Hurry Sundown

Released in 1967 during the later years of the Civil Rights movement, Hurry Sundown (Dir. Otto Preminger) is set in 1946, and its two main characters have just returned from service in the war. The film serves as a prequel to the movement, exploring through characters and their conflicts the ideas and themes that will bring the movement to national prominence in the middle 1950s. The audience views the film through the lens of the ongoing movement.

Hurry Sundown is a convoluted melodrama that exploits a Southern setting, Southern characters, family and racial relationships, stereotypes, and accents to flesh out and advance its narrative. At times it has force, as when Rad McDowell (John Philip Law) returns from Europe to reunite with his family, or when an old black woman who served as mammy for the rich landowner’s wife explains to her son that she grieves for the failure of her life. More often the film drags along, inert and lifeless. Only the performances of certain characters—Fay Dunaway, Law, Fonda (occasionally), Burgess Meredith (ridiculous as a stereotyped and racist Southern judge) give it some life. Michael Caine plays the corrupt Henry Warren, married to a wealthy landowner, ambitious to consolidate that land and make big money by selling it all to a land conglomerate for development. He’s devious, corrupt, and without scruples. His face is usually emotionless throughout the film. He seems happy only when he plays his saxophone (he’s convinced he could have had his own band, and that success and fame are awaiting him in Hollywood).

This film is so cluttered and busy that its 2 hour and 44-minute length is hardly enough yet also too much.

The score is by Hugo Montenegro, a successful film composer of the day. His most famous scores are for the Man without a Name films, but his work here is conventional, out of place, and hardly recognizable until a final climactic scene late in the film.

Hurry Sundown is structured around a struggle for land. Two young men, Reeve Scott (Robert Hooks) and Rad McDowell (Law) return from the Second World War. Rad is a poor white farmer who lives on land next to Reeve, a poor black farmer who lives with his sickly mother Rose (Beah Richards). Friends while growing up, Rad and Reeve have grown apart. Reeve lives on land deeded to his grandfather in 1866. No one seems to know about the deed but Reeve and his mother. It becomes a crucial piece of evidence, especially when Henry argues that no deed of ownership from 1866 made out to a black man could possibly be credible. If Henry doesn’t succeed in securing these two plots of land for sale to the conglomerate, he will lose a potential fortune and possibly his job too. He lusts for power and wealth, neither of which he has ever had until he married the daughter of a rich landowner. The film therefore raises questions about land ownership—who has a better right to the land, families and individuals that have owned it for generations, or a land conglomerate (that happens to be from up North)? Hurry Sundown explores this issue mainly through Henry’s struggle to seize Rad and Reeve’s land. It’s not really a struggle of North vs. South but instead of wealth and power against powerlessness. Does the power of money—directly tied to the local system of law and justice—trump the ownership of individuals without power or money? Does the fact that one of the small landowners is black affect the struggle? In the end, Henry does use race in his attempt to seize Reeve’s land. The film is more interested in the racial structure of the community that in any broadly defined struggle of North vs. South.

Family relationships in Hurry Sundown are complicated. Henry is Rad’s cousin. Rad has struggled to eke out a living throughout his life, while Henry had the good fortune of marrying his wealthy wife Julia. Julia was nursed as a child by Rose and feels kinship to her (up to a point). Henry pressures her to use that relationship to convince Rose and her son to move off the land. Although he never concedes that they own it, he offers to pay them $5000 if they move. Julia is convinced that Rose loves her and her family. Rose is convinced that Julia’s love will protect her land from seizure. Henry offers Rad $7500 for his land and seems to suggest that he will profit in other ways from handing over the land. Rad distrusts Henry on a fundamental level. All these familial interconnections enhance the melodrama and also underlie the film’s contention that in shared family and community connections there is hope for the future.

