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Bref, la tache de l’artiste
n’est pas de mettre en valeur
un instant de l’âme humaine,
mais d’amener le public à la
compréhension de l’homme
tout entier.
~Jean Renoir1
A European adapting a
sharecropper story laid in
Texas!
~Bernard C. Shoenfeld2
CHAPTER THREE
Heading South: Renoir’s America
Swamp Water (1941) and The Southerner (1944-45)
Flight South and Wind, Sand and Stars illustrate the incompatibility between
“French” methods, typified by Renoir’s sensitive subject matter set in allegedly plot-less
narratives, and the Hollywood system, typified by Darryl F. Zanuck’s aggressively
plotted, often clichéd stories. I have demonstrated the ways in which these clear
antagonisms were in reality quite muddied, as well as how Renoir’s nationality was a
factor in the way he was received at Fox and for the type of work he was offered. As a
result, the director would have to try something new in order to keep working in
Hollywood.3 To address the question of what Renoir’s new filmmaking idiom was, a
comparative study of two films he set in the rural American south, Swamp Water (1941)
and The Southerner (1944-45) demonstrates Renoir’s movement towards an expression
1
Jean Renoir, Renoir mon père 435.
Bernard C. Schoenfeld, The Mistakes of David Loew,” The Screen Writer (October 1945): 1-7, 3.
3 He also needed money, having no access to his French accounts. “Je crois que je vais gagner
beaucoup d’argent, un argent entièrement inutile, entièrement absorbé par les impôts, par le standard
de life.” Jean Renoir, letter to Marcelle Oury, 29 mai 1941, Lettres d’Amérique 48.
2
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of “Franco-American” identity that incorporates Hollywood standards of narrative
content as well as American literary inspirations.
The reputation of both these films has traditionally been fixed at two opposite
poles. Among many critics, Swamp Water bears the distinction of being the least
“Renoir” of all his films. Alexander Sesonske’s production history notes that Renoir
distanced himself from the project upon its completion, since the director had had no
control over the final editing of the film. Zanuck sent in another unit to re-shoot several
scenes after tense memos revealed mounting frustration with Renoir’s techniques. The
Southerner, on the other hand, earned several Oscar nominations and critical awards, and
is widely known as the singular success of his American career. The success is perceived
as the result of the fact that Renoir had near-total control over writing, producing and
directing the film.
Despite these apparent differences, Renoir’s treatment of each tale reveals a
progression of techniques, motifs and concerns that revolve around the development of
protagonists whose struggle for identity coincides with their finding a place to call home.
Both films were unexpected financial successes, albeit only domestically.4 With their
similar settings and thematic drift, Swamp Water and The Southerner make a case for
viewing Renoir as a filmmaker constructing a new, distinct cinematic expression as
opposed to an exile working haphazardly under Hollywood’s mandate waiting to return
to France. William Gilcher views Swamp Water as “ a monument to differences in
4
Gilcher writes in his dissertation that “The film did remarkably well across the country, surprising
everyone,” and ran for over a month in New York alone upon its premier there on November 15th,
1941 (369).
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culture, modes of production, and ways of seeing,” but viewed as a precursor to The
Southerner, the Swamp Water reveals significant continuities and emerging stylistic
trends (6).
Background: “The Southern” and Classical Hollywood Narrative
The “Southern” was a genre with nearly as much history in classical Hollywood
cinema as the more popular Western, and Renoir worked within its bounds even as he
extended them. With their tendency toward spartan narrative and virtuous small town
protagonists, Southerns provided a prime opportunity for Renoir’s observations about
American life as an exile-cum-Hollywood director. Both tell stories that are distinctly
American in place, but which still capture a sense of “otherness” in the way Renoir’s
unembellished narratives unfold. Such subtle contrasts also helped Renoir avoid the
classical Hollywood penchant for the melodramatic.
Beneath these stylistic resemblances, the two films share a connection to Renoir’s
increasingly astute sense of American life. Renoir’s artistic empathy towards
downtrodden outsiders (Georgian trappers in Swamp Water and sharecroppers in The
Southerner) are abundantly clear in his writings and his films. The choice of outsider
protagonists might be an outgrowth of Renoir’s émigré perspective, but they also
provided him credible means by which to expose social realities in the United States. In
1944 Renoir wrote:
La grande raison pour laquelle je fais [The Southerner] est ma grande confiance
en tout ce qui peut sembler d’inspiration purement américaine appliquée à des
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films faits en Amérique. Je crois fermement que le cinéma a intérêt à rester local,
autrement dit qu’on ne décrit bien que ce que l’on a sous les yeux (159).5
The oxymoron of “universal locality” to which the director alludes above may appear as a
naïve goal in Renoir’s Hollywood films; nevertheless his vigorous pursuit of this ideal
makes these films rich for study.
Renoir’s new films ceased to focus on the social effects of European political
realities after he crossed the Atlantic. America was a new frontier that demanded new
perspectives. Sesonske relates how “Renoir’s passion for an American subject developed
only after he had made his first trip to Georgia [on May 29, 1941] and had been very
much impressed by his first real contact with ordinary Americans” (25). Renoir
conceived of the American South by searching for parallels to his native French culture:
the countryside reminded him of Breton farms and many Georgians were of French
ancestry.
As one might suspect, Renoir’s Franco-centric “universalizing” tendencies were a
double-edged sword. The equation of “ordinary” Americans with swamp dwellers and
sharecroppers flew in the face of Hollywood convention, even with regard to the
Southern genre. Due to such inclinations, The Southerner was viewed as a risk from its
inception. The film’s title6 was carefully changed to avoid sounding too narrow and thus
5
Jean Renoir, letter to Denise Ravage, 19 September 1944, Lettres d’Amérique, présentées par Dido
Renoir et Alexander Sesonske, introduction et notes d’Alexander Sesonske traduites par Annie Wiart
(Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1984).
6 David Loew, telegram to Jean Renoir, January 31, 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
“Lesserman, domestic sales head, and Gould, foreign sales head, said picture is sure Academy Award
winner for you the best direction they ever saw. Everybody claims our title will not only hurt the
picture but cost us a lot of money please make suggestions for new title. Renoir responded in a letter
to Loew on February 5, 1945. He suggested “Fortitude” or “ The Tucker Clan”: “I really think any
title will do providing it is simple, short and avoids the word Texas,” Jean Renoir Papers.
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alienate urban moviegoers. Renoir’s South was marginal and challenging in relation to
standard portrayals of the South as well as Hollywood’s typical fare. Edward D.C
Campbell Jr.’s book, The Celluloid South, summarizes the ways Hollywood treated the
South up until the late 1940s. Most of Hollywood’s “Southerns” in the classical era
focused on the “romantic aspects” of the antebellum South, “all adroitly calculated for
their undisturbing, pleasant effect” (28-32). The idyllic, genteel past of harmonious
plantations and faithful, happy slaves was comparatively far removed from the harsh
social realities films such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Southerner more adequately
captured.
For background on what exactly classical Hollywood cinema called for in terms
of story and narration, Kristin Thompson has studied old screenwriting manuals to arrive
at a definition of 1930s and 40s classical cinema against which we may read Renoir’s
particular brand of American filmmaking. She writes, “the most basic principle of the
Hollywood cinema is that a narrative should consist of a chain of causes and effects that
is easy for the spectator to follow” (Thompson 10). She notes that the major
consequence of Hollywood’s formulaic model is the “common assumption that
Hollywood films are slight, thin, and lacking in complexity in comparison with, say,
works of the European art cinema” (10). Although the classical narrative is basic,
Thompson notes that the machinery needed to churn out Hollywood films in fact evolved
into a marvel of behind-the-scenes specialization: “The glory of the Hollywood system
lies in its ability to allow its finest script writers, directors, and other creators to weave an
intricate web of character, event, time, and space that can seem transparently obvious”
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(11). Whereas European film narrative typically articulated intricacy, Hollywood’s
seemingly straightforward plots and stock characters masked a deeper complexity.
If classical narrative is viewed as the result of a set of constructive rather than
obstructive guidelines, Thompson argues that classical Hollywood storytelling of the
1930s and 1940s actually encouraged endless variations within the boundaries of the
“unified narratives” it favored (12). The era’s screenwriting manuals and films allowed
Thompson to sketch out the fundamental properties of classical Hollywood plots: strict
cause-and-effect logic; tidy closure in all parts of the plot, clear motivation, an active
protagonist who sets himself upon a goal early on, and a sense of the time pressure to
achieve said goal (Thompson 12-14). Stylistically, the classical storytelling of
Hollywood was reinforced by an “analytical editing system”—shot/reverse shot/ matches
on action, and early establishing shots that “make the narrative events as clear as
possible” (18). The whole film thus created a rhythm of rising and falling action, usually
in a three-act form (22). Thompson herself acknowledges the limitations of hard and fast
rules; she is careful to make many exceptions to the definition even as she sets it forth.
Alternatively, newer concepts of melodrama may help further explain the oddities
Thompson finds in her definition of classical narrative. Swamp Water and The
Southerner take the drama of identity as their central theme, which, we will see, Renoir
located in the rhythms of everyday life rather than in epic tests of the protagonist’s will.
It is worth recalling that this is the very definition of melodrama in Peter Brooks’ The
Melodramatic Imagination. He defines the notion as a “drama of the ordinary” that
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focuses on “needs, desires [and] states” of a protagonist.7 Brooks traces the origins of the
melodrama back to a “the loss of the tragic vision” wrought by the fall of the Church and
the Monarchy during the French Revolution (15). I would argue that the Second World
War constitutes a similar sea change, disabusing man once and for all of his most
cherished ideas about God, fate, and the nature of the world.8 Without the solace of
divine intervention, man’s defining struggle becomes the one between his own good and
his own evil (Brooks 15). We will see that Renoir establishes protagonists whose “virtue
stands opposed to what will seek to discredit it, misrepresent, silence, imprison or bury it
alive” (Brooks 33). It is no coincidence that the advent of the Second World War
brought with it a surfeit of melodramas.9
Building upon Brooks’ now landmark study of melodrama in literature, film
scholar Rick Altman argues that heterogeneous, counter-classical narrative tendencies are
often embedded10 within the classical Hollywood film narrative as well. As Thompson
remarks, convention has it that “classical narrative induces the reader to follow a linear
chain of psychologically based causes leading from an initial question or problem to a
7
Cf. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode
of Excess (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995) pages 31 and 80.
8 As a consequence of these events, “the Promethean search to illuminate man’s quotidian existence
by the reflected theme of the higher cosmic drama constitutes one of the principal quests of the
modern imagination,” Brooks 21.
9
Film historian Thomas Doherty notes that American audiences “never wearied of the catharsis
wrought by [these] tales,” which were a “productive workshop from which to instruct and extol the
homefront.” Cf. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II (New York:
Columbia, 1993) 167.
10 In his words, “an embedded melodramatic mode that subtends classical narrative.” In Rick Altman,
“Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” Classical Hollywood Narrative, ed. Jane Gaines
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992) 34.
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final solution.” But sometimes even these texts contain narrative “excess” that the
11
classical rubric cannot account for (Altman 33). Such exceptional moments define much
of the artistry in classical Hollywood’s legacy: “Unmotivated events, rhythmic montage,
highlighted parallelism, overlong spectacles—these are the excesses in the classical
narrative system that alert us to the existence of a competing logic, a second voice”
(Altman 34). We will see that these “unmotivated events” occur often in Renoir’s
Hollywood work.
The classical Hollywood film’s realism does not, then, preclude elements of
melodrama, though it often succeeds in controlling them to a greater degree than an
obvious melodrama.12 Traces of melodrama may persist in secondary narrative strands,
in secondary characters or in viewer assumptions about the type of story being told. For
instance, spectators might reconstruct complex characters in simpler terms of good versus
evil or view the story as the resolution of a single, pressing moral dilemma. In its most
strict conception as a logically oriented problem-to-solution path, “the notion of classical
narrative has never been allowed to grow into a dynamic, multilevel system in which
coexisting contradictory forces must regularly clash” (Altman 27). Altman’s idea of a
“multiple system” describes the narratives at play in Renoir’s Southerns. They evoke
several narrative traditions without leaving any behind. (And since “classical narrative”
can no longer equate with pure realism, it might in turn be conceptualized as a sort of
11
Altman 19.
For instance, much contemporary narrative theory focuses on classification of causality and neat
divisions between the different aspects of story/discourse. (Chatman) There is often little in the way
of these texts to suggest the type of layered dynamic Altman points out in the films and novels he
analyzes.
12
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narrative “third space” after Bhabha’s approximation.) For Renoir, this hidden flexibility
in the classical model allowed him to stylize representations of American realities.
