French Twist

Jean Renoir's Forgotten Hollywood Classic

Jean Renoir, the great French director of such films as Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, spent the World War II years living in exile in Hollywood where he made several movies. Most are considered failures as Renoir's talents were ill-suited to the studio system that limited his creative freedom. One, however, The Southerner, filmed at Hollywood Center Studios (then General Service Studio) in 1945, is an underappreciated gem.
  
Based on a novel by George Perry Sessions, The Southerner tells the story of a family of sharecroppers trying to eke out a living from hard scrabble farmland in the face of drought, depression and hostile neighbors.

Renoir made the film for producer David Loew, son of MGM founder Marcus Loew, who owned General Service Studio briefly during the war. (The Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca was another Loew production shot at that time on the lot.) The French director found in Loew a supporter for his auteur style of filmmaking. When Joel McRae balked at Renoir's script, Loew agreed to let the director make the film with relative unknown Zachary Scott and then played hardball with United Artists when it tried to back out of a distribution agreement.

The film proved controversial especially in the South over its unflattering portrait of the region. It was banned in Tennessee and boycotted by the Ku Klux Klan.

Southern writer James Agee insisted its representation of Southern life was inaccurate and pointed out that the actors did not speak with authentic accents (despite uncredited dialogue assistance from William Faulkner).

Yet, even with its lack of star power and promotional support from United Artists, the film posted a modest commercial success, earned generally favorable reviews and brought Renoir his only Academy Award nomination for Best Direction. (He received an honorary Oscar in 1975.)

In more recent times, respect for The Southerner has grown, especially among film academics who view it as a superb example of Renoir's poetic realism. Historian Mirella Jona Affron suggests that Renoir's Depression Era South is intended more as a metaphor for than a literal rendering of "a land of loneliness and isolation."