Judge Potter (Burgess Meredith) is a stereotyped, old-time corrupt Southern judge who rules over the community with the iron fist of arbitrary judgments. He’s the most racist person in the film, though Henry is not far behind. The Judge’s family does not occupy the same social status as that of Julia. His daughter Sukie wants Julia to serve as her matron of honor. This will be a sign of social status. Henry pressures Julia to agree, so that he will have the judge on his side in any land disputes, and at first Julia won’t agree. She regards the Potter’s as beneath her, as from a lower social class. Her cousin Clem de Lavery (Frank Converse) has just moved to town to serve as associate pastor of what appears to be a Catholic (maybe Episcopalian) church. He is open-minded, progressive, friendly towards the black community, and immediately an object of suspicion to conservative members of the community. When he offers Judge Potter communion from a cup that a black woman has just sipped from, the Judge is outraged, spits in the cup, and tromps out of the church with his wife and daughter. For this insult, and for further insults to her cousin at a reception she gives in his honor, Julia orders the Judge and his family to leave her house.

Judge Potter is disliked by most of the towns[people to begin with. They see him as too uncultured, too openly racist, and his wife reminds him that the only reason he gets elected in one race after another for the judgeship is that the people in rural regions of the county always vote for him (implying that none of the city voters do).

Obviously, class is a major issue—let us say a major thread rather than theme. The film isn’t particularly interested in exploring class differences so much as in using them to explain tensions and conflicts among various characters. By having Rad and Reeve live on farms next to each other, and by having them become partners in an effort to keep their farms going in resistance to Henry’s pressures, the film seems to acknowledge the fact that class prejudices and racism are closely linked. Rad is at first resistant to a partnership with Reeve. His wife worries that the family will be ostracized in the community. But their common plight—the threat to their land posed by Henry and the conglomerate, and their childhood friendship—finally overcomes these concerns.

Race is another major issue, but I am not sure this film can be accurately described as a film about race. As with class, race is an element of the Southern context that the film uses to enhance tension and the essential conflicts. Viewers born after 1970 may be surprised by the completely segregated society that the film accurately portrays. In reality, society was probably even more segregated and separate in 1947 than this film suggests. We see separate bathrooms for the white and colored races. We learn that the local Sheriff, an inept bumbler played broadly by George Kennedy, has an ongoing sexual relationship with a black woman, that he enjoys the company of black people in general, but that he doesn’t hesitate to back up efforts of Henry and Judge Purcell, and of the “hunting club” (Ku Klux Klan—not named in the film but its members wear white hoods) to deny Reeve and Rad their rights to their land. It shows how in a difficult and life-threatening moment the black characters behave in a friendly, ingratiating way as they talk to the Sheriff in order to protect Reeve. (This is a deliberate strategy—they know they must play the stereotype to get what they need from the whites). Reeve’s friend Vivian (Diahann Carroll) even ingratiates her way into Judge Potter’s favor so that he will allow her to do research in the county court records. (Vivian has lived in New York for some time, seen other parts of the world, had a previous relationship with Reeve. She has come home, for some reason, and wants to move away again—she is an exception to the general portrayal of blacks in this film as honest, good-natured, and uneducated. In general, the black characters in the film all have similar traits and behave in similar ways. When black children learn a song in the local school (where Vivian teaches) it is a blues song about catfish,. When they gather to congratulate Reeve on having successfully opened up an irrigation canal for his and Rad’s farms, they sing and eat in celebration. For a film that seeks to portray racism and discrimination in a direct and open way, its portrayal of black characters is flat and paternalistic.

The racism that the film portrays is undeniable. The film seems aware of nuances in racial attitudes of the time—the difficult relationship between a white girl and the older black women who raised her (her mammy), the vulnerable position that Rad puts himself in by agreeing to work with Reeve and by backing up his claim to the land up in court. On the other hand, racism was far more complex and pernicious than even this film makes it out to be, to have been. Yet all the black characters in the film are portrayed with a uniform brushstroke of goodness. There is little variation. That is, a subtle paternalistic racism permeates the portrayal of the black characters whom the film clearly means to support.

Hurry Sundown tries to maintain audience interest with a strong dose (1967 style) of sexuality. Although Henry gives Julia numerous reasons to hate him, he always manages to overcome her qualms with sex. One night, after she has made him mad by showing concern for their son, he locks her out of the bedroom. The next day she returns the favor, but he climbs into the room through a window and practically rapes her—she resists at first and then responds. In another scene Henry plays his saxophone rather than respond to his wife’s sexual overtures. She sucks whiskey from a bottle in a suggestive way. Then she takes the saxophone from him as he reclines back on a sofa, ready (I assume) for oral sex. She pantomimes oral sex in a graphic and obvious way as she takes the saxophone, holds the grip in her hands, and tries to blow a note. In another scene Henry receives oral sex from Judge Purcell’s daughter (the same daughter who is getting married). Sex here is one of the hot passions that govern the South (e.g., Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Long Hot Summer, Baby Doll). Frankly, Julia’s scene with the saxophone is the best scene in the film. Something real is happening there.

