Sounder is a movie that surpasses its initial constraints to deliver a deeply emotional and evocative experience. At first glance, it appears to be a rigid, well-meaning film about Black sharecroppers during the Depression, yet it transforms into something far more moving and resonant. Martin Ritt’s direction, coupled with a script by Lonne Elder III, avoids melodrama and earns every emotion, making the film about Black strength and resilience a rarity in its genre. The actors, including Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Taj Mahal, bring a sophisticated, modern consciousness to their roles, allowing the audience to connect with their performances on a deeper level. The film evokes the spirit of documentary art, drawing comparisons to the work of photographers like Dorothea Lange, and explores themes of dignity, deprivation, and the harsh realities of life in the Deep South. While the movie’s polished aesthetic may feel a bit grand for its subject, its emotional depth and moral indignation elevate it beyond its genre, leaving a lasting impact on the viewer.
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Soul Food
by Pauline Kael
It’s easy to say why you think a movie is bad, but elements of embarrassment sneak into praise, and, besides, in American studio-financed movies, in which the director must often squeeze blood from stones, there is an element of the mysterious, plus fantastic luck, when the infinity of things that could go wrong go right, or when what goes right overwhelms the disasters. And of the movies that have gone superlatively right Sounder must be one of the most difficult to explain. At the beginning, the actors playing black sharecroppers in the Depression years looked rigid and inexpressive, and I expected one of those priggish, worthwhile stinkers that the movie industry can cite as proof that people don’t go to the clean-minded family pictures they say they want. But the picture grows startlingly better. Who would have believed that an inspirational movie about black strength and pride — and one based on a prize-winning children’s book, by a white author, that takes its name from a symbolic coon hound — could transcend its cautious, mealy genre to become the first movie about black experiences in America which can stir people of all colors? In theme — the child of the sharecroppers finds a path to the larger world — it resembles the Welsh boy’s story that Emlyn Williams told in The Corn Is Green, but it is an infinitely superior movie, and with a far greater emotional range. The director, Martin Ritt, working from a scrupulous, unsentimental script by Lonne Elder III, based on the William H. Armstrong novel, avoids charging up the scenes; Ritt never pushes a moment too hard or too far — the movie earns every emotion we feel. And I think it will move audiences — move them truly, that is — as few films ever have.
It does this even though we don’t quite believe in any of it. The performers are wonderful — Cicely Tyson as the gaunt mother, Paul Winfield as the father, Kevin Hooks as the oldest of their three children, Taj Mahal as their singing friend Ike, and Janet MacLachlan as the teacher. But in some part of the brain we are always conscious that these are trained, educated, modern city folks playing poor country folks. When we look at Cicely Tyson, we know that those are high-fashion bones passing for starving gaunt; we know that that is Taj Mahal, the superb musician, play-acting in worn overalls on the back-country road; the volumes on Crispus Attucks that the teacher gives the boy to read are a very tony selection. This movie about the poor and uneducated is the opposite of artless; yet it isn’t corrupted by the sophistication — it’s the sophistication that makes it possible for us to accept it. I doubt whether a movie could be successfully simple and artless on any black subject now. Our nerves are raw, our sensitivities exacerbated. We need a modern consciousness on the screen even though the year in the movie is 1933, because the conventional movie trust-in-the-Lord black mother would be intolerable to us, a superstitious black mother a scandal. Rebecca, the illiterate woman Cicely Tyson plays, is unconned and intelligent, and we can see the workings of her mind, although the white people she deals with don’t see through her guardedness — the protective mask of anonymity she turns to them. In too many melodramas, the sympathetic characters among the blacks and half-breeds and Asians have been as children, naive and helplessly dependent on the decency and generosity of the stalwart white heroes. This movie shows the Deep Southern whites playing their custodian-of-the-childish-blacks role as it is seen from the other side — by black people who are not fooled. That shifts the audience’s identification completely around. The film’s view is that deprivation, suffering, and being cheated have destroyed the sharecroppers’ illusions and sharpened their wits: they are people who can’t afford illusions and hence do not have them. This may be a slight idealization, but it’s closer to the truth; it has the force of justice, and it’s what we now want to believe. And Ritt validates this view in the film. He endows his actors with the dignity that accuses us when we look at photographs by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange or Helen Levitt, or when we read Robert Coles or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Sounder is authentic to the spirit of that documentary art — the art of photographers, mainly, but of novelists and other writers, too — which has helped create a general awareness of injustice and brought many whites to share the sorrow of it.