The case studies of Swamp Water and The Southerner reveal the challenges
Renoir faced adjusting his social-realist French sensibilities to fit the deceptively simple
classical Hollywood narrative model Altman and Thompson describe. By including
elements of melodrama to create a heightened version of American life, Renoir created a
unique cinematic idiom that corresponded to his discovery of America through new
friendships while he maintained his memories of France.
Swamp Water
Failing to sell Flight South or Wind, Sand and Stars but still needing to fulfill his
contract, in May 1941 Renoir accepted studio head Darryl F. Zanuck’s offer to direct
Swamp Water for Twentieth Century-Fox. Adapted from a 1940 serial novel by Vereen
Bell published in the Saturday Evening Post, Swamp Water tells the story of Ben Ragan’s
[Dana Andrews] coming of age in Georgia.13 After a fight with his overbearing father
[Walter Huston], Ben resolves to make his own fortune trapping animals in the dark and
dangerous Okefenokee Swamp. Chasing after his hunting dog (appropriately named
“Trouble”) into unfamiliar hunting territory, Ben stumbles upon Tom Keefer [Walter
Brennan], a pariah framed for murder by the town’s bullies, the Dursons, and left for
dead. The two men quickly develop a friendship. Tom teaches Ben the secrets of
13
Bell’s first novel, Swamp Water was published initially in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post
in November and December 1940, and then in book form by Little, Brown in February 1941. It was
an immediate sensation in the South and across the nation, and Fox bought the rights for $15,000. The
New Georgia Encyclopedia, 6 June 2007< http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.com/nge/Article.jsp?id=h465>.
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making a living in the swamp; Ben provides Tom with a link to the outside world. As
the film unfolds, the unlikely pair must overcome their own mistrust, prejudice, and
flawed family dynamics in order to move forward with their lives. During his visits into
town, Ben falls in love with Tom’s daughter, the very shy and beautiful Julie [Ann
Baxter] who works as a servant for a local family and believes her father to be dead. In
the film’s dramatic climax, Ben brings the men responsible for Tom’s exile to justice,
enabling him to finally rejoin society. Order is restored to the Ragan and Keefer families
and, by extension, to the community in which they live.
While less than enthralled by the story, Renoir accepted the assignment because,
as he later recalled, he had a standing obligation to Fox and had to begin somewhere:
Nous avions une histoire à peu près possible. Il s’est arrangé pour que je la trouve
complètement idiote ! Je crois bien que lorsque j’aurai fait honneur à la signature
qui est en bas de mon contrat, je quitterai ce lieu de délices, heureux d’y être
passé, parce qu’il faut le connaître, mais encore plus heureux d’en être sorti !14
During his trip to scout locations, however, Renoir found himself delighted by the people
and places of rural Georgia. It was here that he finally glimpsed an America to which he
could relate. He wrote to a friend, “It is an old country, very primitive with peasants who
remind me of the inhabitants of very isolated corners of Brittany” (30).15 Renoir’s
sensitivity to these rural people, and his happiness at finding the ways in which their
easygoing culture recalled his childhood summers in Essoyes and Cagnes-sur-mer, likely
explain why he set the rest of his Hollywood films outside the boundaries of American
14
Jean Renoir, letter to Pierre Lestringuez, 13 June 1941, Jean Renoir Papers.
Sesonske also cites a long memo from Zanuck criticizing Renoir’s slowness, insistence on too much
coverage, and focus on the “background and atmosphere.” “Jean Renoir in Georgia,” The Georgia
Review 26 (1982): 24-66.
15
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cities. He also began to grasp that America possessed far greater diversity than that
evidenced by Southern California and its films:
Pour les Georgiens, la Californie et Hollywood sont des contrées beaucoup plus
lointaines et bizarres que la France. La plupart d’entre eux ont des idées assez
précises sur notre pays, du fait que bien des familles ont des aïeux français. J’ai
fait une remarque assez curieuse : dans ces familles de descendance française, il y
a souvent eu des alliances avec des femmes indiennes.16
Inspired by the Georgians’ French connection (though apparently unaware of how
intimate it was), Renoir worked hard to accurately portray the region and its people.
For the most part, Swamp Water’s iconography consists of idealized pastoral
Americana with clichéd hallmarks of small-town life; a general store, good old boys who
steal pigs and drown kittens, wooden shacks, and pretty girls ready to marry their
sweethearts. Yet Renoir added substance to such clichés by astutely casting and
skillfully directing then-unknowns Dana Andrews and Ann Baxter. Not only were they
absolutely right for their respective parts, but Gilcher also observes using unknowns was
a concrete way Renoir could ensure some sort of influence during shooting (Gilcher 366).
The young actors were malleable in a way that bigger stars were not, which allowed
Renoir to get a somewhat fresh take on otherwise stock roles. Andrews and Baxter were
also willing to indulge translations and direction in awkward French to work with a great
director:
En France il m’est arrivé de bons résultats avec des acteurs à qui le cinéma
n’avait pas encore donné leur chance. C’est pour moi une chose passionnante
que de travailler avec des éléments jeunes et encore un peu malléables […] Je
manquerais à mon devoir si avant de commencer de film magnifique je ne vous
16
Jean Renoir, letter to Albert André, 12 July 1941, Jean Renoir Papers.
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disais franchement que je vois admirablement Linda Darnell dans beaucoup de
rôles, mais pas dans celui de Julie.17
Fig. 3.1 The director and his young stars [Jean Renoir Papers]
(Wisely after Wind, Sand and Stars’ classification as “too French,” Renoir omitted his
comparison to France in the English version of the memo he sent Zanuck.) Willing to
concede to his director on such details, Zanuck approved the screen test for Baxter that
eventually earned her the role. The two young actors validated Renoir’s persistence with
their interpretations of the genuine loneliness and frustrations of early adulthood.
Throughout the film, Renoir’s cinematic touches alleviate the script’s tendency
toward heavy-handed melodrama. Sesonske notes that Renoir had tried with little
success to tone down the false sense of danger through the script. The film opens with a
(disputed)18 foreboding prologue explaining, “not so long ago” men “feared the
17
Jean Renoir, draft of letter to Darryl F. Zanuck, 7 June 1941, Jean Renoir Papers.
Noting that modern life in the swamp was no longer dangerous, Renoir had asked Zanuck in a
memo to eliminate overly dramatic scenes. Zanuck refused and observed only Renoir’s shortcomings
as a slow, disorganized director Cf. Sesonske, “Jean Renoir in Georgia” 31.
18
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unexplored vastness in which a man might disappear, never to be seen again.” Following
this overly dramatic warning, Renoir inserts a characteristic opening shot. He holds a
close-up on an object (here a cross with a skull marking a watery grave) before the
camera slowly tracks back to reveal an expanse of swamp and cypress trees that will lead
us into the story. Renoir’s Okefenokee remains lush and sun-dappled despite its dangers.
QuickTime™ and a
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Fig. 3.2
Ben [in the center of the frame] in the swamp
After entering into the narrative via this prescient detail, the camera pans 180 degrees to
reveal men on small boats paddling upstream. It is Ben with a party of men, who stumble
upon a vacant boat while searching for lost fur trappers. As the men talk, Tom Keefer
creeps into the foreground; Renoir keeps the shot in deep focus to reveal Keefer’s
surreptitious POV of the hunting party. These opening shots convey the swamp’s allure
despite contrasting with Keefer’s menacing voyeurism.
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QuickTime™ and a
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Fig. 3.3
Keefer’s first appearance
From these first frames, the elements of Renoir’s style in Swamp Water anchor
the film’s themes of self-discovery and identity in a natural environment that by virtue of
its sheer scope remains impervious to human pettiness. After a surprising act of defiance
against his father, Ben struggles to capitalize on the choice he has made to strike out on
his own. To further emphasize the discordant father-son dynamic, Renoir frames Ben
and his father’s fight in a medium shot: Ben and his sympathetic stepmother Hannah
stand at the door while his father sits angrily in the foreground. “I reckon this had to
happen just so’s I could be my own man,” he explains to her.19 The shot later repeats in a
second, similarly disastrous argument between Ben and his father.
The repercussions of Ben’s decision to set out without the support of his father
affect his family, Tom and Julie Keefer, and the entire town, who are shocked to discover
that Keefer had been framed long ago by the corrupt Durson brothers.
19
Renoir writes in his memoir that this shot did not sit well with Zanuck: “I had treated it as a single,
mobile whole, following my principle of bringing together all the elements of a situation in a single
take,” My Life 199.
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Fig. 3.4 Family trouble
It is not the danger of the swamp that threatens society—it is the evil of men. Keefer,
who by the end becomes somewhat of a surrogate father, sagely tells Ben, “Most people’s
a whole lot better than we think they are. But some men are a whole lot worse.” Swamp
Water’s narrative thus widens to include the individual’s inevitable intersection with
society.
Swamp Water contains a secondary storyline that provides a romantic interest for
Ben, but which also expands upon the theme of the individual versus society. Julie’s path
leads her to fall in love with Ben; however, she also reunites with her father and frees
herself from silent servitude at the general store in a parallel fashion to Ben’s separation
from his domineering father. We know she is good from the first time we see her; she
attempts to rescue a kitten about to be drowned in a sack by the local thugs. Her boss
slaps her for insubordination. The camera frames her in a doorway with the angry men
still in focus behind her as she is forced to return the animal to its death. Throughout the
scene, she doesn’t speak a word—Baxter, with Renoir’s direction, conveys her
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character’s essence with subtle acting and framing.
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Fig. 3.5 Julie, the bullies, and the kitten
Another major scene set at a square dance brings the challenge of identity to the fore for
both Ben and Julie. The scene’s primary purpose is to show Julie’s transformation into a
civilized woman. Ben puts her in a new dress to reintroduce her into society as his
charming and beautiful companion. Though she dances awkwardly, her charming
honesty helps her break the ice. When Julie admits not knowing how to dance, Ben’s
stepmother reaches out to offer to teach her a few steps. Yet Ben has deeper motives; he
has brought Julie in a gesture of defiance against his old girlfriend, the sexy but morally
bankrupt Mabel. Doubly stung by Ben’s rejection and his choice of a new woman,
Mabel confronts Ben in the doorway as the still visible revelers dance in the background.
Insulted by his disregard, Mabel assaults him with insults and slaps. Her new suitor (who
is also the real murderer) runs to her side, and the scene devolves into a brawl that the
entire dance party rushes out to watch. In full view of the community, Ben and Julie’s
moment of isolation—of identity—arrives. The pivotal moment of explosive violence
reveals to them both that the people whose approval they seek are not worthy: this
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revelation will enable Ben to make the right, ethical decision to save Keefer’s life at the
film’s climax.
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Fig. 3.6 The big fight
Renoir sets up the square dance fight with a long, virtuosic traveling take. The camera
weaves among the crowd to foreshadow the shift from communal revelry to hostility—all
of the participants will witness the upcoming brawl. The difference between the Renoir
of old and the Renoir of Swamp Water is that Ben and Julie’s struggles are no longer
explicitly set within deeper national crises as in the Popular Front works La Marseillaise
or Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. Instead, Swamp Water almost exclusively concerns
itself with one man’s effort to define who he is in relation to his domineering father in a
relatively timeless and apolitical setting.
Renoir nevertheless amplifies the identity themes with subtle evocations of a
naturalist-tinged perspective similar to that of La Bête humaine and even La Règle du jeu.
Though they run counter to good sense, the characters’ actions demonstrate how both
individuals and social groups cannot transcend their family dynamic, which are often
presented as hereditary. Ben Ragan wishes to avoid becoming like his father, but he also
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must come to terms with the fact of swamp life in his genealogy. The elder Ragan
remarks early on, “Just can’t change us swamp folks.” Tom Keefer likewise worries
about rejoining society: “I ain’t sure I can live out there again,” he worries. Both men
return to town and family at the end of the film, though on their own terms. The story
may be “idiotic”; however Renoir chose to find those aspects he could adapt to his own
artistic perspective. Whether he admitted it or not, Renoir did leave an imprint on the
finished film.
Does Swamp Water similarly foreground Renoir’s own consideration of American
citizenship with its commentary on reassessing identity at a crossroads? Gian Piero
Brunetta goes so far as to read Ben as “une espèce d’alter ego qui permet à Renoir de
revivre sur le lieu de tournage des émotions du passé" (Brunetta 113).20 Shooting in
Georgia allowed the director to finally see a rapprochement between French and
American life when it was most needed after the earlier failures. The repeated sequences
of Ben paddling into the swamp with Trouble underneath a canopy of sun-dappled
cypress trees echoes the beautiful riverside of Une Partie de campagne. A title card notes
that the “actual photography of scenes” took place in Georgia. Swamp Water did not
totally shut out Renoir’s previous tendencies; the story often lent them a fresh expression.
