The Southerner (1945)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Southerner (1945) – J. Renoir

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.