The Southerner

Sam Tucker has picked cotton on other men's land for years. One day he decides to grow his own and moves his family onto a neglected piece of ground. In the first year everything comes at them: illness, a flood, an envious neighbour and a hungry winter. The film does not present these in sequence but as one year in which they all happen at once. This is the most cited of the films Jean Renoir made in America. He carries the interest he had in the French countryside over to Texas: the relationship to the land, neighbours, the indifferent hardness of nature. Renoir neither romanticises the poverty nor reduces it to squalor. The film brought Renoir the only Oscar nomination of his career, for Best Director, and it was also nominated for Original Music Score and Sound. The National Board of Review named him Best Director and listed the film as the third best of 1945. Who it's for: Viewers who like Renoir, rural drama, and stories of a struggle against the land. Who it's not for: The telling proceeds in fragments and the plot is not heading anywhere in particular. Some supporting characters also sit close to the era's stereotypes of the South.