The Ben-as-Renoir reading is figuratively intriguing in that it embraces elements
of Renoir’s broader view of the world. Like his main character, Renoir consistently
rejected his exile as victimhood, a stance that also explains the high stakes of his first
film. A letter he wrote during the production details a litany of complaints about the
20
Gian Piero Brunetta “La Provençialisation de l’Amérique” (in Frank Curot) 113.
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climate irritating his war wound, his problems with the studios and frustration at being
cut off from France; however, the director ends the letter, “ceci dit, j’aime beaucoup les
Américains.”21 From a practical point of view the Fox film had to succeed, for if it
failed, he would not be able to rescue or provide for family in France. Renoir recognized
the need for an American reputation: “Pour faire quelque chose ici, il faut avoir fait ses
preuves.”22 The director was sensitive to the demands of Hollywood and did not
begrudge the facts of life there. Renoir’s well documented attitude towards accepting
America for what it was23 echoes Ben Ragan’s own insistence on succeeding by his
community’s rules, however unfair they may be.
The final chapter of his Fox employment, Swamp Water bears elements of
Renoir’s conscious reaction against strict studio production.24 He attempted to create an
amalgam of his native and adopted cultures by finding the pieces of his own culture
(country life) and technique (casting, realism, deep-focus long take sequences) he could
fit into an otherwise generic script. Brunetta identifies the Fox film as the only one “qui
lui a donné l’impression de valoriser son talent.”25 Though an extreme position, Brunetta
captures the importance of Swamp Water for understanding Renoir’s relationship to his
craft in Hollywood. On the other hand, Gilcher reads Swamp Water’s style as a
composite of two distinct narrative voices, Renoir’s and Irving Pichel’s, Fox’s
21
Jean Renoir, lettter to Avronsart, 26 April 1941, Jean Renoir: Corréspondance 1913-1978 107.
Jean Renoir, letter to Eugene Lourié, 12 May 1941, Corréspondance 109.
23 On the eve of his first trip to George, Renoir wrote his friend in Lisbon, “…j’ai de plus en plus la
sensation que l’Amérique est un grant pays don’t les citoyens sont beaucoup plus humains que ne le
veut la légende. Avec joie, j’ai retrouvé chez eux des quantités de nos défauts.” Letter to Robert
Warnier, 26 May 1941, Lettres d’Amérique 47.
24 Zanuck biographer George F. Custen notes that “nobody ever talked DZ into making anything he
didn’t want to make” (250).
25 Brunetta 117.
22
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representative on the set and Renoir’s assistant director. The negotiation amounts to a
“stylistic war,” or a struggle in which we may read the director’s resistance to total
absorption into the Hollywood fold (Gilcher 58). Pichel preferred more standard
shot/reverse shot editing and preferred to work on a soundstage, whereas Renoir shot
several key scenes in his preferred deep-focus long takes on location in Georgia. 26
It remains jarring to witness Renoir’s realist style in the service what first appears
to be Hollywood melodrama; however, the assault on Ben and Julie’s virtue and the fight
to restore it provides a platform for Swamp Water’s secondary focus on collective
violence. Daniel Serceau observes that the film explores darker themes beneath its
melodramatic veneer: “Constat d’un ostracisme, il met en scène une communauté
villageoise largement traversée par la violence, la haine et l’intolérance” (19).
QuickTime™ and a
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QuickTime™ and a
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Fig. 3.7 The Dursons torturing Ben as the
sheriff and pals look on
Fig. 3.8 Taunting Ben and Julie in the
general store
Swamp Water is best viewed not as a failed Renoir picture, but rather as a film
about transitions, even if it failed at times to execute the ideas with the elegance
26
Gilcher also notes, as does Sesonske, the awful rear-projection sequences of Ben canoeing through
the swamp near the end of the film that Pichel re-shot under Zanuck’s instruction (Gilcher 365).
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associated with Renoir français. At Fox, Renoir could not “work as he always had in
France, respecting the advice of his co-workers, conceiving each scene as a unit,
arranging his actors in depth in the narrative space, seeking that construction of the scene
which would best facilitate the interaction of the actors.”27 The film may be on visual
grounds the least obvious Renoir film of his Hollywood career for eyes trained only on
the influences of Zanuck and Pichel28; however, Renoir’s identification with rural
Georgians and sensitivity to American life prevented him from shooting the film as the
brisk melodrama Zanuck had intended.
Renoir would later turn down other projects in order to explore a similar subject
in The Southerner where, as Gilcher puts it, “Renoir ne se fait pas le prisonnier de son
style historique habituel. A côté du style classique renoirien des années Trente, se
trouvent des séquences construites par le moyen du montage.”29 Swamp Water is clearly
the project that encouraged Renoir to experiment with narrative material and style.
Swamp Water (and, later, The Southerner) counters any institutionalized definition of
classical Hollywood narrative with its attempt to fuse multiple forms and styles. Unlike
the classical Hollywood narrative’s protagonist who “actively seeks a goal” (according to
Thompson), Ben Regan is thrust toward ambition by accident; had Ben not discovered
Keefer, he would still be living in his father’s shadow. Though misunderstood, Swamp
Water was Renoir’s first step in finding the cinematic expression of two simultaneously
27
Sesonske, “Jean Renoir in Georgia” 54.
Sesonske notes that “all of the settings, situations, actions and characters in Swamp Water were
conceived by someone other than Renoir, and [his] efforts to influence any of these had little success.”
“Jean Renoir in Georgia” 61.
29 Gilcher (in Curot) 276.
28
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evolving identifications with France and America that he would later piece together
assuredly in The Southerner.
Social Life and the War Effort (1941-1944)
Renoir parted ways with Fox soon after Swamp Water’s respectable box office
showing upon its premier on November 15, 1941 (Gilcher 369). The three years between
Swamp Water and The Southerner were riddled with missed or poor opportunities during
which Renoir’s explicit propaganda film, This Land is Mine, was one bright spot. These
were years in which Renoir’s personal life grew more quickly than his career. His son
Alain finally arrived in the United States after months of circuitous travel in late 1941,
only to immediately enlist in the U.S. Army and deploy for combat in the Pacific.
Dudley Nichols, playwright Clifford Odets, and actors Charles Laughton and Burgess
Meredith became part of his close circle of friends. His English continued to improve as
the war severed the postal service to Europe and, with it, Renoir’s contact with friends
and relatives in France.
Coming at the end of this eventful personal period, The Southerner fits into
Renoir’s philosophy of filmmaking repeatedly as stated in correspondence after Swamp
Water. It is in the United States that Renoir solidified thoughts on the role of cinema and
nation that would continue to impact his postwar filmmaking. He wrote in disbelief to
Saint-Exupéry in June 1941:
Je ne vous parle pas des événements actuels. Je pense que vous êtes,
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comme moi, plongé dans un cafard noir. Je n’arrive pas à me faire une
idée que des garçons à l’âge de mon fils sont des deux côtés de la
barricade, en Syrie, en train de se flanquer des coups de mitrailleuse !30
The recurrent idea that Renoir as a director could never do enough for the war effort is an
important one; he actively sought work that could satisfy the inclination to do his part.
1943’s This Land is Mine and 1944’s short propaganda film A Salute to France31
consequently focus on explaining France’s perspective as an occupied country to
Americans, civilian and military.
Renoir had enlisted in the French Army prior to the Nazi invasion. Too old for
combat, he asked to be assigned to the corps cinématographique upon mobilization in
1939. His sense of duty was something he passed along to his son, Alain, who had
remained behind in France as an enlisted soldier. Upon Alain’s discharge after the Fall of
France, he returned to the Renoir estate in Cagnes-sur-mer in the Free Zone to “bother the
Germans” before moving on to North Africa to find a better outlet for his energy
(Interview). Alain Renoir arrived in New York just three days after Pearl Harbor and had
intended to re-join the Free French at the consulate in Hollywood; however, “My father
pointed out to me, and rightfully so, that the United States had done me a very good turn
in giving me a permit of entry. And that it would be correct on my part to enlist in the
American Armed Forces” (Interview) .32 The younger Renoir’s enlistment at his father’s
30
Letter to Saint-Exupéry. June 11, 1941.
32
Alain had originally enlisted in the French cavalry who saw combat against the Germans. He ended
up near the French-Spanish border “I am a coward.” And the discussion of collaboration came up.
“We should collaborate if any French Jew would be saved.” “We did know that the concentration
camp was not exactly a vacation resort […] I decided that it was wrong. One does not sacrifice two
percent to save 98 percent,” interview 18 February 2006.
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suggestion would prove momentous. The director would spend the rest of the war
waiting for Alain, unwilling to consider going back to France until his son safely
returned. By the time he did, Jean Renoir was a U.S. citizen, comfortably established in
Southern California.
A year after Swamp Water, Renoir appears to have had even less interest in
keeping exclusively French company:
Hier j’ai écrit à Saint-Exupéry dont le livre33 m’a beaucoup troublé. Les
Français qui sont ici représentent presque tous une certaine perfection dans le
miteux ignoble. C’est le genre : « volons au secours du vainqueur, » et
« précipitons- nous du côté du manche. » De plus en plus je suis pour les
Américains [...] Un jour nous nous retrouverons dans un commun hommage à
l’Oncle Sam. Ce vieillard assez vert nous réserve des surprises dans l’avenir. Et
d’avance je suis sûr que ces surprises m’enchanteront.34
Doubly invested in both the French and American war efforts, Renoir consistently
donated money and time to war relief through various organizations. He did not actively
seek out French companionship outside of his immediate family unless it was for purpose
of work or war relief. Alain Renoir recalls that his father kept French company “up to a
point. He was really good at not doing it more than once. The laws of civilized custom
would be met. He would see René Clair and people like that but he did not go out of his
way to see them” (Interview).
The vast array of expatriates working in its various creative industries made
Southern California distinct from the more cohesive, politically engaged New York
wartime expatriate community. The New York contingent was primarily composed of
writers and intellectuals. The French in Hollywood were skilled workers who had arrived
33
34
Pilote de guerre, detailing Saint-Ex’s missions during the Battle of France in 1940.
Jean Renoir, letter to Estrella Boissevain, 4 June 1942, Jean Renoir Papers.
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for pre-arranged jobs or who were actively seeking stable employment. Gilcher describes
the nature of French expatriate Hollywood: “Looking at the 1940’s French community in
Hollywood in particular reveals the making of a rather large sub-culture” (351). Actors
and producers were “comparatively numerous” among the numbers of expatriates (351).
The work-focused, scattered group in Hollywood did not come together for debate: it
existed as a supporting social group dedicated to keeping the memory of French culture
alive in urgent times. Only rare meetings brought any large number of Frenchmen
together” (Gilcher 356). If the French wanted to find each other in Hollywood during the
war they had two main meeting places: Preston Sturges’ café and Charles Boyer’s home
(Gilcher 356). Given the type of industry in which they worked, these gatherings
facilitated professional networking rather more often than activism.
Renoir noticed that despite the vast network of émigrés, the French in Hollywood
were not as politically active as their New York counterparts. Life in Hollywood was a
world away from the realities of France. “Ici à Hollywood nous sommes très loin de New
York moralement et matériellement,” he explained to his friends.35 As Renoir joked in
one of his memoirs, New Yorkers believed “we left civilization for barbarism” by
heading to Hollywood in 1941 (My Life 185). Nevertheless, Renoir attracted likeminded acquaintances rather quickly through his film projects: he had an unlimited
capacity for new friendship. “I believe that the real author is a man who can reload the
battery constantly by contact with the world. Yes. I believe that the constant contact
35
Jean Renoir, letter to Charles Chezeau, 31 January 31, 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
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with human beings reloads the battery.”36 In the French version of his memoir, Renoir
wrote, ”je catalogue ma vie par amis. Chaque période de mon existence a été dominée
par la figure d’un ami.”37
Screenwriter/director Dudley Nichols became Renoir’s closest friend and ally
throughout much of the war after they met on the Swamp Water production. He was
indispensable to Renoir’s development as a screenwriter in English, correcting drafts of
The Southerner by flagging dialogue and offering suggestions to help him avoid trouble
with the film industry censors at the Hays Office.38 Nichols shared Renoir’s dismay over
the state of Hollywood filmmaking as well: “Hollywood is controlled by men devoid of
imagination, therefore devoid of love […] We must find new methods,” he wrote in
1944.39 Renoir explained to his brother Claude after the war how Nichols had found him
work when no one else could. “[Dudley] m’a fait faire This Land is Mine, ce qui m’a
sauvé matériellement, et comme le film a été bien accueilli, cela m’a place dans une
meilleure position en tant que metteur en scène. Dudley est maintenant mon meilleur ami
ici et nous collaborerons de nouveau à toute occasion.”40 René Clair, who also worked
with Nichols while in Hollywood, was similarly impressed by his intense work ethic and
36
Interview with James R. Silke, 1964. Jean Renoir: Interviews 129.
