Hurry Sundown

In the late '40's Hollywood took up not far from where it had left off ten years earlier. Movies like The Best Years of Our Lives, Crossfire, and Gentleman's Agreement (not to mention some of the more foolish ones like Pinky) reflected the same social preoccupations which, if in more outspoken and less glossy terms, had characterized American theatre in the '30's.

It was a short revival. Politically, Hollywood soon succumbed to the rise of McCarthy, and culturally to that of television, both of which forced the motion picture industry to compete almost exclusively for an audience it had previously sought to resist. The results of this competition were fast and unmistakable: genres rose overnight to replace the social problems that were now taboo. Foreign settings, both in time and place, took over when it became impossible to face the present forcefully. Hacks were rampant.

In retrospect, Otto Preminger must be credited with having stood up against the dominant force of the '50's. Separate Tables, The Man With the Golden Arm, and other Preminger films demonstrated considerable personal honesty (which by itself, of course, may be worth nothing) and tried to alter rather than cater to prevailing tastes.

In the late '50's and early '60's, Preminger turned to social spectacle (Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, Advice and Consent, The Cardinal). His latest movie, Hurry Sundown, has in fact prompted many critics to suggest that what Preminger did for the Jew in Exodus and for the Catholic in The Cardinal--whatever that is--he is now doing for the American Negro. But viewed as a picture about race relations, Hurry Sundown is meaningless and banal. The great social dilemmas of the age have somehow passed Otto Preminger by the way, and his perceptions seem no longer relevant.

Preminger's cast is wild, probably deliberately so. He has Michael Caine playing a somewhat selfmade Southern wheeler-dealer, and Jane Fonda as his wife; Burgess Meredith and Madeline Sherwood portray a small-town judge and his wife; and John Philip Law and Faye Dunaway are a poor (but honest) farmer and his wife. Rounding out the cast, in two unfailingly thankless roles, are Robert Hooks -- also a poor but honest farmer -- and Diahann Carroll, the latter as a local girl gone North and corrupted.

Caine and Jane Fonda give the best performances, and it is the Caine character on which the movie's best scenes rest. Preminger has wisely avoided strong accents, with the result that an actor who has previously played thick-tongued Cockneys is nonetheless thoroughly convincing as a Southerner. Caine's line-readings are consistently fine: he even manages to bring over such dialogue as 'Honey, I love you, I need you, I can't live without you."

Unfortunately the most interesting angle in Hurry Sundown -- the Caine character and his giant industrial complex, symbolic of the sudden change coming over the South in the wake of the war -- is ultimately lost beneath a rubbish of uninteresting violence and melodrama. A trial scene straight out of Perry Mason (via Horton Foote and To Kill a Mockingbird) works by itself but doesn't jell at all with the rest of the picture. A hopelessly embarrassing songfest, at which the town's entire Negro population is conveniently present, reminds one of similar affairs in Marx Bros. movies.

The first 45 minutes of Hurry Sundown would be hard to fault. The last 45 minutes, at least in terms of the script, would be hard to find anything good about. The problem is that Preminger's setting -- the postwar South -- is seen not from twenty years later but from the contemporary Hollywood of the late 40's. There is no reason why, in the context of this one picture, Preminger had to tackle the great social questions of the South. His two leading characters were fascinating enough for him to have avoided treating racial questions at all. But as long as he chose to get at virtually everything within reach, he was obligated to come up with a better diagnosis than he did. As it is, to appreciate what is good in Hurry Sundown (and there is without a doubt plenty that is good) one has to accept Preminger's oddly limited vision on its own terms.