Martin Ritt (1972)
COVID-19 has put a huge distance between the present and the immediate past. It seems ages ago – it’s actually seven months – that the latest controversy erupted around so-white lists of nominees for film acting awards. It is ages ago, nearly half a century, that Sounder made Hollywood history as the first film in which both African-American leads were nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Actor (Paul Winfield) and Best Actress (Cicely Tyson) categories. (This has happened only once since: Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett in What’s Love Got to Do with It in 1994.) It may well be that Sounder, also nominated for Best Picture and Best (Adapted) Screenplay, was recognised largely to enable the Academy to feel good about its broad-mindedness; it was no surprise the film ended up Oscar-less, in a year when the awards were dominated by big-hitters that, more unusually, were also deserving winners, Cabaret and The Godfather. What is surprising is how quickly Sounder then faded from view. I didn’t manage to see the film on its original release. Since then, I don’t remember passing up a single opportunity to record it from television or, in more recent years, see it at BFI.
Sounder’s profile is unlikely to increase in long retrospect though not because it isn’t a good film (which it is). Martin Ritt’s drama would now be widely considered objectionable because it’s a story of black lives told by a white director and based on a (1970) novel by a white writer, William H Armstrong, although Lonne Elder III, who wrote the screenplay, was African-American. In 1993, a Paris Review interviewer put it to Toni Morrison, regarding William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), that ‘a lot of people felt that Styron didn’t have a right to write about Nat Turner’. Morrison replied that ‘He has a right to write about whatever he wants. To suggest otherwise is outrageous’. Cultural (mis)appropriation is a much bigger issue now than then. It would cut no ice with those who feel strongly about it that, by the time he made Sounder, Ritt had a more substantial track record than perhaps any Hollywood contemporary in making films with serious racial themes and/or major roles for black actors – Edge of the City (1957), Paris Blues (1961), The Great White Hope (1970).
Even so, Sounder was for Ritt a more extensive ‘extracultural’ undertaking. All three main characters – the mother, father and eldest child in a family of sharecroppers – are black; and the film depends almost entirely on convincing description of who they are and how they live. The story is set in Louisiana, in the depths of the Great Depression in 1933. In the opening episode, Nathan Lee Morgan (Paul Winfield) and his elder son, twelve-year-old David Lee (Kevin Hooks), are out after dark in woodland near their home, hunting a raccoon. It eludes them, despite the tenacious efforts of their dog, Sounder. You’re not sure why the raccoon quest is so important to Nathan until he tells David Lee it’s the only way of putting meat, which they can’t presently afford to buy, on the family table. The hunters return home empty-handed. David Lee’s younger brother, Earl (Eric Hooks), and sister, Josie Mae (Yvonne Jarrell), are already asleep in bed, and he joins them there. When his mother, Rebecca (Cicely Tyson), comes back outside, her husband is nowhere to be seen. The following morning there is meat on the breakfast table – pig meat at that. Later that day, Nathan is taken into custody for stealing a ham from a neighbour. He’s subsequently sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in a prison camp. His wife and children don’t even know where.
In the interval, short in screen time as well as actual time, between the raccoon hunt and Nathan’s arrest, Martin Ritt does a good job of introducing the Morgans’ normal life – David Lee’s in particular. He has to walk miles to school. On this occasion, he arrives slightly late; the unsmiling teacher (Merle Sharkey) tells him off and to take his seat. She is white, as are nearly all the other pupils. At the end of lessons, David Lee is keen to get back to watch the conclusion to a baseball match among the locals where his father is the star turn. On their return home from his sporting triumph the family sees the local sheriff (James Best) and another man waiting to apprehend Nathan. As his master is driven away, Sounder runs after the car, barking loudly. The sheriff’s sidekick fires a gun at the dog and wounds him. The terrified, yelping animal disappears into the woods, where David Lee tries and fails to find him. This sequence, as well as being instantly upsetting, is a very effective expression of the sudden rupturing of family routine and security.
What follows, in terms of both plot and themes, is quite a simple narrative. In Nathan’s absence, Rebecca and the children see to the year’s sugar cane crop. Mrs Boatwright (Carmen Matthews), a white widow for whom Rebecca does laundry, finds out, through snooping on a visit to the sheriff’s office, where Nathan is being held. With Rebecca’s blessing, David Lee embarks on a days-long trek to visit his father, accompanied by Sounder, who has reappeared. They reach the camp but, before David Lee can find Nathan, he’s sent packing by a violent prison guard whose whiplash badly cuts his hand. The boy comes upon a schoolroom. Here, the pupils are African-American, as is their teacher, Camille Johnson (Janet McLachlan). After tending his hand wound, she invites David Lee to stay at her home for a short while before resuming his long return journey. The teacher makes such an impression on him that, when he comes back, David Lee asks Rebecca if he can attend Miss Johnson’s school in future, staying at her house and returning home outside term-time. Not long afterwards, his father is unexpectedly released from prison. A leg injury, the legacy of an explosion in a mine where his prison detail was working, has seriously impaired Nathan’s mobility. It’s enough to change David Lee’s mind about going to Miss Johnson’s school. Nathan, however, insists that he must go and he finally does.