Ma vie et mes films (Paris: Flammarion, 1974) 32. The original French text contains quite a bit
more material than the English version, mostly concerning his childhood in France.
38
“As I told you on the phone I feel this is a fine film. A couple of little things I jotted down while
reading: (not of real importance) Hays Office will cut out word ‘buggers’. While this word was
originally a corruption of “Bulgarian,” which may amuse you, it is now applied only to a sodomist—
or playfully as you use it here […] Hays Office will cut out word ‘privy’ –too bad , it’s a good old
American word. Use ‘backhouse’ or some substitute. In sequence U one feels your are tricking the
audience a bit by having Devers raise gun and aim at Sam’s back, then lower it when Sam rises. Also
this doesn’t sound like the enraged son of a bitch that Devers is.” Dudley Nichols, letter to Jean
Renoir, 13 September 1944, Jean Renoir Papers.
39 Dudley Nichols, letter to Jean Renoir, 13 September 1944, Jean Renoir Papers.
40 Jean Renoir, letter to Claude Renoir, 16 January 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
37
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writing abilities. “He had unbelievable energy […] he work[ed] as if he had been writing
for a deadline that was always going to come up in ten minutes,” Clair recalled in a 1970
interview.41
Leftist playwright Clifford Odets, who literally barged into Renoir’s life asking to
become pals,42 appears as another addition to his coterie of dear American friends in the midforties. Of their relationship Renoir later explained, “To say that people are united is not enough:
it is more like the spiritual absorption of friend by friend” (My Life 262). Odets’s time in
Hollywood shares similarities to Renoir’s. Both men had a clear, fundamental perception of the
world that they had to express in their art. For Odets, it was always the struggle between doing
well and doing good in the American middle-class (Cantor 31). Christopher J. Herr notes, “the
characterization of Odets as a Hollywood ‘lackey’ ignores the complexities of his dual career as
well as his expressed ambivalence about both the theatre and film industries” (Herr 134).43
Odets’s own career had the sort of creative unevenness, and complicated attraction-repulsion to
Hollywood that Renoir deeply understood.
Actor Charles Laughton, who played the lead in This Land is Mine, was another
addition to Renoir’s roster of friends during the mid-forties. “We had much in common,”
writes Renoir (My Life 215). They discussed art and acting; like Nichols, Laughton was a
witness to his and Dido’s February 1944 marriage. Renoir also notes that the actor
decided to teach him Shakespeare upon learning of Renoir’s deficits in this area of
41
RC Dale, “René Clair in Hollywood: An Interview,” Film Quarterly 24.2 (1970-71) 34.
Renoir fondly recalls this meeting in My Life and My Films 260-63.
43 It is entirely possible that he helped Renoir on the draft of Diary, although I have not come across
any written evidence of this. In a 1960 interview with Joan Franklin and Robert Franklin, Renoir
described his move toward playwriting: “I wrote two plays, and I have a third one in preparation, and I
wrote an adaptation of a play by my good friend Clifford Odets, the Big Knife, that was shown in Paris
very successfully” (Interviews 95).
42
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literature. Their friendship, like so many of Renoir’s relationships, was based on the
ready exchange of ideas and common ground as highly respected, if not mainstream,
Hollywood personnel.
Renoir’s reconfiguration of close friends and colleagues coincided with increasing
passion for his work and the United States. They were a vital part of his adaptation to
Hollywood as well as his decision to stay; their ideas and resources expanded his own.
From the outset Renoir was eager to mingle with the Americans: “He was always very
international. It was not a real shock [coming to US]…What amazed me when I first
came to Hollywood was how he was getting along with Americans…as though he’d been
there all the time” (Alain Renoir Interview). Renoir rapidly established professional
connections as well. On June 19, 1941 he had applied and been admitted to the Screen
Directors’ Guild. He and Dido maintained an active presence in war relief drives despite
having had their assets frozen as a consequence of the Occupation.44 On June 2, 1942, he
admitted to Saint-Exupéry, “je hais les Français d’Amérique, sauf vous, Lamotte,
Gabrielle, et quelques autres dont peut-être Lazareff, Charles David et René Clair”
(Lettres 103). By the 1943 production of This Land is Mine, Renoir was investing ten
percent of all his earnings in War Bonds purchased directly through RKO. He
contributed $150 to the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee June 3, 1943 and was later
involved with the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship, whose board thanked
44
He donated $1349 to war relief from April to September in 1941 (Also listed are Julien Duvivier
$1660, René Clair $1100, Marcel Dalio $10 and Jean Gabin $200), Jean Renoir Papers.
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him for extending himself to the Russian émigré community.45 His philanthropy, like his
friendships, had become international in scope.
This Land is Mine (1943)
After casting about for a project and producer who would accept it, Renoir finally
succeeded with RKO, where he was able to write, produce and direct This Land is Mine
in the late summer and fall of 1942 with Dudley Nichols. A somewhat unconventional
wartime tale, the film is set during the occupation of a nameless European country and
concerns the actions of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary
circumstances. The film’s premise allows Renoir and Nichols to explain why
collaboration occurs as well as provide examples of what ordinary people can do to fight
fascism. The film follows several characters in a small town who collaborate in various
degrees with the Nazis. Albert Lory (Charles Laughton), a meek schoolteacher,
originally refuses to make waves when the somewhat sympathetic Nazi, Major von
Keller (Walter Slezak), interrogates him about local resistance members. Yet Lory
eventually decides to stand up and fight for democracy after he witnesses the death of a
colleague who was active in the resistance. Enlightened and emboldened, Lory returns to
his classroom with an impassioned reading of the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
where he is promptly arrested. Along the way he earns the respect of his fellow teacher
45
[Thank you for] allowing us to use your name among the sponsors of the reception of Sunday for
Mr. and Mrs. Mikhail Kalazatov. The party, at which more than four hundred Hollywood producers,
directors, writers, actors and technicians welcomed the Soviet Motion picture industry’s official
“Ambassador” to Hollywood was, we think a complete success. I know the Kalatozovs have a very
warm feeling toward the Hollywood motion picture colony as a result of the generous reception
accorded them,” Thomas L. Harris, National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, letter to Jean
Renoir, 23 August 1943, Jean Renoir Papers.
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and secret love interest, the beautiful Louise (Maureen O’Hara), who is unknowingly
engaged to a collaborationist.
Several scholars have debated the intent and success of Renoir and Nicols’
picture. The problematic gesture of giving equal screen time to heroes and villains, as
well as the characters’ repeated speechifying, leads Faulkner to dismiss the film as
another casualty of Hollywood’s dominance over Renoir.46 James Morrison argues that
This Land is Mine ultimately fails to propose a realistic view of either side:
A final effect of the film's specific evocations of German national identity as
against the effacement of its other nationalities is that the film's ultimately favored
ideology of nationhood can be identified, in an important sense, only negatively.
In its fantasy of pan-European resistance, This Land is Mine generates a fictive
nationality defined only by its opposition to fascism, characterized chiefly by its
status as non-German (972).47
Despite weaknesses in ideological rigor, This Land is Mine achieved its intended purpose
of making Americans closely reconsider the effects of war on rather ordinary individuals.
Renoir wrote that his objective was only to show that “real heroes are modest men” (My
Life 219). This Land is Mine had finally bestowed a sense of purpose on Renoir’s work:
the integration of current world events into a film Americans embraced.
The film opened to generally good reviews in the United States in May 1943.
Buoyed by the response, Renoir felt he was doing the type of work an artist in exile
should. He wrote to his friend Léon Siritzky (the distributor who had helped put Renoir
on the map as a sound film director with his unorthodox publicity for La Chienne in
1931): “Je crois que j’ai obtenu cette fois-ci une qualité comparable a mes quelques
46
“One must, I think, attribute the failure to evoke a specific social milieu to the futility of attempting
this [film] within the Hollywood studio system” (136). Faulkner, The Social Cinema.
47 James Morrison, MLN 111.5 (1996) 954-975.
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réussites de France. Souvent je pense à l’influence heureuse que vous avez eue sur mes
travaux les plus discutés.48 This Land is Mine constitutes Renoir’s most explicit
American propaganda and thus fits in with the type of socially conscious cinema others
expected of him. Coinciding with the shift toward Allied victory, This Land is Mine’s
success attracted other requests for similar work. In July 1943, Renoir received an offer
to direct the picture In Which We Serve, which was to be produced in London.49 The
director replied immediately that he could not, since he planned to be in Hollywood “for
about one year.”
The experience with This Land is Mine led Renoir to reconsider his relationship to
France and its cinema. On April 23, 1943, the director delivered an address to the leftwing League of American Writers that clearly summarizes his thoughts on the current
state of world affairs and Hollywood’s role in it.50 Faulkner reads the address as “an act
of faith in his homeland under the German Occupation” (“Address” 64). In addition to
that, however, he adds that the speech possesses “internationalist discourse […]
characterized by an argument for a productive tension between he same and the different,
self and other, the shared and the distinctive.” I would add to this that Renoir’s insistence
on the potential of oppositions suggests that the director’s work in America had also
48
Jean Renoir, letter to Léon Siritzky, April 1943, Jean Renoir Papers.
Simon Schiffrin (Russian-born producer and production manager who was also an expatriate from
France working in the US during the war), telegram to Jean Renoir, 13 July 1943, Jean Renoir Papers.
50 Cf. Christopher Faulkner, “Jean Renoir Addresses the League of American Writers,” Film History 8
(1996): 64-71. The League of American Writers had initially formed in 1935 at the behest of the
Communist Party of the USA in order to “recruit a wide spectrum of liberal and left-leaning
intellectuals to the anti-fascist cause” (64). They had annual conferences to discuss their course of
action, and Faulkner writes that in the spirit of Popular Fronts, “members of the league might be wellmeaning liberals, socialists or declared communists” (64).
49
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strengthened his conviction in the particular Franco-American perspective he continued
to devise in Hollywood.
Three days prior to the address, Renoir had noted that the questions regarding the
best use of his talents were easier to find than answers:
[During This Land is Mine] I had the impression of playing my small part in the
ensemble of the world, of which probably the sole preoccupation is the War. It
seemed good to me to use the means of my métier to say to other men things
which perhaps they did not know and which the circumstances of my life have
permitted me to know… Now, at the moment of beginning something else my
métier seems to me terribly vain. The task of fabricating a fiction which demands
of the spectator that he forget during two hours what he actually is does not seem
real to me. I even ask myself if the true end of all artistic effort in a time such as
ours should not rather be to recall pitilessly to men what they really are.”51
By the same token, as someone who had fled to make such films in America, he felt he
had somehow forfeited the right to show Frenchmen as they really were (a feeling that
would be validated by the severely negative reception of This Land is Mine when it was
finally released in France after the war.) Out of this creative paradox came The
Southerner (shot in late 1944 and released the following year), the first project that
pointed toward the direction that would recombine the director’s social and cinematic
interests for a postwar world.
As Renoir’s letters suggest, even as a return to France became a possibility he was
preparing the idea of remaining in the U.S. Slow mail delivery resumed between the US
and Europe after the liberation of Paris in 1944. Though months could pass between the
sending and receiving of letters, expatriated Europeans re-established halting connections
to those left behind. Renoir wrote close friend and financial advisor Louis Guillaume in
51
Jean Renoir, letter to Edward Crowley, 21 April 1943, Jean Renoir Papers.
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February: “les lettres, on les met à la poste comme si on jetait une bouteille à la mer avec
le vague espoir que les amis naufragés tomberont peut-être dessus par hasard […] Tous
les mois j’envoie cent dollars a Claude, qui est, avec Pierre, le seul personnage dont je
sois a peu près sur de l’adresse en France.”52
The renewed correspondence with his brothers and extended family in France is
among the most touching in a lifetime of letters. They bear witness to both Renoir’s
relief and his attendant undercurrent of guilt at having left loved ones behind. His
brothers, Claude and Pierre, brushed aside such apologies—preferring to answer his
inquires with matter-of-fact descriptions of life at the end of the war. “Pierre et moi
n’avons rien perdu dans cette histoire. Toutes les toiles sont sauvées et les maisons
intactes […] à part la destruction des ponts, le pays n’a pas souffert.”53 As for the film
industry, Claude Renoir painted an equally blunt picture: “J’ai beaucoup de mal à
démarrer. J’ai eu le tort d’aller dans le maquis au lieu de commercer avec les Allemands
comme l’ont fait tous les petits copains, car, en définitive l’épuration a fait long feu, les
producteurs sont les mêmes que pendant l’occupation, c’est-à-dire ceux acceptés par les
Allemands, et les résistants sont barrés.”54 Renoir responded, “J’ai rarement lu un aussi
bon exposé d’une situation confuse,”55 before commending his brother for acting in the
best interest of his country, if not his career.
