Sounder (1972)
Grade: 85
One of the biggest sleepers of 1972 was "Sounder", a film about a black family confronted with poverty and racism in Depression-era rural Louisiana. The family's struggles to stay together despite the fates seemingly against them struck a nerve with both movie audiences and Oscar voters. "Sounder" received four major nominations: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (Lonne Elder III, based on the short novel by William H. Armstrong), Best Actor (Paul Winfield) and Best Actress (Cicely Tyson). Perhaps director Martin Ritt and composer Taj Mahal's sparse blues score should have been nominated as well.
Winfield is the head of the sharecropping family. With his family going hungry, he steals a ham, leading to his being sentenced to a hard labor camp. Tyson is Winfield's laundress wife, now forced to field labor along with their three pre-teenaged children. Wide-eyed David Lee (Kevin Hooks), the oldest and most promising, has the true leading role in Hooks' film debut. In addition to working the farm and attending school, he embarks on a journey to visit his father at a distant labor camp.
The film can be criticized for its saintly characterization of the three children, who exhibit only the mildest symptoms of selfishness, sibling rivalry and brattiness. And it seems odd that David Lee is encouraged in his ardous and dangerous trek to visit his father, when surely he is needed at home and at school. These problems are more than compensated by the telling script and cinematography, which brings alive the rural South of the 1930s.
The social commentary of "Sounder" is obvious but never heavy-handed. Blacks are segregated and second-class, powerless and facing a life of poverty and unskilled labor. White men in a position of power use it to maintain Jim Crow order, and are often sanctimonious and cruel. The poverty-striken family in "Sounder" never loses hope, however, and their hopes seem bundled up in the future of David Lee.
kollers@mpsi.net http://members.tripod.com/~Brian_Koller/movies.html
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