Hurry Sundown (1967)
Hurry Sundown had everything going for it
- a top cast and a famous director (Otto Preminegr), yet it 
flopped.
Set in the south in the days just after World War II, a black and a white
farmer team up to irrigate their fields and escape the crushing poverty that
their families live under. This will cause problems for the plans of a rich
landowner who will try using family, law, and even his retarded son in order
to stop them. This is in my opinion not a very, very bad movie,
although critics and even many of those acting in it slashed it. It is most
certainly well played by most of the actors, and it is still worth watching
as a grand kind of failure. Diahann mention it in The Legs Are The Last
To Go as being a bad experience - a film about overcoming racism with
a lot of racism going on behind the scenes. Time Magazine wrote in their review
in 1967: "Obviously, Hurry Sundown was intended as a paean to
racial justice, but Producer-Director Otto Preminger chooses strange ways
to display his big brotherhood. One sequence shows Negro sharecroppers singing
a white-eyed hallelujah number reminiscent of those '40s films that pretended
to liberalize but patently patronized. Two hours of such cinematic clichés
make the viewer intolerant of everyone in the film, regardless of race, creed
or color." To balance this, Variety wrote: "Otto Preminger has created
an outstanding, tasteful but hard-hitting, and handsomely-produced film .
. . Told with a depth and frankness, the story develops its theme in a welcome,
straight-forward way that is neither propaganda nor mere exploitation material."
CAST & CREDITS
Michael Caine....Henry Warren
Loring Smith....Thomas Elwell
Peter Goff....Lipscomb
Jane Fonda....Julie Ann Warren
George Kennedy....Sheriff Coombs
John Phillip Law....Rad McDowell
Luke Askew....Dolph Higginson
Robert Hooks....Reeve Scott
Beah Richards....Rose Scott
Burgess Meredith....Judge Purcell
Donna Denton....Sukie Purcell
Madeleine Sherwood....Eula Purcell
Frank Converse....Reverend Clem De Lavery
William Elder....Bishop
Steve Sanders....Charles McDowell
Dawn Barcelona....Ruby McDowell
Faye Dunaway....Lou McDowell
Joan Parks....Kissie
David Sanders....Wyatt McDowell
Michael Henry Roth....Timmy McDowell
Gladys Newman....Mrs. Coombs
John Mark....Colie Warren
Diahann Carroll....Vivian Thurlow
Rex Ingram....Professor Thurlow
George Trussell....Doctor for Rose
Writing credits
Horton Foote
K.B. Gilden (novel)
Thomas C. Ryan
Directed by
Otto Preminger
The movie premiered February 6, 1967.
DVD/VHS RELEASE
Released on DVD in 2011.
PICTURES
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EXTERNAL LINKS (Opens in new window)
Hurry
Sundown on IMDB.com
Hurry Sundown
on Wikipedia