The degree and kind of devastation (psychological and otherwise) Renoir’s family
and friends witnessed by war’s end is remarkably understated in their letters. Historian
52
Jean Renoir, letter to Louis Guillaume, 24 February 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
Claude Renoir, letter to Jean Renoir, 23March 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
54 Claude Renoir, letter to Jean Renoir, 23 March 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
55 Jean Renoir to Claude Renoir. April 17, 1945. Jean Renoir Collection
53
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Tony Judt’s research on the war’s impact on Europe reveals the vast degree and kind of
destruction witnessed by the French: “No other conflict in recorded history killed so
many people in so short a time (Judt 18).56 “In 1944-45 […] France lost 500,000
dwellings,” he writes in Postwar (Judt 17). Consequently, “from the point of view of
contemporaries the war’s impact was measured not in terms of industrial profit and loss,
or the net value of national assets in 1945 when compared to 1938, but rather in the
visible damage to their immediate environment and their communities” (Judt 19). With
its mass migrations of victims and utter destruction of homes and buildings, the war and
its effects constituted a highly visual experience for survivors—crumbling buildings,
bombed-out towns and shattered infrastructure were the visibly wounded landscape of an
entire country. For the French (and the rest of Europe), the only thing on people’s minds
was “to recover the trappings of normal life in a properly regulated state” (Judt 39).
The war’s psychological damage was just as intense as the bombardments.
According to Judt, “For most Europeans World War Two was experienced not as a war
of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and
women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and selfabasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything” (41). And as
for the mythic numbers of French in the Resistance, historians estimate that “[t]he Nazis
administered France with just 1,500 of their own people” (39). Claude Renoir’s
understated letters give just the slightest hint of the reality he faced throughout the war.
56
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005).
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Receiving these letters thousands of miles away, Renoir could likely only imagine the
devastation to which his brother alluded.
As an artist working in a medium that places a priority on the visual reproduction
of reality, Renoir’s reluctance to return to France may have also been due in part in his
inability to capture the French life he had missed or avoided as a comfortable
expatriate.57 He no longer held the authority to shoot films in France as he had working
alongside the vanguard of the Popular Front in the 1930s. The looming resumption of the
backlog of American films was under negotiation; those in the industry feared
Hollywood’s onslaught.58
Many of those close to him expected Renoir to show his patriotic fidelity by
immediately returning to Paris to make films. Renoir was not merely expected to return
home to his family, he was also implicitly expected to re-declare his allegiance to one
culture, one national cinema. French colleagues began to inquire about screenplays and
collaborations oriented toward the rebuilding of French cinema (and morale among the
worn-out French in general) as soon as mail service resumed in 1944:
J’insiste particulièrement pour que vous prépariez dès au présent un ou deux
scénarios qui nous rendra tout ce que la lutte du peuple français contre l’Allemand
a de grandiose en elle-même. Vous êtes qualifié plus que quiconque pour cela
vous dont le grand talent est la mise en valeur de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler
des “petites gens.”59
57
It is important to note that since Renoir had married Dido Freire in America on February 6, 1944
while he was still technically married to estranged wife Catherine Hessling, many scholars assume
that fear of prosecution for bigamy was why he did not return to France. Given Renoir’s status in
French society and the postwar chaos, I doubt he would not have been able to get a divorce from
Hessling in order to enter the country legally.
58 I discuss the Blum-Byrnes Agreement in depth in the following chapter.
59 Edmond Ardisson, letter to Jean Renoir, dated March 26, 1944, but did not arrive until May, Jean
Renoir Papers.
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The trouble was, the director had not lived in France for years. Renoir’s response
delicately explained his actual experience in America:
Bien sûr toutes mes pensées sont avec les miens. Je songe à la plupart de mes
compatriotes; mais matériellement j’aurai tout de même vécu la vie un peu
artificielle d’un “émigré.” J’aurai probablement été un peu moins désaxé que
beaucoup d’Européens réfugiés en Amérique, ayant été aide par la grande chance
que l’Amérique et les Américains me plaisent tout à fait. J’ai trouvé ici de grands
motifs d’emballement.60
The director did not have any illusions about the degree to which the French way of life
had suffered under the Occupation, but nor could he know firsthand the feeling of living
in such a vastly changed community. Only through letters did he glimpse the bleak
situation in the postwar film industry, which had been extensively reorganized under
Nazi rule into COIC and whose resources remained limited: “René Clair m’a
communiqué un passage d’une de vos lettres où vous semblez peu enthousiaste de la
production française actuelle. Un petit mot de mon frère semble confirmer vos doutes.”61
Those who could make films were the same directors and producers who had thrived (or
collaborated) with Greven and Goebbels. Renoir wanted no part of it.
The hectic postwar world is entirely absent from The Southerner. The film marks
an important split between two decades of filmmaking; whereas the thirties’ films were
inspired by the memory of the First World War, the works of the forties stemmed from
the fallout of the Second World War. As the conflict began to end, Renoir was casting
about for a new type of story to fit his mood. “During This Land is Mine I was happy
enough because the story corresponded to my own intimate preoccupations, but now that
60
61
Jean Renoir, letter to Edmond Ardisson, 23 May 1944, Jean Renoir Papers.
Jean Renoir, letter to Jean Benoit Lev, 12 April 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
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I find myself with the obligation to begin a story like any other, a story corresponding to
the mentality of peacetime, I begin to be profoundly bored and to consider that the
cinema is a vain occupation in a time such as ours.”62 He considered completely different
directions, for instance a return to genres like the fish-out-of water Boudu sauvé des eaux:
“I am thinking of a comedy, a little bit in the style of the story of a hobo I wanted to shoot
with Charles Laughton. This one would be more for the E.G. Robinson type.”63 In the
end, he settled on adapting a novel about a family of Texas sharecroppers entitled Hold
Autumn in Your Hand. Its author, George Sessions Perry, was a Texan who had written
the book before working as a war correspondent for The New Yorker. Covering the
invasion of Sicily would disabuse Perry of his folksy vision of the world just as Renoir
turned to it as an alternative to an explicit wartime film.64
The Southerner (1944-45)
In contrast to the complicated Swamp Water shoot, the production of The
Southerner (which went into production in late 1944) marks Renoir’s most accomplished
navigation of Hollywood. By this time he understood more concretely that the American
studio system, an arrangement of East Coast-stationed CEOs who specialized in
marketing and distribution and West Coast studio-based creative executives, like Zanuck,
who oversaw production, was, at its most extreme, inflexible compared to the patchworkstyle European filmmaking methods he knew. However, a niche existed for Renoir
62
Jean Renoir, letter to Charles Kaufman, 21April 1943, Jean Renoir Papers.
Jean Renoir, letter to Bert Allenberg, 22 March 1944, Jean Renoir Papers.
64 John Mason Brown, foreword, Walls Rise Up and Hold Autumn in Your Hand (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1959) 5.
63
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among independent producers who were not bound to a particular studio and worked with
relative autonomy.65 Dependent upon connections and personal relationships to a greater
degree than his French reputation suggests, Renoir’s “independent” phase corresponds to
his increasingly diverse social life in Hollywood.
A day planner recently found by Alain Renoir dating from 1944 provides a
snapshot of Renoir’s day-to-day life in America—a roster of meetings, dinners and
cocktails with Europeans, Americans, literary and film people, with finances carefully
tallied for each date in Dido Renoir’s handwriting:
Fig. 3.9 Renoir’s agenda circa The Southerner [Courtesy of Alain Renoir]
As with most film productions, the development of Hold Autumn in Your Hand into The
65
There is some debate as to how independent they really were. Matthew Bernstein suggests the term
“semi-independent production” to account for the fact that these producers “took for granted and
employed the same detailed division of labor that the studios evolved among departments and
technicians, and the often copied any number of the studios’ production management systems.” See
Bernstein’s preface to his book, Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1994).
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Southerner was not without its dramatic tensions, which I will briefly outline here
because the pre-production demonstrates the agile social connections that marked this
period of Renoir’s career. By March 1943, he wrote to Bob Flaherty that “now I can read
in English” (Lettres 152). Once Hold Autumn became a real possibility, Renoir
distanced himself from previous writing partner Dudley Nichols, who was intent on
making folk hero stories like “Johnny Appleseed”66 or “Sister Kenny.” But not just any
American story would suffice for Renoir; he did not believe that either of these ideas was
solid.67 The director tactfully described his decision to work apart from Nichols in his
memoirs: “I did not want Dudley to waste his time working with someone who would be
a hindrance to him, so I persuaded him that he should himself direct a film about Sister
Kenny” (My Life 221).
Renoir gently left Sister Kenny on the table by focusing instead on his
commitment to work with screenwriter Hugo Butler for the film that would ultimately
become The Southerner:
I have not yet studied the material on [Sister Kenny] which is on your desk. I
was, and still am, preoccupied by the picture I have to make with David Loew. It
is a subject which could be great if treated with a certain sense of humour so
common with the people of the soil in America. I fear the author of the screenplay
is rather theoretic. [Butler] is coming today and I am impatient to see the results
of our first day of collaboration.”68
66
Dudley Nichols, letter to Jean Renoir, 30 March 1944, Jean Renoir Papers.
Jean Renoir, letter to David Loew, 11 February 1945, Jean Renoir Papers. Nichols continued to
pursue Renoir for Sister Kenny, but Renoir reiterated his desire to make another film “of good quality”
with Loew. Sister Kenny was directed by Nichols and released in 1946 by RKO, starring Rosalind
Russell in the true story of an Australian nurse who cures polio by unconventional means. Renoir
appears to have decided to go his own way creatively after The Southerner’s success, writing to Loew
that “Dudley Nichols believes strongly in ‘Sister Kenny.’ Between us, I don’t share his confidence.”
Still, Renoir donated $500 to the Elizabeth Kenny Institute in 1945 and received a letter from Russell
personally thanking him. Rosalind Russell, letter to Jean Renoir, 10 January 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
68 Jean Renoir, letter to Dudley Nichols, 20 May 1944, Jean Renoir Papers.
67
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After this date, Butler remains in the calendar for dinners and drinks throughout the
following months.
The final hurdle in The Southerner’s preproduction was the withdrawal of popular
leads Joel McCrea and Frances Dee, who were unwilling to play miserable farmers.
Renoir’s agent, Phil Allenberg, wrote him in March “there are still many problems with
‘Hold Autumn’ [… ] I am afraid David Loew is bowing out of the deal. Ben Bogeaus,
who releases his films through United Artists, is willing to take over the entire deal, and
Hakim is seeing Joel McCrea tomorrow to endeavor to obtain his consent to having the
picture made by B[ogeaus] instead of L[oew]. I will let you know what happens.” 69
Without his bankable stars, Loew and Hakim then nearly backed out (Bertin 222).
Renoir remedied the situation with his casting expertise, finding young actors Betty Field
and native Texan Zachary Scott perfect for the roles McCrea and Dee had abandoned.
Hold Autumn in Your Hand further appealed to Renoir because Loew allowed
Renoir to work on the screenplay after Butler wrote the first draft. Renoir biographer
Célia Bertin writes, “The script had several hands, including Nunally Johnson, perhaps
John Huston, and assuredly William Faulkner. Zachary Scott said that Faulkner
considered Renoir the best director of his time [….] Faulkner did not just make
observations that led Jean to redo several scenes; he also gave him valuable pointers on
the dialogue” (222). More recent research suggests “Faulkner’s work on the script seems
69
Phil Allenberg, letter to Jean Renoir, 11 March 1944, Jean Renoir Papers. Benedict Bogeaus was
the owner of General Service Studios, where Renoir did shoot some of The Southerner’s studio
scenes. Renoir later explained in 1964 that “the stars of the picture […] saw my script and were very
disappointed” because there was “no story” (Interviews 91).
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to have been in the capacity of advisor for certain scenes” (Gilcher 395). Renoir’s day
planner does indeed reveal a series of cocktails and dinners with Faulkner in the summer
of 1944.
Production commenced in September 1944 and ran smoothly with the aid of
several other acquaintances in Renoir’s growing professional network. Through Loew
and Hakim, Renoir had a solid script and connections to an international staff to shoot it.
Loew rarely visited the set; his proxy, associate producer, Sam Rheiner, was a hard
worker and great fan of Renoir’s work. On the 27th, Loew sent Renoir a letter noting how
pleased he was with the production:
I came over to the studio immediately to see the cut stuff and the rushes you shot
before you went on location […] I want you to know that I am very happy with
what I have seen [….] I received a wire from Sam Rheiner that you had decided
to ship lights [for shooting] up there. I personally think it is a good idea, and I
know as a result and with your cooperation, it will more than make up the extra
cost.
PS. I just saw the rushes they are great and the photography look like paintings. 70
Two French crewmembers, cameraman Lucien Andriot and Renoir’s old friend and
longtime set designer Eugene Lourié further facilitated the harmonious production
(Gilcher 399).
Like Renoir, Lourié was initially shocked by what he perceived as a paternalistic
studio system upon his emigration in 1941: “the most radical departure in Hollywood
[…] was the part played by the studio production office in what appeared to me to be
basic set-designing decisions” (76). Yet also like Renoir, he remained in Hollywood and
calls The Southerner a high point in his own career: “I think our work on [it] is the best
70
David Loew, letter to Jean Renoir, 27 September 1944, Jean Renoir Papers.
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reflection of our team’s happy dedication” (128). The film was Lourié’s first legitimate
collaboration with Renoir in America;71 his memoirs corroborate other versions of the
genial creative atmosphere. For instance, when Lourié felt “uneasy” about the film’s
planned ending, Renoir assented to a change (Lourié 126). As an émigré in a similar
situation, Lourié understood more clearly than most where Renoir was heading
creatively: “By the time of The Southerner, Renoir’s talent was fully mature and his
storytelling was deceptively simple” (126). Confident, “he knew how important his
collaborators were to his work, and being a truly great director, he did not deny their
influence but tried to assimilate it to reinforce his own point of view” (30). Renoir and
Lourié agreed on the need for a high degree of control of the mise-en-scène. The
Southerner’s “natural” setting is actually quite planned out. 72
The Southerner’s collaborative atmosphere controverts the popular notion of
Renoir in America as a director without a plan. From the film’s inception, he was finally
adapting to the system through the niche of independent filmmaking. In a 1944 letter to a
Portuguese journalist, Renoir clearly explained the difficulties of working with
independent productions:
Une entreprise indépendante […] c’est extrêmement difficile. La plupart des
acteurs et techniciens sont sous contrat dans les grands studios. Ceux qui sont
“free-lance” comme on dit ici, ont leurs idées sur les sujets de film et risquent de
se montrer aussi tyranniques que n’importe quel exécutif de studio.73
71
The two had worked together previously stateside on This Land is Mine, but due to union
restrictions, Lourié had had to work at night to bypass the rules.
72 Cf. Lourié 124. He mentions Renoir’s use of extensive sets in other projects as well, such as La
Règle du jeu.
73 Jean Renoir, letter to Alzer Barreto, 2 July 1944, Lettres d’Amérique.
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Fortunately, Hakim and Loew were hands-off producers. Once they secured financing74
and arranged distribution via United Artists75 they left their director and his crew alone.
Like Swamp Water, The Southerner focuses on an isolated community in the
American south, that of Sam Tucker and his kin, in order to arrive at a broader truth
about human nature. After his uncle works himself to death in the cotton fields, Sam,
with the blessing of his wife Nona, gets a farm, seeds, and tools on credit to become a
sharecropper and work his way out of poverty. The family faces bad weather, hunger,
and the lure of “easy” city work but ultimately remains united in their quest for a better
life. The Southerner is a monument to the importance of family and hard work; it also
reveals apprehensions about a society that forgets the validity of these values. The film’s
setting in rural Texas (actually shot on location near Fresno) furnished a chance to turn
the camera on an American way of life that resonated with Renoir’s recollections of
France even more so than the creatively blunted Swamp Water. He could treat themes in
the slow, atmospheric style that had become a source of contention at Fox.
The finished film moves with the deliberate pacing of country life, balancing what
Gilcher has termed “une lutte menée par Renoir pour trouver un moyen pour exprimer à
la fois le particulier et le général” (Curot 272). As for audience reception, Renoir was
pleasantly surprised to find a topic that could translate into the American idiom and
74
Loew’s company, Producing Artists, had a distribution deal with United Artists that did not allow
for Loew-Hakim films to count toward the total releases under the agreement (Gilcher 394). The
contract dispute was resolved however; “United Artists accepted the film [as part of Loew’s deal], and
the Bank of America loaned the funds (Gilcher 394).”
75 Founded in 1919 by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, UA was not a studio,
but rather a distribution company for independent producers. UA developed links to the major
studios, from which it negotiated for personnel and production facilities. See Schatz, The Genius of
the System 176.
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potentially earn him the type of independence he wanted: “D’ailleurs, chose étrange, ce
‘Southerner’ fait une bonne carrière commerciale, et si mes agents n’étaient pas
stupidement impressionnés par l’organisation des grands studios, ça me procurerait peutêtre le moyen de produire à peu près librement.”76 The film garnered Renoir an Oscar
nomination for Best Director (he did not win)77 and earned him the National Board of
Review’s award for best director.
Renoir was at last endowed with a capable crew and creative license; the finished
film bears the imprint of the positive impact his embracing of American life was having
on his career and identity as a director. The Southerner is a mix of new and old elements,
a film that ultimately becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It remains a difficult
film to interpret, as Lourié notes, because of the deceptive simplicity of its premise and
form. The Tuckers don’t want to harvest cotton for pennies on the pound, so they heed
their dying Uncle Pete’s advice and buy a rundown farm on credit. That is the entire
story. The film mostly takes place on this decrepit farm, though the family returns to the
city for two scenes that foreshadow disaster. In the end they begin to put their floodravaged farm back together as the family rebounds from the brink of defeat in the face of
nature and isolation.
Because of the film’s deliberate pacing and family-oriented subject, critics fault
the “generalness” of The Southerner as false and trite. Recent theories of culture that
examine the significance of daily life provide one explanation for Renoir’s unspectacular
76
77
Jean Renoir, letter to Pierre Lestringuez, 22 November 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
His Oscar ballot can be found in the Jean Renoir Papers—it is unmarked.
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focus in The Southerner and its subsequent rejection by critics. In Tim Edensor’s
formulation
[the everyday’s] low-key, humdrum passage does not contain the exciting
moments in which decisions are made, identities enacted and displayed.
Because the everyday tends to be contrasted with the time of celebrity, of
holidays, of exceptional and symbolic events, it is believed to be static:[ ….]
change occurs on a grander stage (18).78
It is precisely in the everyday lives of the Tuckers that the grace and beauty of their story
shines through as a small-scale triumph of “identity enacted.” Sam and Nona plow the
seemingly vast fields, but at least they are together; the family eats their meals, though
meager, around the table in their shack. The Tuckers’ insistence to be happy and remain
a loving family despite the high odds against a kind fate constitutes the real story of The
Southerner. Just as in This Land is Mine, resistance to injustice must be a part of
everyday life if it is to be a part of life at all. The Southerner reflects an awareness of the
way identity forms and re-forms slowly through myriad small choices rather than large
gestures set against an extraordinary context. The film recalls the simpler origins of
melodrama rather than its present cliché of overblown sentimental struggle: The
Southerner is a “drama of the ordinary” marked by its simple setting and one man’s
symbolic effort within it to carve out a better life for his family (Brooks 13).79
In the vein of Boudu sauvé des eaux and La Chienne, The Southerner’s opening
shot uses a framing device to introduce the story. Sam Tucker’s city-dwelling friend Tim
flips through a photo album of the main characters while his musings about the difference
78
Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (New York, Oxford: Berg,
2002).
79 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of
Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press) 1995.
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between country and city life set the stage for the story ahead. “Believe me,” he says,
“they don’t come no better.” The album ends with a photo of Tim, who points out, “I’m
a town man myself […] that’s how come I cherish these pictures so, makes me feel close
to my friends to look at. ” Tim is not so close to his friends, as we will find out, and his
longing seems curious, since his main purpose in the film is to serve as the pro-industry
foil to Sam’s farmer.
Fig. 3.10 Tim’s keepsake album
The next scene fades in with a deep-focus tracking shot that spans great lengths of cotton
fields full of stooped figures, cutting to particular anonymous workers young and old,
men and women in tattered clothing laboring beneath the sun, before settling on the
Tuckers. Clearly struggling, Uncle Pete falls ill in the middle of the field. Sam quickly
takes up his cotton to be weighed and speaks to a Mexican worker about their winter
plans as busy pickers unload bales of cotton into massive trucks.
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Fig. 3.11 Sam, Nona and Pete among the scores of workers
Little has been made of these striking documentary scenes, other than Pete’s dying plot
command to “Grow your own crop”. However, by juxtaposing images of workers
against the single story of Sam Tucker, Renoir visually alludes to the problems of an
entire group of migrant workers. Throughout the film, the allure of “easy” factory work
politicizes the Tuckers’ decision to become subsistence farmers, a difficult way of life
that still dominated the South’s landscape well into the 1940s. The opening sequence,
with its vast cotton fields filled with migrant workers, exposes the harsh realities many
poor southerners faced. The Southerner is no individualistic fairy tale; Renoir
emphasizes throughout the film that the Tuckers belong to a collective group of
impoverished laborers. That Sam and Nona lack the resources to care for their children is
a source of shame, forcing them to appeal to others for help. Renoir holds Nona in a rare
close-up as she cries to the doctor about her son’s illness and wonders where she’ll get
the means to feed him the food he desperately needs. The doctor’s solution is “to
borrow” the supplies. He refuses Nona’s payment for the diagnosis, “if you don’t give
him milk and vegetables, anything that I can do will be just plum wasted.” The simple
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exchange of goods and services is not an option; neither is self-reliance. These vignettes
amount to a demystification of the American dream.
Made between the end of the war and the horizon of peacetime, The Southerner’s
valorization of the everyday struggles of a Texas family is at once controversial and
clichéd. Whereas the Tuckers’ fight adheres to the wartime/postwar message that “shows
the home to be the place we are fighting for,” Renoir’s choice to set the message in a
poor American family calls into question the reasons for the struggle (Polan 10). Sam
Tucker is not going off to war in the Pacific; he is forced to do battle on fields bought on
credit, at the risk of hurting the family he loves most. Though Hart Wegner echoes the
consensus when he writes, “The Southerner is not tied to a specific time or place, the
events are not politicized, nor does the film ever become polemical,” his reading neglects
details that reveal the film’s subtle politics (64). The Southerner fits into the canon of
Southern films that actually dealt with poverty as a contemporary American reality, such
as The Grapes of Wrath or Tobacco Road.80 Whereas films dealing with the South
traditionally adopted the romanticized antebellum plantation as their setting, Renoir’s
film selects the more accurate version “oriented to dirt farming and land clearing with the
help of the immediate family” (Campbell Jr. 28). The Tuckers’ mundane story
constituted a bold choice for the time: its “timelessness” points more to the tedium of real
farm work than to an idyllic lifestyle.
80
The Southerner also echoes some of the imagery of Renoir’s 1935 film, Toni, which is about poor
Italian immigrant farmers in the south of France. However, The Southerner differs in content and
form from Toni’s story of a crime of passion using local music hall actors.
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Politics and polemics appear in the recurring city versus country dynamic
embodied by earthy, no-nonsense Sam and the quick-tempered, portly, devious Tim. The
latter’s conversations with Sam punctuate the film and provide a counterweight to the
economic model Tuckers follow. Tim enjoys showing off his wealth from factory work.
When one customer remarks “seems like in the city, dollars grow faster than beans in the
field,” Tim responds with disparaging laughter: “don’t pay no mind to them yokels.” As
Sam and Tim walk down the main street to have a drink, the townspeople ignore Tim as
they greet Sam and inquire about his ailing child and Nona. At the bar, Sam’s implicit
sex appeal to a buxom woman reflects his status as a real “man” who works with his
hands in contrast to Tim, who believes his money suffices as an identity. However, it is
Tim who compares farmers to gamblers: “Year after year you starve yourselves to death
hopin’ that one fine day” a bumper crop will save the farm.
Fig. 3.12 Sam and Tim, farm vs. factory
In a twist reflective of Renoir’s belief that “everyone has their reasons” the two later
reconcile after the flood when they realize that each needs the other to survive: “it takes
all kinds to make up this old world.” Their imperfect but enduring relationship is a
testament to the economic realities of modern America.
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Corollary to the emphasis on Sam’s folksy virtue is the film’s elevation of family
and God, which is often singled out as another “American” aspect of Renoir’s
filmmaking;81 however, this phenomenon connects to characterization more than
spirituality. The rhythm of the film, determined by the Tuckers’ work and worries in the
course of one year, does highlight the cyclical nature of life, and is greatly toned down in
contrast to the overt Eastern spirituality of The River (1950).82 Sam Tucker stands out
against a backdrop of the world beyond man’s control, and it is his decision to go it alone
that drives the other characters’ actions. The Tuckers’ daily prayers and unshakeable
faith reflect Renoir’s insistence on accurately capturing a slice of regional American life,
of making Sam a product of his environment. Just as Ben Ragan tries to make a better
life in Swamp Water, Sam, like Jacques Lantier or Amédée Lange, is the quintessential
Worker who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps only to be threatened by a moral
dilemma. But unlike the doomed Frenchmen, Sam’s identity remains rooted in the
strength of his determination, which helps him overcome the pressure to remain a migrant
worker.
