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.
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
The Current Cinema
“Love Lies Bleeding” and the Perils of Genre
Crackling performances from Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian can’t quite disguise a thinness of characterization in Rose Glass’s neo-noir.
By Richard Brody
The Current Cinema
The Form-Blurring Fury of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”
Radu Jude’s TikTok-tinged movie can be breathtakingly funny, but the absurdity is rooted in a powerful sense of outrage.
By Justin Chang
The Front Row
Med Hondo’s Vital Political Cinema Comes to New York
The Mauritanian filmmaker, long active in France, reveals the legacy of colonialism in society at large and in the art of movies.
By Richard Brody
Goings On
Michael Schulman’s Oscar Predictions
Also: Kwikstep and Rokafella’s freestyle-dance party, Tierra Whack, Richard Linklater’s new documentary, and more.