Unsurprisingly, Preminger's films became less interesting as his stature hyper-expanded. Laura (1944), Fallen Angel (1945), Daisy Kenyon (1947) and Angel Face (1952) are sublime, detailed meta-noirs that age beautifully, while his subsequent "big productions," including Saint Joan (1957), Porgy & Bess (1959), Exodus (1960) and The Cardinal (1963), begin to suffer from budgetary obesity and lumbering messiness. (1959's remarkable Anatomy of a Murder is notable bump on the downward roll.) Certainly by the time the late '60s came around, Hollywood was a radically different sort of board game than when Preminger began for real in the '40s, and like his fellow expatriate auteur Billy Wilder (among others) he found the generational New Wave transformations difficult to slalom.
Hurry Sundown (1967) is commonly considered the nadir of Preminger's long and rocky career (his career began in the '30s with an Austrian film, but, typically, Preminger refused to publickly acknowledge it and the five other minor films he made before Laura), and it is something to see, a great, preening, dumb dinosaur of a movie, from an erstwhile Jurassic period when, in response to television, Hollywood resolved to make the movies, the budgets, the lengths and even the screens bigger than ever. In fact, it's been most renowned in the home video age due to its inclusion in Harry Medved's now-out-of-print book The 50 Worst Films of All Time - which, it should be noted, also included Eisensteins's Ivan the Terrible and Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad, and which obviously had a tangle of agendas that forbade it from actually being the reasonable tally of badness its title claims. Hurry Sundown isn't even the worst American film of 1967, much less a world-qualifying turkey. (I'd nominate top-20 hits like Murderers' Row, A Guide for the Married Man and Follow Me, Boys instead, if I was pressed.)
Preminger's film, a high-profile filmization of a racy Southern-gothic bestseller, is a sweaty, overwrought race-relations saga, set in post-WWII Georgia and dizzy with the audacity to cast and hyper-fuel Michael Caine and Jane Fonda as soulless, drawling Georgia landowners endeavoring to save their family's vanishing fortune by selling their land to a corporate cannery. The problem is, of course, two contiguous plots have to be included in the deal, one owned by a white sharecropper returning from the war (John Philip Law, supported in his obstinence by wife Faye Dunaway) and black farmers Robert Hooks and Diahann Carroll. The story template itself is such a Hollywood standard - little people vs. evil developers - that you'd think the offices of Santa Monica were occupied by fire-breathing Luddites, but it's in its textures that Preminger's movie distinguishes itself, so to speak. The film has a weird admixture of plainness (the sets sometime seem hardly decorated, and are often thoughtlessly overlit, making the grubby sharecropper shacks look like soap opera hospital rooms) and lurid character hyperbole, whether it be the wild overacting, as a bigoted judge, of fellow Batman villain Burgess Meredith, the hellish keening of Caine's apparently demon-possessed grade-school son or the scene in which an elderly black woman (Beah Richards) has a climactic heart attack, staged by Preminger in a manner that suggests either contempt, negligence, madness, or an unholy cocktail of all three.
It's a film that seems due for a cult rediscovery as an explosion of high camp - after all, if The Ten Commandments, Valley of the Dolls and Barbarella can acquire passionate postmodern devotees, Preminger's film seems a neglected midnight movie must-see, particularly once Caine starts playing his saxophone in masturbatory frustration; when Fonda tries it, at crotch level, she's derisively told "some things are better left to experts." (The development company in question is called Delta Field Erection.) A flaring sense of anachronism makes the tumult even stranger - Fonda's hair and couture seem very 1967, and a rich man's helicopter figures prominently, even though helicopters of any make weren't licensed for civilian use until well after WWII had ended.
Still, Hurry Sundown creates a distinctive hothouse world for itself, and typical of Preminger it indulges a wide variety of points of view, all of them equal and ambivalent. The cartoonishness of the film's surface is deceptive; some hilarious character bits, like George Kennedy's corrupt sheriff and Jim Backus's jovial lawyer, turn out to be far less predictable than you'd thought. (This more than makes up for the immobile presence of Law, who was one of those momentary movie stars who was briefly landed lead roles based only on his sterling good looks.) But the Preminger touch hardly mitigates the project's rabid righteousness - substantially less fair-minded in its depiction of evil Southern whites and righteous blacks than contemporaneous movies, the film suggests Preminger's attempt to conjure a fusion of Duel in the Sun, In the Heat of the Night and The Chase, and the results, pretensions of the time aside, are saucy, outrageous and, in its details, self-mocking.
For more information about Hurry Sundown, visit Olive Films. To order Hurry Sundown, go to TCM Shopping.
by Michael Atkinson
