The Southerner

A harsh yet human antidote to traditional Hollywood attitudes about 'real people', this is (with Diary of a Chambermaid) Renoir's most successful American film, loose, free-flowing, honest. A year-in-the-life of Zachary Scott, Betty Field and family, poor sharecroppers turned self-employed, both romantic and realistic in its investigation of courage and freedom, both accurate and impressionistic in its view of 'nature', so that you can smell the river and the dead rain after the flood that almost ends their struggle. (From the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry.