The Southerner is a 1945 American drama film directed by Jean Renoir and based on the 1941 novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Director (the only Oscar nomination Renoir received), Original Music Score, and Sound. Renoir was named Best Director by the National Board of Review, which also named the film the third best of 1945. The film portrays the hardships of a poor family struggling to establish a cotton farm in Texas in the early 1940s.
Plot Texas sharecropper, Sam Tucker, is picking cotton alongside his wife Nona and his elderly Uncle Pete. Pete suddenly collapses due to the extreme heat and to what he blames as "my darned old heart". Before he dies, he tells his nephew, "Work for yourself; grow your own crops." Sam heeds his uncle's advice, so Nona, their children Daisy and Jot, "Granny", and he leave the migrant camp and set out to work a vacant 68-acre tenant farm with little more than two mules, a second-hand plow, and some cotton seed and fertilizer. The land the family leases includes only a decaying shack and a dry well. In immediate need of drinking water, Sam visits a gruff neighboring farmer, Henry Devers, who reluctantly allows the Tuckers to share water from his well.
Sam and his family nearly freeze and starve during their first winter on the farm, surviving largely on a limited diet of opossums, raccoons, and other small game that he is able to shoot. As spring arrives, Jot falls ill with "spring sickness". The town doctor informs Nona that the boy needs more diverse, vitamin-enriched foods, including vegetables, fruits, and milk to survive. The Tuckers immediately plant a garden, but its produce will take time to mature. Daily servings of milk would provide the suffering Jot with some timely relief, but the family cannot afford to buy or even rent a cow. Sam's friend Tim offers to help get him a factory job that pays the attractive wage of seven dollars a day, but Sam remains determined to succeed as a farmer. Soon, the family's prayers are answered when Harmie, who owns the local general store, and Tim arrive in Harmie's flatbed truck with a milk cow, which young Daisy names "Uncle Walter". The family's cotton crop and the much-needed vegetable garden they planted finally begin to flourish. Meanwhile, the embittered Devers and his strange nephew Finley plot to ruin the Tuckers so Devers can buy the tenant farm for a cheaper price from its owner. After Finley destroys the Tuckers' garden, Sam confronts Devers at his farm. There, Devers, armed with a knife, declares he will no longer share his well water, whereupon the two men have a near-deadly fight. Sam leaves and Devers gets a rifle and follows him. Soon, he finds Sam at the nearby river pulling in a fishing line on which he has hooked "Lead Pencil," an enormous catfish that Devers has been trying to catch for years. In return for the fish and the bragging rights that he was the one who caught it, Devers agrees to give Sam his garden and allow him continued access to his well, a deal that effectively puts an end to the trouble between the two families.
Harmie now marries Sam's mother, and a party is held at his general store to celebrate the wedding. Life at last seems to offer true promise for the Tuckers on that joyful occasion. Unfortunately, a violent rainstorm rolls in as the party is ending. The next day, the family returns to their farm, where heavy winds and flooding have ruined their entire cotton crop and ravaged their home. Sam, stunned by the sudden devastation, lets Tim accompany him as he searches for the family's missing cow, which they find alive but struggling in the swollen river. Tim nearly drowns in the deep water, but Sam rescues him. After pulling his friend to safety, Sam tells him that he is giving up farming and is now willing to take a factory job. Upon returning to the battered farm, though, he reconsiders his decision after he sees the resilience of his wife and grandmother, who are busy cleaning up what remains of the house and professing their resolve to start over again. The film ends with Sam and Nona, months after the flood, standing together in a freshly plowed field preparing for a new season and a new crop.
Cast
Production The Southerner was the fourth of six films that Jean Renoir directed while living in the United States during the 1940s. It was also the first of his independent Hollywood productions. Renoir's other "American" films are Swamp Water (1941), This Land Is Mine (1943), The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (1943), The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947). The Southerner, however, is now regarded by some reviewers and film historians to be his "Hollywood masterpiece" and generally recognized as the French director's "most American" film with regard to its content, structure, and overall presentation. Contemporary news items in Hollywood reported that Joel McCrea and his wife Frances Dee were set to play the lead roles of Sam and Nona Tucker in The Southerner, but the couple left the project in pre-production out of McCrea's dissatisfaction with the script and his "creative differences" with Renoir. The roles then went to Zachary Scott and Betty Field. Although Scott did not possess McCrea's "star power" as a leading man and had relatively little experience in feature films, he did have one distinct advantage in preparing to portray Sam Tucker; he was a native of Texas, the setting for The Southerner. Robert Aldrich, at age 26, was the assistant director on The Southerner, which was filmed at various locations in California, including the Arthur Ranch in the San Fernando Valley, Hotchkiss Ranch in Firebaugh, California, at RKO Pictures' movie ranch near Encino, in Malibu, at sites along the banks of the San Joaquin River, and in cotton fields near the town of Madera, about 240 miles northwest of Hollywood. The flood depicted in the production was created with water supplied from the Friant Dam and was shot where Millerton Lake is located today.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
