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" Inheritance "). And who is to effect this impossible conciliation? The hyphenate, whose father has been cheated and sent to an early death by the planter who is now the son's benefactor because he recognizes in the boy profitable material. In politics the hyphenate is easily characterized, in an ostensibly non-political novel or film he is not so readily stamped — he becomes first pitiable then heroic — when he shows up the greed of the one " bad " planter in order to have him shake hands with the tenants. A proper conclusion would have been the boy's assumption of tenant-leadership against the planter. Two falsehoods are presented to strengthen the drama of conciliation : the tenants steal the planters' cotton and seek to set up their own broker in Memphis (how long could a tenant conceal the bales before he were apprehended?), the collaborator of the hyphenate in making the peace is the district attorney — an agent of the planters who is presented as a friend of the tenants ! There are other details equall} suspect. Yet, it would be sectarian and dishonest not to say that this film, in its argument and mood, balances the sympathy to the credit of the tenants. That is assuredly a victory ! a concession to a rising temper. The tenants are faciallv well-chosen, not non-professional players but professionals chosen and controlled upon the documentary principle — director Curtiz has evidently learned something from the Russians. For the first time, in my immediate recollection, the movie has dared to approach lynching as a contemporary American custom. Here the victim is a white peasant who has been sorely driven to the murder of a planter. More should have been made of the scene since it submits the climax to the hyphenate's evolving attitude. We must recognize also that this is not a typical instance. The tvpical instance is lynching not on a " real " but a framed charge; the most frequent instances are the organized mob-murders of Negroes, but that is an indisputable fact to which our conscience is too sensitive — we can argue the lynching in The Cabin in the Cotton as rare and therefore chance. Still, the incomplete presentation of the pursuit and lynching of a white man by wealthy men of his own race is an incipient suggestion of the fact that lynchings are economic. Therefore, for all its distortion of the social theme it particularizes, The Cabin in the Cotton is an advance in the movie's content. A more truthful production would have sought its material in works like Georgia Nigger, To Make my Bread, Call Home the Heart, Strike ! or Gathering Storm.
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As a work of cinema, I am a Fugitive from a (Georgia) Chain-Gang, is superior to The Cabin in the Cotton. Its voting director, Mervyn Le Roy, is as yet an eclectic of the second or third order. He has made as bad a film as Numbered Men, films as inflated for their tiny intelligence as Big City Blues and Three on a Match, and pictures as reputable as Little Ccesar, Five-Star Final and I am a Fugitive. His career is an argument for the importance of content : the better the story, the better has been his direction I Le Roy is gifted in the American open-play tradition that has been