Sam’s wife Nona is a particularly strong center of the family who also at once fits
into and transcends previous Renoir archetypes; she also subverts the conventions of
standard melodrama. On the one hand, Nona is an heiress to the strong, sassy Renoir
heroine who anchors society, such as Valentine in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, or
Maureen O’Hara’s schoolteacher in This Land is Mine. In American wartime
81
Faulkner, Social Cinema 149.
The River’s emphasis on the mysteries of nature is extreme compared to the more pedestrian
relationship to God evident in Sam Tucker’s story.
82
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iconography, she is Rosie the Riveter gone south. Nona’s dogged belief in Sam’s dream
drives the film forward; she encourages Sam at every point that he wants to quit, doing
any job he does to show him the way. His resentment against her angers the greedy
neighbor Devers to the point of wanting to kill Sam, since we learn that his own wife died
as a result of Devers’s stubbornness. Almost too good to be true, Nona Tucker is tired
but never downtrodden; she cleans up the shack, creating a home with carefully arranged
jars of food, family pictures, and the calendar featured in the introduction. Her ability to
light the decrepit stove and make coffee at the family’s two lowest points in the film
literally represents the hearth, the centrality of the family and the will to endure.
Fig. 3.13 No neighborly love for Sam at
Devers’ farm
Fig. 3.14 Nona the hero
Despite her many travails Nona never devolves into the hysterical heroine so
common to conventional Hollywood melodrama. She does not have a “scene” in which
she hits bottom in order to spur Sam along. “There’s work to do,” she sternly lectures
Granny after the catastrophic flood, even as Sam sees “nothin’ but trouble and misery.”
Nona’s exceptionally calm, yet still feminine presence expresses the best possibilities of a
Franco-American perspective that allows realistic personalities to inhabit dramatic
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situations. Considering Nona and Sam’s equal sharing of the duties of farming in order
to truly own what they earn, the Tuckers are the American counterpart to the collective
ideal modeled in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.
Today, interpretations of The Southerner continue to view the film as the moment
where Renoir willingly chose to betray the distinctly French political sensibility of his
1930s work to turn toward muddled “spiritual” work. Christopher Faulkner argues that it
“anticipates a major ideological and epistemological shift in Renoir’s career […] in a
very important sense Renoir is starting again from zero in the United States. With This
Land is Mine he has one foot in the thirties; with The Southerner he has his other foot in
the fifties” (145). According to Faulkner, the Hollywood machine completely obscures
Renoir’s French sensibilities by 1945—he merely parrots “American ideological-generic
structures” in trying his hand at the American pastoral genre (145). In his either/or
reading, Faulkner typifies the tendency to focus on limited cues in order to exclude
difference that might trouble otherwise neat distinctions. The Southerner’s themes of
place, family and the virtue of human connection course throughout his American
projects (beginning with Flight South), and often resemble aspects of his prewar work.
Moreover, none of these projects can be separated out from Renoir’s biography.
Faulkner also reads The Southerner’s focus on family (as opposed to class) as
Renoir’s blatant concession to the demands of Hollywood, where “the family is
ideologically the most important social unit in American cinema” (149). Yet this
perspective discounts the significance of Renoir’s own insistence on remaining in the
U.S. for his son. The patriarch, Sam Tucker also represents the stereotype of the self-
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made man in Faulkner’s reading: “[I]t is essential to what I take to be the spiritual
idealism of the film that we continue to believe Sam free, that what is in fact an
ideological practice be read as natural” (Faulkner 154). This might be true on the
surface—Sam lives by his wits, his brute strength and optimism. Beyond that, however,
Sam is acutely aware of the limits to his freedom—namely his debt to the landowner and
his constant struggle to get by. A water tower advertising Ruston’s company looms
through the window as Sam asks for credit, reminding the viewer that Sam’s
“independence” is illusory. Ruston himself warns Sam, “if I ain’t satisfied with the way
you’re workin’ I aim to break that contract any time I like.” Sam’s faith in God or his
own abilities cannot trump the rights of creditors or eliminate the constant threat of
disease and starvation.
Several salient moments in The Southerner illustrate the harsh existence the
Tuckers, and by extension their kind, face as farmers trying to make a name for
themselves. As their borrowed truck pulls out of the workers’ camp, rows of wood
cabins illustrate the scale of migrant labor and echo John Ford’s portrayal of this
dispossessed community in Grapes of Wrath. 83
83
According to John Mason Brown’s foreword, George Sessions Perry greatly admired Steinbeck’s
Tortilla Flat and Grapes of Wrath, though as a writer he shied away from the overt ideology of those
well-known novels (8). Many of the scenes and even dialogue in The Southerner share a similar
perspective with Ford’s film.
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QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Fig. 3.15
Leaving the workers’ barracks
Behind The Southerner is the premise that an entire group of Americans (and poor around
the world) live a reality the average moviegoer is likely to never have known and should
no longer be content to ignore. What is taken for granted as a basic American right—a
roof over one’s head and a steady job—constitutes the nearly impossible challenge of the
Tuckers’ existence from the beginning. As they pull up to their “property” (again, bought
on credit), the decrepit house sits like an angry black mark on the desolate, sun-bleached
landscape. In voice-over, Sam and Nona discuss their plans as Renoir’s camera wanders
in one long take through the beat-up shack. Unable to hold back her despair, Nona blurts
out, “Oh Sam, the house don’t seem like anything extra.” Beulah Bondi’s interpretation
of crotchety Granny Tucker appears today as a concession to the time, but her role as
comic relief doubles as the voice of past generations. She functions much like the old
concierge in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, who feels the need to comment on the
hopelessness of future generations while in fact living off their resourcefulness. Both
characters are quick to condemn the follies of youth, but even quicker to share in the
success when it comes. Renoir’s “social consciousness” expands beyond the realm of the
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explicit historical moment in his American work. The Tuckers’ overwhelming project
represents the ongoing barriers to advancement for an entire social class.
Renoir’s mythologizing of sensible country folk, so clearly articulated in his
“French Southern” La Marseillaise (1938), thus finds its American equivalent in The
Southerner. But Sam and Nona, unlike those French counterparts, do not change the
course of history. The story of a year in the life of sharecroppers who hope to make their
own way revolves around the centrality of place and virtue; all the action builds toward
an escape from the past through the cultivation of the small piece of land on which the
family has staked its future.84 The Southerner transfers themes of community and
exclusion to a setting that voids the melodramatic mode of its common antagonisms.
Instead, the Tuckers’ “everyday drama” is told in a narrative that presents a moral
dilemma without clearly resolving it. The farm’s destruction by the flood, a random act
of nature, seems undeserved given the Tuckers’ good qualities. Sam’s moral rectitude
does not ensure the avoidance of tragedy, but it does keep his family together and allow
him to pick up the pieces. The Southerner affirms that this is often the best anyone can
hope for.
84
Jean Douchet calls the struggle for property a “theme clé” in Renoir’s films: “l’opposition
fondamentale du non-proprétaire et du propriétaire.” Cf. “Le monde et Un,” Renoir/Renoir (Paris:
Editions de la Martinière, 2005) 94.
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Figs. 3.16 and 3.17
Fig. 3.18
Destruction and perseverance
Getting back to work
Changes wrought by the war in Renoir’s daily life echo onscreen in the Tuckers’
dogged day-to-day perseverance. Rendering their rough but fundamentally rewarding
existence in vignettes that take place over the course of an entire year ultimately allowed
Renoir to build up the themes to the point where the film cohered into a meditation on the
meaning of modern life—a project that very much paralleled Renoir’s own experience at
the time as he remarried, became a citizen, waited for his son and redoubled his efforts
when the going got rough.
Reception: Identity vs. Identification
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The film premiered on August 26, 1945. Criticism of The Southerner, like that of
Swamp Water, attempts to locate the increasingly blurry borders of “French” or
“American” attributes in the province of Renoir’s filmmaking. The Southerner’s
strengths and weaknesses are based on cultural assumptions; at times, a single quality is
used to alternately glorify and vilify the film. A general overemphasis on locating
Renoir’s French modus operandi in these films has only obscured its more significant
trends of identity, culture and melodrama.
The film’s reception over time suggests that The Southerner remains a
contentious portrayal of national identity with an ambiguous message at best. At worst,
critics find the film trading in hillbilly stereotypes, a serious failure in that it breaks from
Renoir’s previous brand of cinéma engagé. The subtext here is that the plight of
sharecroppers falls outside mainstream realities. On the other hand, positive press came
to the film’s defense against a ban by several censor boards in the South who objected to
its portrayal of poverty. Many more American critics in the New York Times and Los
Angeles Times appreciated Renoir’s careful technique and unconventional story. Later,
when the film was released in France, favorable reviews recuperated Renoir français
through certain aspects of the film. French critics saw the presence of Renoir’s
“universal” humanism in his ability to succeed in such a drastically different idiom.
In the October 1945 edition of Screen Writer, Bernard C. Schoenfeld reflected
upon the odds stacked against The Southerner in his playfully entitled essay, “The
Mistakes of David Loew”:
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Here was no ponderous sociological treatise posing as fiction. It was a poignant,
gripping, and dramatic story […] As any screenwriter can tell you, […] you
simply don’t produce a motion picture whose mood is one of hunger and
frustration, whose characters are grim, pellagra-stricken sharecroppers. Jesus
Christ! You can’t even pay your cost if you make such a product!85
Hold Autumn in Your Hand was a risk even before Renoir was attached to it. And
Schoenfeld notes the “universality” of the subject that rescued it from being a narrowly
focused, depressing film. His piece notes the surprising allure of The Southerner’s
regional specificity:
A European adapting a sharecropper story laid in Texas! […] but Loew went
ahead and hired Mr. Renoir because Mr. Renoir is an integrated adult as well as
an artist and knows that Pierre, a hungry farmer in post-war France is no different
than Sam, a hungry sharecropper in Texas.86
The broad dividing lines between pro and anti Southerner criticism adhere to popular
cultural ideas of the time still largely at work today. For Schoenfeld and many others,
The Southerner was the closest translation of Renoir’s Frenchness onto American
celluloid because it found the part of the story that was essentially “no different” from
any other small town narrative. Critic Robert L. Balzer thus viewed Renoir’s French
influences as the origin of the film’s transnational excellence:
Largely the work of Frenchman Jean Renoir, it is a sensitive, literary and artistic
human document of cotton share-croppers in Texas. The Southerner will
doubtless satisfy both those men of production who are conscious of the film’s
value as entertainment, and those who know that they are making an American
record […] suitable for export to foreign lands […] .in an international society.”
Kate Barlay applauded the “European” tendencies in the film as well, describing Renoir
as an ethnographer recording a different species for the benefit of mankind. He “really
85
86
Bernard C. Schoenfeld “The Mistakes of David Loew,” The Screen Writer (October 1945):1-7 2.
Schoenfeld 3.
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got underneath the skin of a group of American people in way that makes them
intelligible to you or me or anyone else anywhere from China to Peru.”87 Indeed, the
American press’ glowing reviews appear to preface the backlash against the escapist
films rife in Hollywood that would be ushered out by the end of the 1940s.
Critics also praised the small-town setting for its rejection of fake Hollywood
glamour. The Southerner was refreshingly “simple yes—but the simplicity of something
profoundly and movingly human.”88 The Los Angeles Times critic also noted how the
humanist bent complemented the film’s entertainment value: “The film has strong and
honest characteristics and does not sacrifice reality for what is known as popular appeal.
It impresses and interests with the humanness of its events, which also carry a strong
theatrical impact” (9).89
For all of the praise, the release was not without its detractors who were critical of
the exact same elements. Among the harshest critics were southerners with influence.
The chairman of the Memphis Board of Censors banned the film because “it showed
‘southerners’ as ‘illiterate mendicants’ and ‘common, low-down, ignorant white trash.”
In a Los Angeles Times interview about the ban Renoir appeared surprised to have
touched off such a debate: “I copied some of my own relatives in the picture,” he said,
“and they are not ‘illiterate mendicants. They are just poor.” Scheuer also mentions that
87
Kate Barlay, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 10 September 1945, Special Collections, Margaret
Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.
88 Barlay, Huddersfield Daily Examiner.
“What made French films so good was the fact that there was no substitute for talent. They were, of
necessity, made very cheaply. Direction, acting, camera work, story just has to be good. In the case
of Hollywood, I think you’ll agree, you often have the feeling that people there would have to think a
little harder if they hadn’t so much money to spend. Renoir seems to have taken this very rare habit of
thought and financial stringency with him across the Atlantic.”
