DVD of the Week: Hurry Sundown

Jane Fonda may not have quite as many lines as does Michael Caine in Otto Preminger’s 1967 drama “Hurry Sundown” (which I discuss in this clip), but she’s the moral center of the story. She plays (with a gritty Southern accent) a small-town Georgia socialite whose sharp-dealing husband is putting together a land deal for a developer; her former nanny (whom she calls her “mammy”), an elderly black woman, owns a piece of land that’s needed to complete the deal. (The film will be released on DVD on May 17th by Olive Films.) The drama (from a script by Horton Foote and Thomas C. Ryan) takes some time to get going—it’s got a lot of moving parts, and Preminger doesn’t so much push the action ahead as he watches it seethe. It’s an angry movie, with race relations at the core; the worst racial epithets are flung with disgusting casualness, the self-loathing of the long-abased rises bitterly, and—with a few signal exceptions—nearly the entire white Southern milieu appears infected with the virus of racism, which (as seen in the clip) comes off as just one of its many endemic varieties of cavalier brutality. In particular, Preminger—the son of a prosecutor and himself a onetime law student—takes angry pleasure in exposing the way the judicial system, led by a self-righteous and glad-handing judge (Burgess Meredith), is silently and stealthily rigged against blacks, giving them their day in court and making sure it will end badly for them. And Fonda’s performance, showing the socialite’s coming-of-consciousness as much politically as domestically, foreshadows the activism that—as Hilton Als’s splendid Profile of her in the magazine this week (available to subscribers) shows—has been central to her art and to her life.