Cinema
Black or white.
Christopher Hudson
Sounder(' U' Rialto) tells a simple story with grace and economy. The setting is Louisiana; the time, 1933. A black sharecropper nad his young son are hunting coon with their hound, Sounder. The coon escapes, and the man returns dispiritedly to the shanty home where his wife and two young children await their dinner. That night he steals meat from the farmer's cold store. The following day his family fill their hungry stomachs. The eldest boy goes to school; in the afternoon there is baseball and music and singing. In the early evening they get back to find the sheriff waiting. The sharecropper is led away handcuffed, to be sentenced to a .year's hard labour. His wife and children are left to harvest the sugar crop.
Sounder has been acclaimed by some American critics as the most mature and dignified film yet made about black people in the United States. Cicely Tyson who plays Rebecca, the mother, is widely, tipped to get an Oscar as best actress of the year; no doubt there are other Oschr nominations in the offing. Much of this acclaim is justified. The dialogue (by Lonne Elder out of a novel by William Armstrong) is unfailingly natural. Every word tells. The ' period ' setting has been recreated very effectively by the director Martin Ritt — as anyone who remembers The Molly Maguires or the ' society ' sequences in The Great White Hope will anticipate. And the music and the studio photography are both good enough to be worth remarking upon. All in all it is a film I recommend you to see.
Nevertheless if Sounder is swept to fame and fortune it may be on a slightly misdirected tide of sympathy. It is a ' period ' film in the best and worst senses of the word. Ritt has shied away from representing nakedly the harsh world of sharecropping in the Deep South at the height of the Depression. Instead he carefully evokes the world we think it might have been. The shanty homestead, kept spick and span by a devoted mother, springs to us out of the pages of a Walker
• Evans photograph album. Our imagination imprints a gingham pattern upon the tablecloth. The sharecropper and his friends walk and talk with the slowmoving dignity of cowboys in an early Ford western. When Rebecca, distraught at losing her husband, presses the faces of her two youngest into the voluminous folds of her apron and stares ahead unflinchingly, it is a tableau that takes us back even further, to the romantic paintings of Winslow Homer.
The same intermediary folk-memory diffuses a warm glow over episodes that would have been a good deal more stark at
the time. After days of weary travelling, looking for his father's labour camp, the boy stumbles as if by magic upon a schoolhouse. A lovely black teacher is gently dispensing wisdom to a class of black children. She takes him home with her and lets him look with wonderment at books which, tell him the truth about his past, and prepare him for the future. And at the end, sitting on a log beside the stream, the boy is told that he is being sent away for his own good to be educated. The son must better himself: there'll be no sharecropping for him.
The myth is intact. These are black faces instead of white: that is all that has changed. Rather than make a film about racial injustice along Politkino lines of slogan-shouting and facile antitheses, Ritt has, more subtly, placed the impoverished lives of the black sharecroppers within a framework we already accept for white people — and leaves a few well-judged ironies to point up the juxtaposition. The whites in Sounder are not vindictive: they simply carry out rules with a brutal detachment that occasionally warms into patronising kindliness. The white woman who helps locate the labour camp is motivated More by sentimental affection for the family than by a burning sense of injustice. Much of the irony is unspoken: when the boy arrives in the classroom of black children he goes instinctively to the row at the back where he used to sit in the mixed school. And why is the film called Sounder? Sounder is the coon hound who gets shot at by the white man, slinks off to hide and lick his wounds, and ambles back ready for the fray.
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