89 Edwin Shallert, “Rural Hardships Well Shown in 'Southerner,'”Los Angeles Times, 4 October 1945.
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Renoir made the film with an eye toward France: “Renoir hopes The Southerner will
correct the misconception abroad that all Yankees are millionaires. It should make the
farmer of France feel friendlier toward the farmer in the U.S.A., he says. He tried to
capture the spirit of simple people the world over.”90 Despite such hopes, cross-cultural
tensions pitting French artistry against American know-how—common stereotypes—
remain dominant criteria in both positive and negative reviews of the film, especially
when we consider French reception of The Southerner.91
When the French critics finally viewed the film in 1950, those long familiar with
Renoir did not know what to make of the Tuckers’ story, which they perceived as wholly
American in subject. André Bazin’s notes to his book on Renoir92 are two rare pages
where he is unequivocally not impressed with the director. He argues that The
Southerner’s flaw is its lack of “complicity” between the French spectator and the story.
For American audiences, The Southerner struck a chord by focusing on the
familiar subject of a hard-working American family set in an unfamiliar locale. For the
French critics, the film’s overall weakness is the result of what they perceive to be
Renoir’s inadequate command of American culture. Bazin pronounced Nona Tucker
“peu vraisemblable. On ne mène pas une telle vie en conservant cette grâce.”(86). “Où
la petite fille va-t-elle a l’école? Ne peuvent-ils vraiment pas acheter chaque jour un
demi-litre de lait?” (86). The theatrical acting clashes with the realistic setting, rendering
90
Philip K. Scheuer, “Memphis Censorial Edict Perplexes Jean Renoir,” Los Angeles Times, 19
August 1945 C1.
91 For example, whereas the Los Angeles Times appreciates Renoir uniting “reality and popular
appeal,” André Bazin calls the characters “not very realistic” precisely because of their unlikely
appeal.
92 Bazin did not finish the book before he died of cancer on November 11, 1958. The Southerner
merits only two pages of the manuscript. Swamp Water is totally absent.
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audience identification with the film impossible. Bazin believed “c’est l’américanisme
qui nous exclut de la complicité des films français et avec Renoir quand on n’est pas
complice…"(86). But Renoir had moved beyond that mode by now, as evidenced by
This Land is Mine, which used deliberate, theatrical staging to present real dilemmas of
the Resistance. Gilcher writes that “The Southerner is a half-breed in many ways,
harking back to the realist style of the 1930’s, and also foreshadowing the artifice of
Renoir’s 1950’s films” (406). Though the film offered elements of each culture, it
amounted to nothing “whole,” and Bazin conceded that the cultural divide was simply too
great to bridge in The Southerner: “Si nous étions Américains nous ne verrions pas plus
d’invraisemblances dans The Southerner que dans Toni où elles ne nous gênaient
absolument pas” (Bazin 86). His implication that only native audiences can truly identify
with American films is surprising coming from a critic whose ideas on the auteur would
lead to endless study of Hollywood directors by French filmmakers.
The few favorable French reviews found Renoir’s ability to “out-American” the
Americans to be the sole praiseworthy aspect of the film. For instance, “[c]’est un bon
film parce que ce Français égaré chez les Yankees a tout de suite mieux compris
l’Amérique que les Américains.”93 For these critics, no amount of time and distance
could erode Renoir’s distinct perspective:
[i]l est trop facile de dire que nos réalisateurs perdent leur personnalité en passant
l’Atlantique…Renoir, dont le tempérament particulier effrayait déjà pas mal de
producteurs français, devait, tout naturellement, être spécialement touché par le
dépaysement…L’Homme du Sud nous le restitue.94
93
94
Robert Chazal, Cinémonde, 5 juin 1950, Jean Renoir Papers.
Jean Néry, Franc-tireur, 2 juin 1950, Jean Renoir Papers.
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Other French reviewers insist on seeing Renoir as a victim of the very same American
influences. In “L’Homme du sud, un Jean Renoir décervelé," the critic laments Renoir’s
lapse into American stereotypes with no bearing on French life. 95
…la culture du coton, la terre en friche, les masures délabrées, les tornades
dévastatrices, toutes ces choses sont trop loin de nous pour que nous y prenions
un intérêt passionné […] beau sujet, a priori [mais] que Renoir ait pu se soumettre
au pire conformisme américain navrera tous ses admirateurs.”96
Others assert Renoir is too brilliant to succumb to the banal pressures of American
filmmaking:
On lit un peu partout qu’il faut distinguer dans l’oeuvre de Renoir une période
française et une période américaine. Ah! Que c’est beau les formules!…De la à
prétendre que sous la pression des magnats de Hollywood, et troublé par des
ennuis personnels, un grand bonhomme comme notre Jean Renoir ait changé son
fusil (de Marey) d’épaule, il y a une marge.97
Yet as the correspondence with producer Loew indicates, the film was carefully marketed
so as not to appear too strange to domestic audiences outside the South, which was still
widely regarded by many Americans as an alien, backward region. A. H. Weiler’s New
York Times review commented on Renoir’s unorthodox narration and setting of the
Tucker family’s story in terms evoking the South’s foreignness: “The Southerner may not
be an ‘entertainment’ in the rigid Hollywood sense […] it is nevertheless a rich, unusual
and sensitive delineation of a segment of the American population worth filming and
95
It is interesting to note that during the Occupation, a spate of agriculturally oriented French films
were produced. Nicole Casi notes that “one-third (35% percent) of the 220 films created during the
Occupation were set in the country.” It is entirely possible that part of the reason for the French
rejection of The Southerner lay in its superficial resemblance to these Vichy-aligned pro-agrarian
“Travail-Famille-Patrie” message films. See Nicole Casi, “Contested Nationalism: Naturalism &
Agrarian Tropes in French Films of the Occupation,” Paroles Gelées 23 (2007).
96 Robert Pilati, Ce soir, 3 juin 1950, Jean Renoir Papers.
97 Henry Magnan, 3 juin 1950, Le Monde, Jean Renoir Papers.
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seeing.” No matter their verdict, the need to explain difference or find common ground
98
with 1930s Renoir is exceptionally strong among the critics, American or otherwise.
Reading Renoir’s Southerns through a French and an American lens has long
been the most appealing approach, but it is one that remains problematic. It is important
to recall, however, that “no culture is full unto itself…there are other cultures which
contradict its authority” (Bhabha 210). The 1945 American reviewers did not see the
Tuckers’ story as part of mainstream “American” culture. Similarly, postwar French
critics favorably received Renoir’s carefully constructed observations of their society (La
Règle du jeu or La Grande Illusion), but similar observations become “peu
vraisemblable” when presented as part of American culture. This double standard begs
the question of whether an artist can present differences within a culture in a way that
remains accessible to other audiences. Or is this, as Bhabha suggests,
“counterproductive” 99 or even impossible? And if so, what then do we make of The
Southerner? If “[h]ybridity is an identification [that] puts together the traces of certain
other meanings or discourses,” then Swamp Water and The Southerner are its models
(211). In them, Renoir articulates a vision of American life at once familiar and
strange—American and French, American but Southern.
98
A.H. Weiler, review, The New York Times, 27 August 1945. The New York Times Film Reviews
1913-1970, ed. George Amberg (New York: Arno-Quandrangle, 1971) 217.
99 “…it is actually very difficult and even impossible and counterproductive, to try and fit together
different forms of culture and to pretend that they can easily coexist. The assumption that at some
level all forms of cultural diversity may be understood on the basis of a particular universal concept,
whether it be “human being, “ class or race, can be both very dangerous and very limiting in trying to
understand the ways in which cultural practices construct their own systems of meaning and social
organization” Bhabha 209.
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The mere fact that Renoir succeeded with American audiences was sufficient to
earn him French skepticism about The Southerner’s value in France. Reflecting on this
phenomenon, Raymond Durgnat observes, “fidelity to an alien culture may seem
‘absurdity’ to spectators who know too little of it” (250). Naomi Green’s historical study
of the clash between French cinema’s images of “a certain idea of France” and the
postwar “shattering [of this] hegemonic vision of the national past” anticipates the
problems Renoir faced as a director in America when he turned to more American
subjects (7). Before French cinema in the postwar era returned to uncomfortable themes
of guilt and morality Green describes, the cinéma de qualité focused on lavish romantic
stories meant to compete with Hollywood spectacles and revive the struggling French
film industry. French reviews of The Southerner imply that Renoir ignored a general
responsibility among French directors to restore their country’s glory (thus we get film
critic Robert Pilati’s allegations of “le pire conformisme américain [qui] navrera tous ses
admirateurs”) (4). Indeed, following Green’s thesis, Renoir would have been perceived
as one of the first casualties of this postwar fragmentation in French cinema; in a sense,
his decision to remain in America and make films about everyday life in Georgia and
Texas was an abandonment of the Golden Age of French cinema Renoir had helped
create (Green 7). On their surface, these American films constituted a visual “shattering”
of his distinct, cherished French identity.
Conclusion
Linda Williams proposes that we “understand melodrama for what it is as
opposed to “failed tragedy or inadequate realism […] it is “better to view melodrama as a
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mode with its own place in classical cinema”(48-50). The perceived lack of social realism
(i.e. evoking the intersection of the social and political as in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
or La Bête humaine) in Renoir’s American films is actually redirected toward the
protagonists’ interior struggles. What films like Swamp Water and The Southerner ask of
the spectator is not simply “identification,” but a “complex negotiation between emotions
and between emotion and thought” that is closer to the domain of melodrama (Williams
49). As myriad film reviews show, the Southerner affected audiences with a complexity
well beyond a simple thumbs up or down. The Tuckers’ and the Ragans’ stories adhere
to the melodramatic mode in appeals to viewers’ own ability to feel for them. Renoir’s
images consistently amplify seemingly unimportant, secondary elements (the meandering
shots of the river off Sam’s property, the banter between Granny and the rest of the
family). Yet Renoir also threads social realities into the emotional stories, and each
character’s development “depend[s] on thinking with social tools and acting in social
ways” (Edensor 24). Ben needs the town’s respect to earn his living; Sam is a noble
farmer and family man, but he cannot realize his dream without Ruston’s mass-produced
tools.
Both Swamp Water and The Southerner demonstrate that social themes, especially
that of injustice, provided the impetus for Renoir’s work on both sides of the Atlantic.
Alain Renoir discussed is father’s commitment to progress: “I [saw] him […] get in
absolute rages about social justice. Every instance of social injustice would really get
him going” (Interview). The Southerner belongs as much to the social justice picture
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category as Crime de Monsieur Lange or Toni.100 Swamp Water and The Southerner
manifest two increasingly dominant trends in Renoir’s life and art: the importance of
personal relationships within and beyond the filmmaking community; and the
combination of melodrama and realism to incorporate these two defining elements of
Hollywood and French film narrative. Even more than Swamp Water, The Southerner
afforded Renoir material closer to his particular exilic perspective on the rhythms of
community and exclusion. He also had the freedom to frame the narrative in a way
appropriate to its content—as a slowly unfolding story set against the isolating fields of
Texas.
The notion of place and perseverance toward a difficult goal coincide with
Renoir’s own attempts to put down roots in America. By 1945, he had decided to remain
in the United States. In letters to his financial advisor and friend, Louis Guillaume, he set
forth the reasons behind his decision: “1. Duvivier tells [Claude Renoir Sr.] the French
cinema is in bad shape, seems unfair to go back and compete for the scarce resources
after having lived comfortably in the US. 2. My son is fighting, and I don’t want to leave
before he gets back and I help him settle in.”101 The progression from Swamp Water’s
heightened coming-of-age drama to The Southerner’s more subdued tale of family life
parallels Renoir’s reconciliation of his interests with the culture of Hollywood.
Upon their postwar release in France, Swamp Water and The Southerner’s
American exterior caused many French critics to grapple with the dilemma of Renoir’s
100
The PCA analysis chart, for instance, classifies it as belonging to the “Drama—Social Problem”
genre, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library.
101 Jean Renoir, letter to Louis Guillaume, 24 February 1945, Jean Renoir Papers.
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national identity as a filmmaker. These efforts to categorize, though understandable,
overlook Renoir’s intentions. More than anything, he wanted to demonstrate the
potential to achieve a simultaneous identity that blended familiar perspectives with
alternative ones. The “everyday” dramas of Ben’s and Sam’s search for identity belong to
the traditions of both melodrama and the classical Hollywood cinema. If both classical
and melodramatic modes involve a negotiation of forms, then criticism that categorizes
The Southerner or Swamp Water as failed realism misses the interconnectedness of realist
and melodramatic modes. In their narrative, character, and style, both works breached
the limits of classical Hollywood cinema, and did so without falling into the category of
classical French film. By anchoring the films around distinctly American characters,
Renoir was able to move beyond conventions with his plot, pacing and style to portray a
South that was socially relevant without relying on the explicit historical moment.
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