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THE SOUTHERNER

Jean Renoir United States, 1945
The Southerner is one of Renoir's most direct, most simple films, and certainly one of his most moving.
July 25, 2017
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The lyrical, cracker-barrel realism of The Southerner would provide a beacon for future followers – Charles Burnett, for example, has spoken of the film's influence – but it remains in a class by itself, a pioneer piece of American neorealism.
March 4, 2016
Beulah Bondi's grotesque Granny undercuts the family scenes, but Renoir's life-embracing sensibility and veracious, atmospheric style sweep you up in the change of seasons and volatile environments. The film's haunting possum hunt and nightmarish, disorienting flood are as visceral and poetic as the rabbit shoot in The Rules of the Game.
March 3, 2016
Renoir and the writers' styles complement each other throughout, though in the final act one can see certain elements of the director's tonal control get lost in translation... but The Southerner cannot quite handle the overlapping absurd comedy, hopeful relief, and cruel caprice that define the final act, perhaps the result of Renoir's graceful observation clashing with the stiff theatricality of 1940s Hollywood acting.
February 9, 2016
La Gazette du Cinéma
This total, immediate adhesion, this innocence of the spectator finally found, along with the impossibility of speaking of this film directly, and the obligation that it places on us to discourse only about him—such are the most immediate proofs of the total success of Jean Renoir.
June 2, 1950