Simplifying their performances to essentials, the actors achieve the desperate dignity of the very poor, their faces purged of all but the primary human anxieties. They never ask for sympathy, and the reserve in the performers enables us to respond: we don’t have to believe in this specific story, or in the actors as the characters they’re playing, to be moved. The movie opens us up emotionally, not to them but to everything they evoke — to what they’re standing in for. When the actors’ faces and gestures echo the people caught by the Depression artist-photographers, we think of all those trashed lives. The characters on the screen are coexistent with the memory of the black people in the recent civil-rights demonstrations who put on their Sunday clothes to be beaten up in. Memories like this distance us, painfully, and we need an element of formality in the performances so that we don’t allow ourselves the release of easy forms of identification. This movie enables us to feel without feeling for ourselves, and that’s what the artists among the photographers did for us, too. In addition, the movie taps one of the enigmas of this century: that the people in old photographs (and not just rural black people or poor people but even middle-class and rich white people) have an inexplicable nobility. We look into the photographs of people now dead and we feel a twinge that we don’t feel when we look at paintings of them; it’s an acute sense of mortality and loss. Sounder, with its links to photojournalism, affects us in this same way: the people are puzzlingly, achingly beautiful.
Cicely Tyson has the singular good fortune to play the first great black heroine on the screen. Long overdue; but Miss Tyson makes us feel that her Rebecca was worth waiting for. She is visually extraordinary — every movement true to the archetype in our heads — and her voice is so precisely controlled that her soft words can pierce one’s defenses. Her cry as she runs down the road toward her husband, returning from prison, is a phenomenon — something even the most fabled actresses might not have dared. This scene will live, along with descriptive images of the terrified poor which Agee gave us, along with the Dorothea Lange faces. To audiences now, this homecoming scene could mean as much as that other great homecoming scene — the little colonel’s return from the war in The Birth of a Nation — did to early movie audiences. If so, it may help to right the balance, because this story of resilience and triumph is the birth of black consciousness on the screen. Shaft and its ilk are merely in blackface. Sounder distills — and in the most delicate, unstressed way — the prodigious, deep-down gaiety of black people. Taj Mahal helps, with the earthy-hip score he provided, and Paul Winfield, in the critical role of the volatile father, with his quick smile. One could do an iconography of smiles from this movie; often it is a smile that ends a scene, and it always seems the perfect end, just what was needed — an emblem of the spirit of a people, proof that they have not been destroyed.
Ritt uses the Louisiana locations unostentatiously; he gets the tone he needs, and the gracefully measured pace. Each shot lasts long enough for us to perceive what’s in it, and feel at ease, before we move on; the rhythm is unusually satisfying. Still, the look of the film is not quite right: Sounder was shot in Panavision — a process I like for its ultra-sharp focus, and yet a process that gives this subject too much visual weight. The scale of the Panavision imagery produces a slight aesthetic discomfort: it’s a little grandiloquent for a sharecropper’s family. Maybe because this is an American-made film that starts from an inspirational story and is somewhat overproduced, it doesn’t completely cross the barrier that separates the fine commercial craftsmen from the poets like Renoir and De Sica and Satyajit Ray, who at their best make a movie seem easy and natural, just the most direct and simple way to express yourself. (The Europeans who have worked here have never been able to express themselves in the same natural way, either.) In feeling, though, Sounder does cross over; it works directly on our feelings the way film poets do. Ritt shows situations in their complexity through the simplest of means, as in the Christmas scene in Claude Jutra’s My Uncle Antoine when the mineowner rides through town in his carriage tossing trinkets at the children of the mineworkers, and the parents are torn, not wanting to deprive their children of the toys yet humiliated to see them pick up this miserly beneficence. We watch the hesitant, eager children and the parents divided against themselves, and we, too, are divided — between the beauty of perception that brings us such moments and the anguish of having, from this time on, to live with this perception. Sounder has performances that do this to us, and sequences, too. You wake up the morning after you’ve seen the picture and you hear the father’s voice as he tells his son that he doesn’t have to stay at home, that wherever he is, the father will love him, and you can’t bear it.
I said that what goes right in Sounder is difficult to explain: I can’t think of any other movie that is questionable as a work of film art that is so emotionally rich that it stays with you this way. Like certain great political pamphlets and muckraking novels, it is informed with a moral indignation that raises it to a plane above its genre. Perhaps Sounder, with its vestigial dog story and do-gooding plot line, was somehow transformed into this root black myth of the strong mother and the loving, rash father fighting for his manhood by a director who was fighting for his manhood as a director. I’ve tried to avoid describing the action of Sounder too specifically, because I should like others to have the pleasures of discovery that I had.
The New Yorker, September 30, 1972
