Fleeing France as the Nazis advanced, French director Jean Renoir went to Hollywood, where he tried to make more of the lyrical, socially engaged films that had made his name back home. 1945’s The Southerner was about as close as he got, but to make his third US feature he had to exit the studio system and do it as an independent. What do you know, it was his best received film, three-times Oscar-nominated, including one for Renoir himself as director. It was as near as he’d ever get to an Academy Award.
Being a second-string production made outside the system meant not having access to big-name talent, but Zachary Scott and Betty Field do pretty OK as Sam and Nona Tucker, poor white Southerners who try to make a go of it on a piece of land they’re renting off the guy whose cotton they used to pick. Maybe, if everything goes their way, their up-by-the-bootstraps wishes will come true.
Renoir paints a highly idealised picture of the South – play “spot the black face” in the opening sequences set out in the cotton fields – but he’s fairly rigorous in his detailing of the woes befalling this family as it tries to hack a living from the soil. Lack of water. Little food. An awkward elderly relation. A child who gets sick from vitamin deficiency (or “spring fever” as pellagra was known). A viciously cold winter. A terrible storm. And finally, the cherry on the cake, a neighbour who resents the Tuckers’ presence on land he was hoping to buy until they came along.
Renoir also sets out clearly what the Tuckers have to do – clear the overgrown land, plough it, burn the weeds, sow, tend, remain vigilant against bugs, and so on, all the while keeping body and soul together until money comes in from the first crop.
Scott plays Sam Tucker as a man of simple dignity, while Field, initial wobble to one side, is something similar as his pretty, hard-working and optimistic wife. J Carrol Naish scowls as Devers, the neighbour who isn’t just unhelpful but possibly a threat. Beulah Bondi plays another of her old grannies, an incessantly complaining old crow who is the counterweight to Sam and Nona’s hopefulness. (Renoir even gives her a song – Sweet Beulah Land, a little in-joke for audiences).
Renoir’s leftish sentiments are personified by the collaborative Tuckers and their network of family and friends. Against them the the more individualistic Devers clan.
Though the film is set in the era of cars, radios and juke boxes, Renoir gives The Southerner a western vibe – the Tuckers could almost be settlers heading out West in a covered wagon.
It’s folksy as hell, and Renoir’s insight that so much of what’s on screen is familiar from westerns, even though this is no such thing, means he can up the pace. He whips along and one of the reasons the film stands the test of time is because of its muscular storytelling and forward thrust.
That’s Norman Lloyd as Devers’s possibly simpleton nephew, Finley. Amazing to think he was still alive only three years ago, aged 106.
Lovers of Renoir’s painterly style – being the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir has to count for something – can bask in his pictorial sense. There are scenes towards the end, when the Tuckers are dealing with flooding and the river has burst its banks, where he can really let the inner pictorialist go. But then river is often freighted with meaning in Renoir – “deep time” and the eternal verities versus everyday time and the petty scrabbling of humanity – as it was in Boudu Saved by Drowning, and would later be in Partie de Campagne and, most obviously, in The River.
All in all, it’s a cute example of how good Renoir was at film-making. The film didn’t go down well in the South, and was banned in some areas because of perceived insults to its way of life. From the 21st century it’s hard to see what upset them.
The Southerner – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
