper) charged into the flooded river without shedding their shoes, ties, or suitcoats! (The ironic end of this sequence is mishandled.)

Some of the dialogue is stilted, much of the humor is forced, the plot is a succession of clichés, the performers make no attempt to sound Southern... And yet the unlikely cast (which also included Betty Field as Nona, making the best of things and only losing her patience and snapping once at Granny for constantly promising to die and not doing so, and Percy Kilbride ("Pa" Kettle) as a country store owner who weds Nona's mother there to help with her sick grandson) often made me care about the characters.

The cornpone is seasoned by some unsweet characters and strong visuals (of cotton fields, the river, and the fights; the cinematographer for it and Renoir's last Hollywood movie, "Diary of a Chambermaid" was Lucien Andriot). In some ways it is a pro-capitalist (though subbourgeois) variation on Dovzhenko's Earth (though the tractor does not come to the bottomland, the land and those committed to it endure for a long time and then die loquaciously with parting words of advice for their families) It also includes a lecture on pellagra and dramatization of what happens to young 'uns who don't eat their vegetables... and some speechifying about "dem dat's got and dem dat don't" that makes me appreciate anew the greatness of John Ford's movie "The Grapes of Wrath."

As for Renoir's Hollywood movies, I think I prefer the first, "Swamp Water" (with Walter Brennan) to "The Southerner." (Renoir preferred "The Southerner.") In recent months I have watched the preposterous "The Woman on the Beach" (with Joan Bennett in the title role, married to a homicidally jealous blind painter played by Charles Bickford and Robert Ryan as a White Knight!) and Super Ham Charles Laughton chewing up the (occupied French) scenery as a coward who Rises Up Against the Nazis in "This Land Is Mine," so even without having seen "The Diary of a Chambermaid" (with Paulette Goddard, Burgess Meredith, and Judith Anderson), I know that the casting of Renoir's American movies was strange and the dialogue hit and miss. I was underwhelmed by Renoir's last English-language movie (filmed in India) The River, which has an weaker cast than that in any of his Hollywood productions.

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The DVD has unrestored sound and picture. The extras as talent files on Jean Renoir, Zachary Scott, and Betty Field. The two stars burned out quickly and died relatively young. Renoir returned to Europe but died in Beverly Hills.



Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12