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Released by: Olive Films
Released on: December 23, 2014
Director: Otto Preminger
Cast: Michael Caine, Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Diahann Carroll, Robert Hooks, Faye Dunaway, Burgess Meredith, George Kennedy, Madeleine Sherwood, Jim Backus, Robert Reed
Year: 1967
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The Movie:
Henry Warren is a smarmy draft dodger out to increase his wealth by expanding his business. But to do that, he needs two properties adjacent to his own: one owned by his cousin Rad, the other by an elderly black woman, Rose, who served as his wife's mammy when she was young. His wife, Julie Ann, is reluctant to ask Rose to sell, since the old woman has lived on the property all her life and now her son, Reeve, farms the land. Rad and Reeve join forces to resist Warren's offers, but when Rose dies, Julie Ann claims ownership of the land. To make matters worse for Reeve, a local judge wants the Warrens' endorsement for his daughter's impending wedding. Pressure mounts, and soon the Ku Klux Klan is involved. A court case ensues, and the KKK resorts to violence against Rad's family as punishment for his support of Reeve.
Hurry Sundown is far from director Otto Preminger's masterpiece, but neither is it as bad as reviews from the time suggest. Still, what went on behind the scenes was more interesting than anything on screen. Having read a galley proof of K.B. Gilden's novel, Preminger purchased the film rights before the book was even published. When the printed book sold far fewer copies than Preminger had envisioned, he was forced to scale back his production. Hoping to capture some of the same ambiance as the film adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), he hired Horton Foote to write the script for Hurry Sundown. Foote hated the novel and rewrote it heavily, prompting Preminger to sack him and start afresh (though Foote's name remained in the credits). His longtime reader, Thomas C. Ryan, was then given the job. The film went into production in the South at a time when racial tensions were high, with the result that the cast and crew were threatened and the shoot sabotaged.
Preminger had long been known for his abuse of his actors. Thomas Tryon credited his ill treatment at the hands of the director during the shoot for The Cardinal (1963) for his abandonment of acting for writing. On the set of Hurry Sundown, Preminger mistreated young newcomer Faye Dunaway, to whom he had signed a five-film contract. Not one to be pushed around, however, Dunaway sued to be released from her contract upon completion of filming. The case was settled out of court, leaving the young actress to pursue her career as she saw fit. But it was the beginning of the end for Preminger's long and distinguished career; over the next decade and a half, the director who had been responsible for such classics as Laura (1944), Carmen Jones (1954), The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Anatomy of Murder (1959), and Advise & Consent (1962), among others, made only five more pictures, none of them particularly successful or much remembered today.
Hurry Sundown's performances range from excellent (Burgess Meredith) to middling (Jane Fonda and John Phillip Law) to “What were they thinking?†terrible (Michael Caine). Ryan's script shows little understanding of the way human beings speak or interact with one another, and the direction fails to elicit the necessary tension to make it all believable. Still, there are some striking set pieces, including a taut scene in a Southern courtroom, where the judge has presupposed the outcome of the case, not figuring on the determinedness of the forces of justice and equality. The sequence provides the film with its true climax, and had it ended there, it would no doubt be much better remembered than it is. Unfortunately, Preminger and Ryan opt for a final, drawn-out emotional resolution that misses its mark by a long shot.
Yet, the film does offer a window into the liberal political view of its makers, as well as into the social dynamics of both its setting (a post-World War II South) and the era in which it was made (a South in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement). Despite its lengthy running time, it's never boring. And Caine's amazingly bad performance has to be seen to be believed, especially considering how reliable he usually was.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Olive Films brings Hurry Sundown to Blu-ray in 1080p high definition and its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio courtesy of an MPEG-4 AVC encode. Despite being forced on a single 25GB disc, the 146-minute film looks striking, with details practically popping off the screen. Much of the film takes place in broad daylight, and even night-time scenes appear to have been well lit, with no crush or loss of detail and grain kept at an appropriate level. Colors are generally consistent and strong. Early on, there are a couple of sequences that appear to have been culled from another source, but it's better to have them soft and colorless than not to have them at all, and they are few in number. The overwhelming majority of the film looks superb.
When it comes to the audio, purists have no cause for alarm. The film's soundtrack is presented in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono. There is no static or hiss audible, voices are crystal clear, music and sound effects (including innumerable explosions and a child's incessant screaming) are vibrant, and the singing of African American hymnals is beautiful and robust.
The film has no extras to speak of. Given Olive's use of a 25GB disc, this is a good thing, as extras would have taken up more space and resulted in greater compression and accompanying noise, of which there is little as is.
The Final Word:
Hurry Sundown can be purchased as part of The Otto Preminger Collection, which also includes Skidoo (1968) and Such Good Friends (1971), or it can be purchased as a standalone BD. Either way, it's an excellent visual and aural presentation of a lesser film, one that should please fans of Preminger as well as those interested in the cinema of racial confrontation. The film is a product of its time and, as such, is worth a look for historians interested in how the Civil Rights Movement was reflected on the big screen.
Note: Some viewers have complained that the image appears to be stretched on both Olive's Blu-ray release of Hurry Sundown and Paramount's original DVD release.
