True. I watched it today, and it was a revelation for me, because they don't show something like this often enough. Faulkner wrote about the people he knew and grew up with; good, bad and indifferent. Nothing sugar-coated here. The good: Claude Jarman, Jr, Juano Hernandez, Elizabeth Patterson, David Brian and Will Geer as the just-minded Sheriff who makes sure that the dead man's body is removed from it's second, watery grave to prove that Hernandez was not the murderer. The bad: most of the townspeople, who liberally use the 'n'-word, and are ready to burn Ms. Patterson, as she stands guard at the jail with her shotgun. A quietly touching scene for me was the venerable character actor, Porter Hall, bending over the body of his dead son, and cleaning the muck off his face and eyelids - and then breaking down completely. When Robert Osborne mentioned that item about Mr. Hernandez, after the film's close, I thought that at that in point time, the film's climate mirrored the actual racial climate of Oxford, Mississippi. Were Mr. Hernandez not an actor, and safely ensconced within the black quarter of the town (since, unfortunately, he had no other recourse) would his fate have been similar as Mr. Beauchamp's at the outset of the film? A proud, intelligent and independent black man resented by the white population because he lived with dignity, and was far above many of them? It gave me food for thought.
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