Martin Ritt’s film about a Louisiana sharecropping family is plain, patient and unsentimental, and Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield are as good as anyone has said. Only a stretch of schoolroom history in the middle stops trusting us.
Louisiana, 1933, and a family that owns none of the land it works. Nathan Lee Morgan (Paul Winfield) takes his eldest boy, David Lee (Kevin Hooks), and the dog out after a raccoon at night, loses it, and comes home with nothing. In the morning there is meat frying, and nobody at the table asks how. Martin Ritt’s film, adapted by Lonne Elder III from William H. Armstrong’s novel, spends its opening on that household, a cabin, a field, a Sunday ball game with a neighbour called Ike (Taj Mahal) on guitar, before Sheriff Charlie Young (James Best) drives up with a wagon. From then on it is about what a wife and three children do when the father is taken for stealing meat. We would put it in front of almost anyone.
It is a U certificate and a children’s film in the sense that a child can follow every scene of it. It is not a children’s film in what it thinks about adults. Nobody here makes a speech about injustice. The sheriff is civil. The white woman Rebecca (Cicely Tyson) does laundry for, Mrs. Boatwright (Carmen Mathews), is kind in the way of someone who has never had to be brave. The system that takes Nathan works by rule and habit, and Ritt lets it, which does more damage than a villain would have.
John A. Alonzo, who shot Chinatown two years later, photographs the fields in hard white daylight and the cabin by whatever comes through the door, so that indoors the family’s faces are half in shadow and you lean in. Walter Scott Herndon’s cabin has a stove, a table and beds, and looks lived in rather than dressed. Sidney Levin cuts slowly and stays on people after they have finished speaking, which is where Tyson does her best work. Taj Mahal wrote the music as well as playing Ike: acoustic blues, guitar and banjo, much of it played by people on screen, so it never sounds like something poured over the top.
Tyson plays Rebecca as a woman who has decided in advance not to fall apart in front of her children, and the film is honest about what that costs her. Winfield is large and gentle and plays Nathan as a man who knows exactly what he did and would do it again. The scene that got us comes at the jail. Rebecca bakes a cake for David to take to his father, and the deputy breaks it into pieces on the counter, looking for whatever he imagines is hidden inside, then hands the boy the crumbs to carry through. We were angrier than we expected to be, and what made it worse was that nobody on screen raised a voice, not the deputy and not the boy. Then Nathan, through the bars, tells his son not to bring his mother to this place, and Hooks plays the whole exchange with his jaw.
The middle of the film, when David walks out to find the camp and is taken in by a schoolteacher, Camille Johnson (Janet MacLachlan), is where Elder’s screenplay adds to the book, and where it comes nearest to a lesson. She has shelves of books and reads to him out of them about black history, and MacLachlan is warm and unhurried, but these are the only scenes in which we could hear the film explaining its purpose. Two of the reviews we read find the whole film too soft and too uplifting. We think they are wrong about the whole and right about this stretch. And the dog, for a film named after him, is off screen for most of it. That is the point, but a small child may not think so.
Ritt made Hud before this and Norma Rae after it, and both of those films argue with you. This one does not. It is 105 minutes, it has no wasted scene, and it is patient in a way films of the period rarely allowed themselves to be with a poor family.
It reached British cinemas on 22 February 1973 and has not dated in any way that matters. Watch it with a child if you can find one; the hunt and the ball game will hold them, and the rest will wait for them. Tyson’s last scene we will not describe, except to say that we have thought about it for days.
