LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the Movies The Southerner—A picture handicapped by a too-inclusive and too-emphatic title, which is a challenge to criticism from all sorts of sources, good and bad, for failure to satisfy...
...Called — poetically and somewhat cryptically—"Hold Autumn in Your Hand," like the novel from which it was made, it might have gone its uncontroversial course as a sympathetic revelation of one family's struggle to achieve economic independence in one of the cotton-growing states...
...His young wife is in the truest sense a helpmate, and the 2 kids are the kind who not only go to school with eager minds but take back home what they have learned there, and make it part of their lives...
...The story is of the Spring, Summer, and Autumn in one year of these people's lives...
...Being made by Joe Pasternack—who, since he started Deanna Durbin on her prosperous way, has become a top expert at this sort of entertainment—it will keep the boxoffice tills running over...
...But it does celebrate human dignity, and the patient wisdom of those who live close to the soil because they love it...
...The future for them...
...Katherine Grayson warbles nicely and is a pleasant heroine...
...It doesn't look too hopeful— the film isn't preaching optimism and invokes no remedy except through a casual suggestion that city workers and farm laborers might be of more help to each other...
...And 4 stars...
...The show slips really seriously only once...
...He is the sea-wolf who knows all the ways with women, Frank the bashful follower who wants to learn...
...Light on the Movies The Southerner—A picture handicapped by a too-inclusive and too-emphatic title, which is a challenge to criticism from all sorts of sources, good and bad, for failure to satisfy each and every individual notion of what the title implies...
...It has music—all the way from sentimental songs and the Brahms lullaby to uncountable pianos pounding out a Hungarian Rhapsody in the Hollywood Bowl...
...People who go to swoon over Frank Sinatra will keep alert to watch Gene Kelly...
...It has comedy—the kind that comes from likable people getting into and out of scrapes...
...Dancing, just about as novel and gay and delightful as the screen has contrived (Gene Kelly contrived it...
...It has already caught the attention of the censors in Memphis, and without any explanation they have banned its showing in that city...
...A new little boy (Dean Stockwell) for motherish emotions to gurgle over...
...Sam, the young hero, is one step beyond a migratory worker: he has become a tenant farmer—a share cropper...
...A family of character and good stuff— they have only nature and human nature to contend with...
...Family...
...He is no "poor white"—intelligent, ambitious, his heart is in farming and he knows how to cope with a farmer's problems...
...Frank, with his Fairbanks grin and his songs (he also dances), is easy and natural in a part that fits him, and Gene is everything a musical show could want, a fresh and vigorous Fred Astaire plus...
...Not since The Grapes of Wrath has an American film got so close to the lives of the struggling poor...
...They move into a house a little better than a dilapidated hen-coop...
...But Zach-ary Scott, Betty Field, J. Carroll Naish, and Beulah Bondi, for all their varying divergences of accent, seem really under the skin of their parts...
...A little girl named Sharon McManus who helps out in one of Kelly's dances entrancingly...
...Estelle Taylor, briefly back from the older days, has a vivid bit in a bar-room...
...The labor of clearing the land is back-breaking...
...Jose Iturbi (now the staple Hollywood maestro for getting nice movie girls started on spectacular musical careers) continues his unashamed flirtation with the camera, with his usual aplomb, and participates molto spiritoso in all the classier musical items...
...It is not over-weighted by plot—2 sailors on leave who eventually get the right girls...
...The out-doors in which so much if it was made gives it a strong impact of being fact, not story, but fact which the director, Jean Renoir, has subtly illumined with poetry—poetry of picture and poetry of character...
...That Brooklyn gag...
...Good food for the children is scarce, even the well won't work...
...The characters will seem more or less real according to how critically one happens to apply a personal knowledge of how Southerners really talk...
...Family) * * * Anchors Aweigh—This lavish show has "about everything anyone could look for in a musical, almost too abundantly...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 37
