The Southerner

The great French director Jean Renoir fled Nazi-occupied France during World War II and made films in Hollywood through the 1940s. The Southerner (1945), his third American feature, transplants the poetic realism of his French masterpieces of rural life in the 1930s to the American South of poor sharecroppers, telling the story of a year in the life of a family of migrant workers who follow their dream of farming their own land. Hawk-eyed Zachary Scott gives the performance of his career as the easygoing but determined father who risks everything to give his family something to call their own, with J. Carrol Naish costarring as his bitter, hostile neighbor, and Beulah Bondi as the dubious grandmother. The seasonal episodic nature of the film captures the setbacks and victories of these lovingly created characters with their bent but unbowed spirit, while the simple beauty of the landscape (shot on location) and the plain poetry of the dialogue (which received an uncredited polish by William Faulkner) create a vivid world that echoes both John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and the documentaries of Pare Lorentz. This was Renoir's personal favorite of his American films, his most acclaimed (it was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Renoir's only nomination for Best Director), and it was commercially successful. Handsomely remastered from a restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, extras include Renoir's 1944 wartime short “A Salute to France” and Lorentz's 1938 documentary The River. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)