In the aforementioned saxophone scene, Julia’s pantomime is one of the few instances of subtlety in the film, and even in that scene the film strains to make clear what it’s suggesting. Most of the time this film uses sledge hammers. Everything must be made clear, repeatedly. It’s not enough to show that Henry’s ambition to acquire the land of Rad and Reeve is a major character flaw. To make sure we understand that Henry is a bad man, we must see him abuse and lie to his wife, commit adultery in a convertible, mislead his cousin, conspire with the corrupt judge, lie in court. The worst sledge-hammer blows come when we learn that Henry’s mistreatment of his son left the child emotionally damaged—an offense he repeats later in the film when he locks the child in a storage room while he goes to check on some business. The child pulls shelves over on himself and is left unconscious. Then Henry lies to the law enforcement folks that careless use of dynamite by Reeve and Rad injured the child. No doubt about Henry—a mean old bad man. Michael Caine never once in this film seems comfortable in the role.

It amazes me that Horton Foote had a hand in the screenplay.

The Littlest Colonel

In The Littlest Colonel (1935; dir. David Butler) the border state of Kentucky is the Deep South. A white columned plantation house, an elderly colonel who refuses to accept defeat by the North, loyal black servants indistinguishable from slaves, courtly manners, Southern belles. The South is a setting for this tale of how a winning little girl brings reconciliation between an estranged father and daughter. The film also serves as a vehicle for the 1930s child star Shirley Temple. Her acting never varied much from one film to the next, except that over the decade she got older.

The North-South division is the crux of the event that tears father and daughter apart. The colonel wants her to marry a gentleman from the south. She plans to marry a northerner, aptly named Jack Sherman. Father and daughter are resolutely stubborn. She leaves with her fiancé and her father tells her never to enter the house again.

The strongest figure in the film is Lionel Barrymore, who plays old Colonel Lloyd. He struts and huffs and puffs and overacts and holds your attention. There are entertaining moments between the house servants and Temple, entertaining within the narrowly defined lives of the servants. Bill Robinson plays the head house servant, Walker. He knows and has opinions about everything going on in the house, but he usually holds his tongue. (This in is a stereotype—the knowing, avuncular house servant who doesn’t say what he thinks). He and Temple perform two dance numbers together, one on the inner stairs of the colonel’s house, another in a barn where he looks after horses. Robinson was a wonderful dancer, as the scene on the stairs makes clear. Hattie McDaniel appears in her stock role as personal servant, or Mammy, to Shirley Temple’s character. McDaniel played these parts well—she was human and believable despite the constraints of her roles.

The characters played by McDaniel and Robinson are important secondary roles, but none of the black characters in the film ever wanders outside the prescribed social boundaries. Nor would they in a film like this, that exists only to tell a story, to broadcast the talents of its child star, that isn’t interested in subverting or questioning or satirizing. The Littlest Colonel accepts the conventions of the Old South without question.

Other black characters in the film, in particular two children, and one house servant, provide comic relief. Children can be funny without much effort, of course. These two children—a little boy and an older girl--play roles secondary to Temple’s. They follow her around, obey her commands, and make comic statements and comic actions. The little boy can do little more than moan and groan and utter monosyllables. This film offers further confirmation of the fact that African Americans in the 1930s had virtually no choice of roles beyond those involving servitude and slavery and low comedy. I wouldn’t characterize the portrayal of black characters in this film as viciously racist, but instead as conventionally racist. Given the decade, that’s about what one could expect from an A-list film written, directed, and produced by whites for a mostly white audience.