David Lee’s education, a central element of Sounder, is used by Ritt and Lonne Elder to make incisive points. The boy’s solitary journey down dusty roads to the nearest school, because it’s a journey he undertakes so regularly, comes over as more arduous than his and Sounder’s mission to find Nathan. In the white schoolroom, the children are reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Well-meaning Mrs Boatwright, knowing he’s a reader, gives David Lee a copy of The Three Musketeers. Camille Johnson’s bookshelves include works by Harriet Tubman and Crispus Attucks. When she tells him who they were and David Lee asks why she doesn’t read things by living people, Camille takes out a book by W E B Du Bois. Immediately after the raccoon hunt, Nathan queries what good school does his son and David Lee defends his enthusiasm for going there. In the climax to the story, their positions are reversed. The father’s bitter resentment of what he’s been subjected to in the last year has left him determined for his child to acquire the means of escaping the life he himself has had to lead. Perkins (Ted Airhart), who owns the land on which the Morgans try to make a living, thinks Rebecca owes him a debt of gratitude for pulling strings to allow David Lee to attend the white school. Nothing is said explicitly about Earl’s and Josie Mae’s schooling but there’s no sign of it in prospect. David Lee’s literacy is a thing of wonder to the younger children, as it is to his mother.
Sounder has its share of too-obvious moments but Ritt and his cast mostly redeem the situation. When Clarence (Spencer Bradford), a boy in Miss Johnson’s class, tells the story of how he saved his little sister from drowning, the other kids are derisively incredulous: they know Clarence can’t swim. David Lee alone believes the story. He explains that he, his mother and siblings didn’t know how to plant crops but, with Nathan in prison, knew they had to – ‘I believe his story ’cause his story is about what he did when he had to do somethin’. He didn’t know how to swim but he had to or else his sister woulda drowned. That’s how he did it’. Kevin Hooks’s utter seriousness validates David Lee’s words (though I could have done without the whole class bursting into applause when it hears them). The simultaneous disappearance of Nathan and Sounder naturally raises suspicions that their eventual homecomings may coincide too. It’s a relief the plotting isn’t as pat as that, even if the dog on his return does have a limp that anticipates Nathan’s. In the event, Sounder makes a real contribution to Nathan’s return, which is the film’s most affecting scene. He recognises his master when his figure is still a speck in the distance, and heads off towards him, barking for joy. The dog’s reaction alerts Rebecca to what seems to her an impossible vision until she realises her husband is actually approaching.
Cicely Tyson makes this very powerful. Hers is the outstanding performance in Sounder. Some of the bit parts feature people virtually as themselves. A real-life preacher (Thomas N Phillips) and judge (William Thomas Bennett) appear in cameos as, respectively, the Morgans’ pastor and the judge who sentences Nathan. Ritt was a consistently good director of actors but he sometimes struggles here to align these quasi-documentary performers and the more conventional playing elsewhere in the cast. Carmen Matthews as Mrs Boatwright, for example, is too aware of her responsibility playing a significant character in a socio-historically important story: her line readings are weighted and unvarying. Committed and sometimes touching as Paul Winfield and Kevin Hooks both are, they’re evidently acting, in a way that some of the minor players aren’t. Cicely Tyson is crucial in bridging this gap. She is, more than any of the other trained actors, naturally and compellingly real – a magnetic presence not just in dramatic highlights like the reunion with Nathan but equally when Rebecca is going about her household chores. Tyson makes her the embodiment of the devotion and hard work that keep the family going.
Are the principals in Sounder treated condescendingly, in ways they wouldn’t have been with an African-American eye behind the camera? A white viewer may not be entitled to say but if there is condescension here I’d be inclined to locate it in the writing rather than the direction. The black heroes are conceived as quite simple personalities. That was no less the case in a much more recent sharecropper drama, Mudbound (2017), set in 1940s Mississippi. Like Sounder, Mudbound is an estimable film, based on a work of fiction by a white writer. Unlike Sounder, the director was a woman of colour – Dee Rees, who also shared the screenplay credit. Rees didn’t see fit to qualify the admirable qualities of her African-American characters. Doing so could have detracted from the political points she wanted to make and which were evidently her priority (though it’s also worth noting Rees’s mostly nuanced treatment of the white characters in the story). The same applied to Martin Ritt. The strapline on the sleeve of my DVD of Sounder seems to want to reduce the film to a generic, colour-blind moral uplift number – ‘In troubled times, the only thing that counts is human kindness’. Ritt knew and did better.
23 August 2020
