The Southerner

Zachary Scott and J. Carrol Naish

Jean Renoir's The Southerner, from 1945, is not in the top rank of his movies, but is awfully close. I would rate Renoir as one of the great directors along with Ford, Mizoguchi, Murnau, and a gaggle of others. Therefore, The Southerner, is an essential picture.

The Southerner is a rural picture much like Renoir's first American feature, Swamp Water. This genre  was in serious decline by 1945, ten years after Variety declared "Sticks Nix Hix Pix". My first exposure to hix pix were the Ma and Pa Kettle films, themselves a spin-off from The Egg and I, of the 40s and early 50s which I could not abide as a child. The hayseed humor of the films seem old hat to me in the 60s.

Beulah Bondi's Granny is the comic relief here and I found her performance, which rankled contemporary critics, to be hilarious. Like Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo, Bondi's performance is a riff on the stereotype of the crusty codger. It is an outsized act which is cognizant of its own ridiculousness. Contrast her work with that of Betty Field. Field is a competent performer, but her work here seems off. She presents her character as is she were the platonic ideal of a farmer's wife and the result is not pathos, but bathos. J. Carrol Naish is wonderful as the neighbor who lacks a communitarian spirit.

Zachary Scott delivers his best performance. His Texas accent comes in handy and he seems more relaxed than usual under Renoir's guidance. This was before the success of Mildred Pierce typecast him as an oleaginous villain and it is a bit sad to consider the downward arc of his career after Flamingo Road. He had an independent nature that did not make him a good cog in the Hollywood machine. Before his premature death at 51 in 1965, he was arrested for violating segregation laws in Louisiana and proudly sported an earring.

The Southerner's rural setting brings out one of Renoir's great strengths as a director: an ability to portray men and women as creature in their environs. Renoir shared with his father a gift for portraying the beauty of the country. This is evident in The Southerner, but so is the harshness of rural farm life. Indeed, the state of Tennessee thought it was too harsh and seamy and banned the picture during its first run. 

A good point of comparison is John Ford's work on The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road. Ford mythologizes the land as a barren hell or a fertile paradise. While the two directors share a humanistic view of rural folks and their plight, Renoir presents a more naturalistic view of their environment compared to the expressionistic force Ford brought to such locales as Ireland, Africa, and Monument Valley. Ford's work is most akin to Renoir's in Swamp Water, thanks to the screenplay by frequent Ford collaborator Dudley Nichols, but there is a wonderful dance sequence towards the end of The Southerner that would fit in many of Ford's films. Ford held Renoir in the highest esteem and once attempted to remake La Grande Illusion. Both filmmakers in the 30s stood as exemplars of Depression era Popular Front humanism.