The film shows whites and especially blacks as accepting of their positions in life, as masters and servants. It purveys the notion that within this range of acceptance blacks and whites lived comfortably together in a nurturing community, helping and supporting one another when circumstances called for it. It’s important to remember that the story takes place in the 1880s, long after the end of the Civil War, when the former slaves could have left the plantation for better opportunities. That they have remained with the colonel simply reflects the golden gaze of Thomas Nelson Page apologetics that underlies this film’s conception of historical reality.

I’m always a sucker for films that show reconciliation between parents and children. In this one there’s no question, from the earliest scene in which they argue, that reconciliation will come for the colonel and his daughter. What gives the film interest, beyond Barrymore’s wonderful overacting and Temple’s carefully managed talents and the merits of other actors is the question of when that moment will occur. It comes not a moment too soon. And then, except for a final scene in which all the characters, black and white, enjoy a barbecue together, a scene filmed in color (in contrast to the rest of this black and white film), the affair is over.

That Evening Sun

That Evening Sun (2009; dir. Scott Teems) foregrounds place. The setting is Tennessee. Intensely visual cinematography, a strong soundtrack of insect sounds and other ambient noises, mountains in the background, views of fields, houses, tenant shacks, pickup trucks, a nearly abandoned small town. These do not image a stereotypical American South but instead a particular one.

The South is not the subject or even the primary issue. Rather it is a context. The dramatic focus is an 80-year old farmer, Abner Meecham, who has been living in a retirement home for three years. It is a dreary, depressing place. We learn that after the death of Abner’s wife, his son Paul convinced him to move there. But Abner decides he cannot tolerate the home any longer and packs up to walk back to his farm. When he arrives, by walking and by taxi, he discovers someone else living there. He learns that as soon as he moved to the retirement home his son rented the house and farm to Lonzo Choat, a ne’er do well local citizen struggling to make his way. Although he lives only off the benefits from disability checks, he wants to make the farm work. The conflicts here revolve around class, age, and family. Lonzo is around 40 and holds Abner in contempt. Some years before Abner refused to rent a tenant shack to him. Abner hates Alonzo—he calls him white trash, accuses him of laziness, thievery, and worse. While Abner wants to return to his farm and live out the remainder of his life, Lonzo wants to make a home there. Both desires, the film gradually brings us to know, are not likely to be fulfilled. This is not a narrative in which two stubborn, resolute characters struggle and argue and finally come to an understanding. As the conflict between Abner and Lonzo deepens, each becomes more firmly set against the other. They are stubborn, yes. But Alonzo’s stubbornness may be fueled by alcohol and upbringing, while Abner’s may come from advancing age if not early senility. There are moments when it seems the gap between these men might be bridged, especially through Alonzo’s wife and daughter, both of whom are sympathetic to Abner, but they lead nowhere.

That Evening Sun is based on a story by Tennessee writer William Gay. The director and screenwriter Scott Teems is a native of Lilburn, Georgia. Ray McKinnon, who plays Lonzo, has appeared in a number of Southern films, including The Accountant, The Blind Side, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? His production company, “Ginny Mule Pictures,” which he co-owns with Walton Goggins, who plays Abner’s son Paul in this film and who also appeared in The Accountant, has produced several films about the South. Although Ginny Mule Pictures did not produce That Evening Sun, McKinnon was a producer. To some extent, then, this film is the creation of Southern writers, director, and actors. This may account to an extent for its realistic treatment of the Southern setting. The film shows us an old farm nestled in the mountains. It is instantly recognizable. We are not surprised that it is Southern. It is particular unto itself—it doesn’t seem constructed from preconceptions of what a Southern farm ought to be. It simply is what it is. The makers of That Evening Sun give us the South of their own experience. Of course, their Southnernness simply means that they bring their own preconceptions to the film. But compared with the treatment of the Southern farm in such films as The Long Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, this one seems quietly real.

