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Hurry Sundown (1967) by Stephen Rebello Some Bad Movies about sexual high jinks in the Deep South boast occasional highs amid plenty of nothing. Others, like the 1967 Hurry Sundown, are an astonishing 142 minutes of all meat, no filler. Take, for starters, the scene in which white-trash belle Jane Fonda argues with her white-trash spouse, Michael Caine, about their white-trash kid. We're supposed to be horrified to learn that Caine has traumatized his son by leaving him tethered for hours at the end of a rope while finagling a crooked land deal at his company called, no kidding, Delta Field Erection. What we're actually horrified by are Caine's and Fonda's Southern accents, which sound as if they were perfected in a Berlitz This Property is Condemned language course. Trying to divert the nagging Fonda, Caine picks up his phallic saxophone, sits in a chair and wails out a sultry riff. This sets Fonda's rump a-wiggling, and her mouth a-sucking on a booze bottle. Director Otto Preminger, finding this too subtle, has Fonda then take over on the sax, stationing it squarely on Caine's crotch as she works her lips over the mouthpiece. "Certain things is better left to experts," drawls Caine, not needing to add that certain things like hilariously over-the-top filmmaking are best left to experts like Preminger. Just home from WWII, white-trash farmer John Phillip Law has a gift for his white-trash wife Faye Dunaway: "I brung you this all the way from Paris, France," he drawls, holding up a scanty negligee. When Law starts talking about the fleshly temptations he tried to resist overseas, Dunaway drawls, "Ah don't wanna heah!" Neither do we--we'd rather spy on Caine in the woods with slutty Donna Danton, daughter of racist judge Burgess Meredith. "Ya know what you're doing'?" Caine drawls as she dives for his midsection. "I oughta," she drawls back. "Done it often enough." Later, horny again, frustrated Caine locks Fonda out of their bedroom after she's left him to attend to their son. What does Fonda do? She saunters to her tyke's bed with a lustful look, strips to sexy lingerie, crawls in and wraps herself around him, that's what. PAGE 1 | 2 |
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Sex aside, Hurry Sundown exists to show how one Georgia town's poor African-Americans--sexless, upstanding, cardboard African-Americans--are morally superior to its rich, depraved whites. (We're not going to say a word about this thesis being set forth by Preminger, whose offscreen abuse of his Porgy and Bess star Dorothy Dandridge supposedly hastened her suicide.) This means that strapping Robert Hooks must stoically endure racist taunts, Klan-style raids and a rigged trial in the court of bigoted Meredith, all because Hooks and Law have tried to thwart Caine's big real estate deal. How does Hooks cope? Well, whenever the white characters act up, Hooks fellow cardboard African-Americans break out in the movie's theme song, a faux Negro spiritual led by schoolmarm Diahann Carroll. Hooks is also fortified by the love of his dying ma Beah Richards, Fonda's hammy old mammy. After Fonda tries booting her invalid ex-mammy off her land, Richards says to Hooks, "I was a white folks' nigger! You've got to fight!" whereupon she dies, apparently of terminal scenery chewing. Hooks then tries to better her by bursting into tears and practically gnawing on her pillow. It all climaxes when Caine is exposed as the murdering scum he is. Groping Fonda, he drawls that she surely feels "that itch we always give each other," but she drawls back, "Don't! Makes mah skin craw-ell!" before advising Caine go "back to the shrimp boats" where, presumably, she found him in the first place. A true Georgia peach, Hurry Sundown is a Southern-fried sex-and-depravity gem that ranks with Duel in the Sun. Y'all are gonna love it, he-ah? What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |