Cinema: Black + White = Grey

Hurry Sundown is a gigantic masquerade in which the participants put on two things: a Southern accent and the audience. Based on K. B. Gilden’s 1965 bestseller, Hurry Sundown examines Georgia’s effluent society after World War II. Its focus is the fortunes and follies of the Warren family, a sorry collection of scapegraces and scapegoats. Henry, played by England’s Michael Caine with a surprisingly plausible spoonbread locution, is a draft-dodging mongrel. He aims to become a real estate mogul by grabbing passels of farm land from his soldier-cousin Rad (John Phillip Law) and his Negro neighbor, Reeve (Robert Hooks).

Henry has an infallible touch for ruining whatever he comes near. Even his own little boy becomes a psychotic Oedipus wreck. Sin-burned by Henry’s faults, his wife (Jane Fonda) leaves him, heading to the Menninger Clinic with their maimed son. Impotent with rage, Henry dynamites his cousin’s farm, accidentally killing one of Rad’s boys. Rad and Reeve combine to rebuild the land—a union of black and white that seems grey and unconvincing.

Obviously, Hurry Sundown was intended as a paean to racial justice, but Producer-Director Otto Preminger chooses strange ways to display his big brotherhood. One sequence shows Negro sharecroppers singing a white-eyed hallelujah number reminiscent of those ’40s films that pretended to liberalize but patently patronized. Two hours of such cinematic clichés make the viewer intolerant of everyone in the film, regardless of race, creed or color.