Although Abner Meecham’s farm is near the small town of Ackerman’s Field, only a few scenes occur in the town. There is no real farm vs. city conflict here, though the setting makes clear that the town is a part of the rural South that has been left behind by modernization, urbanization, and homogenization. It is analogous to the small town in Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart, left behind when the highway passed it by, or Eula Springs in James Wilcox’s novel Modern Baptists. In a sense, all the characters live on the margins. Abner is old and isolated. He lost his wife (whom he remembers in occasional flashbacks and dreams) three years before. His only friend, Thurl Chessor, a nearby farmer played by Barry Corbin, has difficulty walking and cannot drive. Abner lives on social security and support from his son Paul. A long history of unemployment, domestic violence, alcohol, and an injury to his leg have given Lonzo the reputation of a terminally unemployed no-count. He is struggling, as his wife explains to Abner, to make something of himself, and he was (apparently) successfully managing to avoid abusing alcohol and his family, until Abner returns to the farm. The two women in the family are trapped by Lonzo’s domineering personality, his violence, and their love for him (though ultimately the daughter leaves).

Too many conflicts and struggles afflict That Evening Sun. The main one is Abner’ s struggle to come to grips with his age, the loss of his farm and his wife, and his difficult relationship with his son Paul. His son is a lawyer and while it’s apparent that he’s not a wealthy man he at least has money. He complains to his father at one point about how much it costs him to keep him in a retirement home, and it’s clear that he never had much of a relationship with the old man. Abner complains that all Paul has ever done is lie to him. In fact, Abner’s conversations with Lonzo and Paul are full of insults, rancor, and bitterness. He feels abandoned and betrayed by everyone, and the worst insult comes when he returns to his farm to find a man whom he has long disliked renting his farm (with an option to buy) from his own son.

Abner blames everyone for his misfortunes. Gradually events lead him to realize that to some extent he bears responsibility for some of the things that have happened, including his difficult relationship with Paul. He comes to see how cruel and difficult he has been, even to his wife. We recognize, even if Abner does not, that Abner is much like Lonzo after all.

Abner shows some sympathy for Lonzo’s wife Ludie (Carrie Preston) and daughter Pamela (Mia Wasikowski). Ludie tries to be friendly with Abner, perhaps hoping to soften the developing tensions with her husband. She seems to understand Abner both as an old man with his own problems and also as a threat to the life she and her husband hope to build on the farm. It is Pamela, a sixteen-year-old girl, whom Abner at brief moments talks to and even behaves kindly towards. She seeks him out on several occasions simply for conversation, as if she is looking for a warmth and connection she cannot get from her embittered father. When Lonzo, drunk and angry over her being out late at night with a boy, beats her and his wife with a hose, Abner threatens him with a gun and turns him into the local sheriff. Later he warns and then demands that Pamela leave the farm, for her own safety (Ludie has encouraged her to leave as well). We see a dimension of Abner in these scenes that suggests he is not all gruffness and bitterness. In these two woman he may see something of his former life, of his departed wife. At the same time, Lonzo’s abuse provides him with a convenient excuse to escalate their dispute.

There is no peaceful resolution here. After Abner is injured in a fire, he wakes up in a hospital room to find Paul watching over him. They agree that Abner will go to live in a retirement community apartment near Paul’s home. Paul tells him he will have a backyard where he can grow tomatoes, and Abner, true to form, answers that he would rather grow corn. In the final scene we see Abner peering into windows of the abandoned house where he once lived. Lonzo and his wife have moved out, but, significantly, Abner does not enter the house. He walks around the front of the house, peers through the windows at vacant rooms and unused furniture, and then walks out of view.

Hal Holbrook is excellent as Abner Meecham. His is a one-note performance, of sorts, but then Abner is a one-note sort of man. McKinnon is effective as Alonzo, but then again Lonzo too is a flat character whose basic stubbornness only deepens as the film moves along. Preston, Wasikowski, and Corbin are a fine supporting cast.

Abner Meecham and Lonzo Choates are vaguely Faulknerian names. The struggle here between a displaced landowner and the lower-class white man who has supplanted him suggests Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy. The plot of the film as a whole, about a man displaced and struggling with his age and ownership of land, reminds us of The Field (1990), with Richard Harris in the lead role, an even darker and grimmer film than this one. The ultimate ancestor of both is King Lear, about an old man raging against age, betrayal, and abandonment.

That Evening Sun has comic moments but is not a comic film. Abner’s plight is sad and hopeless, as is Alonzo’s. No one seems headed towards a happy outcome. Abner and his friend Thurl will die soon. Lonzo will continue to falter in an ongoing downward spiral. Maybe his wife will put up with him a while longer. And who knows what will happen to their daughter?