Hurry Sundown Reviews

This mint julep melodrama is a hooty delight. I suppose that at the time it was meant to shine a light on racial injustice but it just comes off as a overbaked soap opera. Preminger was the wrong director for such a piece of honeyed excess, this is the type of thing at which Douglas Sirk excelled and could make trenchant observations while still entertaining the masses. Still worth watching for the cast alone. Jane Fonda gives the most enjoyable performance even if her honeychile accent comes and goes. And even as a sharecropper's wife with four kids Faye Dunaway manages to look ravishing.

I pretty much agree with Jay Nixon about this sweaty sexual and racial drama but not the part about Doug Sirk being a more obvious choice for director: both Sirk and Preminger had auteurist champions (e.g. Andrew Sarris), and although it's true Sirk brought a touch of class to soap opera, this is not such a film. It is a fairly good portrait of sharecropper misery and landowner excess, including the then-controversial sequence in which Jane Fonda plays a sax organ from a position between Michael Caine's legs. (A few years earlier the same director shocked audiences with "The Moon is Blue" with its realistic depiction of an attempt to seduce a real live "virgin"!) I doubted anyone, certainly not Paramount, would transfers these Dixie doings to DVD, but Olive Films did so, politically incorrect dialogue intact. (Look, and listen, for the scene in which Burgess Meredith refers to a mature African-American as "an ugly, syphilitic old n----r woman." At the time the film was released civil rights were still very much on the minds of Americans, and this film might be seen as a companion piece to the much inferior "Mandingo," released about the same time. This one at least avoids stereotypical, cardboard characters, and John Phillip Law did his best acting here. (I was a fan.)