The Southerner

The Southerner (1945)

The picture that never lets go of your heart!

Sam Tucker, a cotton picker, in search of a better future for his family, decides to grow his own cotton crop. In the first year, the Tuckers battle disease, a flood, and a jealous neighbor. Can they make it as farmers?

Date of release
1945-04-30
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (71)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Drama
Director
Jean Renoir

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 3. Including: National Board of Review: Top Ten Films

The Southerner is a 1945 American drama film directed by Jean Renoir and based on the 1941 novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Director, Original Music Score, and Sound. Renoir was named Best Director by the National Board of Review, which also named the film the third best of 1945. The film portrays the hardships of a poor family struggling to establish a cotton farm in Texas in the early 1940s.

Production

The Southerner was the fourth of six films that Jean Renoir directed while living in the United States during the 1940s. It was also the first of his independent Hollywood productions. Renoir's other "American" films are Swamp Water (1941), This Land Is Mine (1943), The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (1943), The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947).

Contemporary news items in Hollywood reported that Joel McCrea and his wife Frances Dee were set to play the lead roles of Sam and Nona Tucker in The Southerner, but the couple left the project in pre-production out of McCrea's dissatisfaction with the script and his "creative differences" with Renoir. The roles then went to Zachary Scott and Betty Field.

Robert Aldrich, at age 26, was the assistant director on The Southerner, which was filmed at various locations in California, including the Arthur Ranch in the San Fernando Valley, Hotchkiss Ranch in Firebaugh, California, at RKO Pictures' movie ranch near Encino, in Malibu, at sites along the banks of the San Joaquin River, and in cotton fields near the town of Madera, about 240 miles northwest of Hollywood.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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