Not lost in translation

Jean Renoir’s 1945 drama The Southerner follows a family of sharecroppers as they struggle to launch a farm of their own. I can’t help but compare it to Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, made five years earlier and long one of my absolute favorites. Amazingly, Renoir’s film more than holds its own.

Zachary Scott plays Sam Tucker, a strapping, laconic son of the dirt with a stubborn dream of something better for his family. Betty Field is his devoted, rough-and-ready wife Nona. Beulah Bondi is magnificent as the childish, hectoring Granny, whose selfishness is distilled from a lifetime of suffering, and J. Carroll Naish is equally good as the treacherous neighbor Devers, a crafty survivor whose soul has been curdled by hardship.

The harshness of their lot, and the family’s fundamental decency, are established in the opening scene, as they pick cotton together in the blazing sun. An elderly uncle collapses in the heat, and his dying words, “Own your own land,” are Sam’s catalyst. From there, Sam and Nona press on through innumerable obstacles, never losing their dignity.

There are unforgettable scenes. The family’s decrepit “new” home has the haunted alien look of Ford’s Dust Bowl shacks, but the scene balances pathos and humor with a subtlety that Ford seldom achieves. Likewise the moment when Scott brings home a possum for his starving family: The gleam in Granny’s eye as she ravens her share of this humble meal powerfully evokes a life of desperate poverty even as it invites a sympathetic laugh. The wedding party and the flood scene play like Faulkner or Dostoevsky.

Indeed it is the humorous ingredients that set the film apart, clarifying Renoir’s object as humanistic; unlike Ford, he does not aim to mythologize. Refreshing reversals of plot and tone undercut and temper the tragedy.

Renoir wrote the script, with help from Faulkner and others to catch the authentic speech and folkways of the American South. These particulars ring true. Yet The Southerner is also universal, a story of peasant struggle and survival that could well be laid in China, or in France, or in any mezzogiorno.

In memoriam

There’s a moving tribute in this week’s America to Robert Drinan, the Jesuit priest who served in Congress back in the ‘70s, then returned to legal scholarship at Georgetown when ordered to do so by the pope. The author, Ladislas Orsy, another Jesuit legal scholar (and one I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, a learned, gentle man), does not dwell on Drinan’s accomplishments, but on his love and generosity, his constant reaching out to people in need. Orsy paraphrases Aristotle and Aquinas in explaining Drinan’s drive and his vast impact, that “goodness cannot contain itself: it is expansive by nature like a wellspring with unlimited supply.” He imagines Drinan 60 years ago as a young Jesuit in Florence, reading Dante on divine love. From there, “he set out on an adventure to mend this broken world.” Requiescat in pace.

Sunday Dinner

I roasted a chicken, using a Mark Bittman recipe I cut from the Times maybe ten years ago. It’s a bare-bones approach (he is "The Minimalist," after all) that hinges on two things: high heat (450F) and preheating the roasting vessel to “jump-start” the cooking of the dark meat, so that everything comes out even. You simply put a cast iron skillet in the oven, turn it on, and salt and pepper the bird. When oven and pan are hot, you plop in the chicken, breast side up, and shove the pan back in the oven. What could be easier? Bittman suggests thirty minutes for a three-pound bird. Mine was four and a half, so I set the timer for 45 minutes, to be sure of doneness. I can’t stomach chicken pink at the bone.

Alas, this time Bittman’s minimalism turned out to be a bit excessive. Before twenty minutes passed L noticed smoke seeping from the oven. I opened the door and choked on a cloud. The bird’s skin was already brown, and the bottom of the pan was swimming in grease, which popped and spattered everywhere. I turned the oven fan on high and opened the kitchen window, but every time I cracked the oven door another billow of smoke rushed to the ceiling. I covered the pan loosely with foil, thinking that might catch the spattering and prevent burning grease, to no avail. Out of tricks, and hungry, I just hunkered down and willed the oven timer to get to zero, alternately cursing Bittman’s cavalier omission ("Warning: Burning grease!") and praying that I wouldn’t set off the smoke detector. In the middle of this ordeal I dimly remembered trying this recipe once before, probably ten years ago—and why I had never tried it again. Thus was reinforced the utility of making notes on recipes, and also that of throwing flawed recipes away.

In the end the bird turned out fine, better than fine even: 45 minutes produced breast meat so moist and juicy I was afraid it wasn’t done, though it had easily run the meat thermometer to 165F. L claimed it was the best chicken she’d ever had. The dark meat was done well, too. Still, despite the results at table, I don’t think I’ll try this recipe again--not indoors, or at least not in winter. My eyes are still smarting from the smoke.

P.S. It’s not often that my having made polenta ranks as an afterthought, but yeah, I made that too. Stirred it for a good 45 minutes while watching the chicken, not constantly, but every couple of minutes over a very low heat. When it was finished I swirled in some Parmesan cheese. It was thick, creamy, and rib-sticking good, nothing like the wretched pre-made stuff that comes in tubes, or the instant variety you buy in a box. The gulf between these impostors and the real thing is akin to that between instant coffee and good French pressed.

I also made some hot oil: red pepper flakes simmered briefly in olive oil which is then allowed to cool, so that the pepper infuses. My father remembers his grandfather keeping a bowl of this simple dressing on the table always, and drizzling it on everything. It added zip to the polenta, caro nonno!