The Southerner (1945)
This is such a deliberately sentimental, salt-of-the-earth story, filmed with intelligence but no particular innovation, it's hard to believe the same director made one of my favorite movies, "Rules of the Game," with all its energy and sophistication. Can it be even as relevant as it seems to want to be, six years after the depression ended, and everyone's attention on the war, the bomb, and the returning soldiers with no jobs? In fact, the more you watch it the more it seems like a parody--but to make a tongue-in-cheek movie about something this earthy would be a kind of slap at the soul of the country.
So what's to be though, or said? It almost has the documentary feel of a Flaherty film (from twenty years earlier). The heartfelt and rather sympathetic tone is offset (for me) by the obvious types played out--the terribly good neighbors and the backwards mean ones, the struggling good wife and the struggling good husband (both smart and stubborn and beautiful). You can have your preferences, of course, but if I compare to "Grapes of Wrath," as one example, I see a whole different kind of movie making, from acting style to photographic intensity to a story with complexity as well as sentimental warmth.
But let's look at the other hand. This is not a slick Hollywood film. It was produced (funded and controlled) by the director himself, and he was able to keep what I call a European feel to the filming, something more honest. And the themes may well come from the huge trauma of Renoir's own life, having escaped from Europe and made an anti-Nazi film but felt adrift. This is his first straight American film, and he may in fact not know his subject directly, but only through the FSA photographs, LIFE magazine stories, and the book that it was based on, a pop fiction bit of pulp fiction in its own way.
Heartbreak, bad weather, and ever transcendent human compassion merge together in this well made but imperfect film, sometimes regarded as Renoir's best American effort. Take it on your terms.
This is such a deliberately sentimental, salt-of-the-earth story, filmed with intelligence but no particular innovation, it's hard to believe the same director made one of my favorite movies, "Rules of the Game," with all its energy and sophistication. Can it be even as relevant as it seems to want to be, six years after the depression ended, and everyone's attention on the war, the bomb, and the returning soldiers with no jobs? In fact, the more you watch it the more it seems like a parody--but to make a tongue-in-cheek movie about something this earthy would be a kind of slap at the soul of the country.
So what's to be though, or said? It almost has the documentary feel of a Flaherty film (from twenty years earlier). The heartfelt and rather sympathetic tone is offset (for me) by the obvious types played out--the terribly good neighbors and the backwards mean ones, the struggling good wife and the struggling good husband (both smart and stubborn and beautiful). You can have your preferences, of course, but if I compare to "Grapes of Wrath," as one example, I see a whole different kind of movie making, from acting style to photographic intensity to a story with complexity as well as sentimental warmth.
But let's look at the other hand. This is not a slick Hollywood film. It was produced (funded and controlled) by the director himself, and he was able to keep what I call a European feel to the filming, something more honest. And the themes may well come from the huge trauma of Renoir's own life, having escaped from Europe and made an anti-Nazi film but felt adrift. This is his first straight American film, and he may in fact not know his subject directly, but only through the FSA photographs, LIFE magazine stories, and the book that it was based on, a pop fiction bit of pulp fiction in its own way.
Heartbreak, bad weather, and ever transcendent human compassion merge together in this well made but imperfect film, sometimes regarded as Renoir's best American effort. Take it on your terms.