Hurry Sundown

At last, Preminger's sensational, trashy dose of Southern Americana on widescreen DVD!
Get ready for a heady, potboiler version of the K.B. Gilden, hot-button novel about Southern racism in 1946 Georgia. Otto Preminger gathers a terrific cast and piles on the cheap controversy in overdose mode: beyond-beastly bigots; sappy, sentimentalized white-trash; saintly black sharecroppers belting out designer spirituals; and a delightfully vile bourgeois who ties his brat up in a crib. Fonda sucks Caines saxophone in a film that fairly competes with VALLEY OF THE DOLLS as the best camp of the sixties. Hugo Montenegro contributes a colorful, evocative score that sadly hasn't seen the light of day on CD. Based on the quality of previous Olive Films releases, this promises to be one of the retro dvd delights of the year!

What If Tennessee Williams Scripted 'Green Acres'?
[HURRY SUNDOWN - (1967) - Widescreen presentation] Personally, I'm glad Olive films are releasing a handful of Otto Preminger's films from his latter career that weren't previously available. 'Such Good Friends' (1971) was such an unexpected treat that I jumped on this one immediately, though the results were murky this time out. First off, the audio is not as good as other Olive films; this one's all treble with no bass and little mid-section, and can be grating during certain dialogue-heavy scenes. The video is good, not great, but the aspect ratio is fine. And I'm a fan of Preminger's directorial skills - so no problem there. Now let's discuss the cast and not-so-petty annoyances, shall we?

Before I go on, let me state that I love Michael Caine's body of work during the 60's, 70's and 80's. But he's so horribly miscast here as a Southern landowner in 1940's Georgia that he threatens to destroy the essence of the entire film. His cockney confederate accent is mostly...

It makes my skin crawl!
With "Hurry Sundown" (1967) Otto Preminger was beginning his decline which was the last big budgeted film based on a controversial best-seller which Preminger thrived on in the fifties for his taste for built-in controversy ("Anatomy of a Murder," "Advise and Consent") (in defense of "Hurry Sundown" the screenwriters couldn't have been more competent to turn K.B. Gilden's massive novel into a film: Horton Foote ("The Trip to Bountiful") and Thomas C. Ryan (Carson McCullers' "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"), great screenwriters who know the South). Preminger, beside the reputation as a tyrant on the set (here Faye Dunaway paid off her contract she earned from Preminger to never have to work with him again), Otto was a great humanist who through "Hurry Sundown" managed to present a well-measured and seasoned dose of racial conflict (that the reality of surfaced during the shooting of the film). Critic Rex Reed who took pot shots at Preminger for the rest of his career was called upon...

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