The Southerner, 1945

The Southerner is a 1945 American drama film directed by Jean Renoir and based on the 1941 novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand by George Sessions Perry. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Director (the only Oscar nomination Renoir received), Original Music Score, and Sound. Renoir was named Best Director by the National Board of Review, which also named the film the third best of 1945. The film portrays the hardships of a poor family struggling to establish a cotton farm in Texas in the early 1940s.

The Southerner was the fourth of six films that Jean Renoir directed while living in the United States during the 1940s. It was also the first of his independent Hollywood productions. Renoir’s other “American” films are Swamp Water (1941), This Land Is Mine (1943), The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (1943), The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), and The Woman on the Beach (1947). The Southerner, however, is now regarded by some reviewers and film historians to be his “Hollywood masterpiece” and generally recognized as the French director’s “most American” film with regard to its content, structure, and overall presentation.