Sounder (1972)

Sounder was nominated for Best Picture of 1972, the year of The Godfather, so it was always an unlikely candidate to win the top award. However, it was unlikely in another way as well. This is a film with a predominantly black cast that tells the story of family of sharecroppers in Louisiana during the Depression, hardly the subject matter for many movies during the early 1970s. Sounder came out during the burgeoning "blaxploitation" era when films about inner-city black life, not history lessons about the black experience in the Depression, were more popular. Sounder, however, is an exceptional movie worthy of the attention that it received and worthy of our continuing admiration today.

The plot is somewhat simple, as befits a movie based upon an award-winning children's book. Nathan Lee Morgan (Paul Winfield) and Rebecca Morgan (Cicely Tyson) have gotten into debt as sharecroppers, as many of the poor did who were forced into this kind of work. Nathan steals meat one night for his family, particularly his eldest child, David Lee (Kevin Hooks), and is jailed and then sent to a prison work camp. The family, however, cannot find out to which camp Nathan Lee has been sent until a white woman, Mrs. Boatwright (Carmen Mathews), intercedes on their behalf. David Lee walks many miles to visit his father in the camp, but he fails to find Nathan Lee once he gets there. Instead, he stumbles upon a school where the teacher and all of the pupils are black, quite a difference from the predominantly white school he is sometimes able to attend back home. It's a revelatory moment for David Lee, one that he is excited to share when he returns home.

I haven't yet mentioned the dog, but he's rather significant to the story. His name is Sounder, and he's shot while Nathan Lee is being taken into custody. Sounder disappears for a while, but he returns when he has started to heal. I don't want to make too much of the fact that Nathan Lee also has to leave for a while and returns to his family still wounded yet healing, but the film itself seems to make that parallel.

One of the most impressive aspects of this film is its cinematography. The images in Sounder are especially evocative of the era with the fields and houses and forests. It's beautifully shot, and while I know that infusing such a story as the oppression of an entire race of people with beautiful imagery could be construed the wrong way, I think part of the beauty of this film is in its attention to real detail as well. It doesn't attempt to make the grinding work of the sorghum mill, for example, any less sweat-inducing or labor-intensive than it really is. If you've ever been to Louisiana or other similar places in the South, you'll recognize just how accurate the film is in its depictions.

Everyone in the cast is fantastic. Winfield brings a touch of humor to his part, yet he also allows you to see just how close to being completely exhausted a man can become. Hooks was making his motion picture debut, and he's a revelation. He has an incredibly expressive face, and his eyes reveal the thoughts that his David Lee is unable at times to speak. Hooks has become more famous as a director and producer now, but he had a talent for acting. You might recognize James Best in the role of Sheriff Young; he's perhaps better known as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard. Did he always get the call when they needed a redneck sheriff? He's good at the part, certainly, but I bet he wishes he had a career with more range to it.

I've saved the best for last, of course, and that's Cicely Tyson. What an amazing actress she is. I first saw her on television in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a movie I recently got to see again. She had already been acting almost a dozen years before she got the part in Sounder, and it made her a star. She's outstanding in the part. She has a quiet dignity going about her day-to-day errands here, and yet she allows you to see the pain she is feeling when the sheriff refuses her entrance (as a woman) to the men's jail to see her husband. It's a standout performance in a year that saw many strong women's roles. She lost to Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, but she's the equal (or the better) of any of the actresses nominated that year. Sounder is only one of the great performances she has given throughout her illustrious career, and I'm very grateful to have had a chance to watch it.