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.