"Racist? Me? My best friends are black; Woody Strode and my servant who's lived with me for thirty years. I've even made a picture exalting the blacks! I'm not a racist! I consider the blacks as completely American!" - John Ford
John Ford's "The Sun Shines Bright" stars Charles Winniger as William Priest, a kind, elderly judge operating out of old Kentucky. Structured as a series of vignettes, the film watches as Priest finds work for lazy black men, sympathises with prostitutes, defends wrongly accused African Americans, challenges racist lynch mobs and forges bonds between Confederate and Unionist types, the American North and South holding hands under the magnificent spectacle of the Star-Spangled Banner.
In other words, it's another John Ford flick about "what it means to be American". What's interesting about "The Sun Shines Bright", though, is the way it manages to be sympathetic to the plights of the downtrodden (prostitutes, women, African Americans etc), whilst also being totally conservative, racist and reactionary. In this regard, Ford's film is filled with racial stereotypes (Stepin Fetchit, cast a dimwitted man-child), is incredibly paternalistic, pretends to decry outlaw justice whilst celebrating the vigilante killing of bad guys, panders to Confederates and exalts the moral and ethical superiority of the Law (which in most Ford flicks, equates with the bowing down to military/patriarchal authority).
"The Sun Shines Bright" was based on a series of "Judge Priest" stories by Irvin S. Cobb. It's also a loose remake of Ford's 1933 film, "Judge Priest". That film opened with text which exalted the "tolerance of the late 1800s" and the "wisdom of an almost vanished generation". This bogus sentimentality, and ahistoricism, is replicated in "The Sun Shines Bright", both films nostalgically pining for a Lost Cause mode of southern identity, but doing so in the guise of a statement against prejudice and intolerance. This is not surprising. Most films "about" or "against" racism ("Colour Purple", "Monster's Ball", "Sayonara", "The Blind Side" etc) are thoroughly racist. But "The Sun Shines Bright" goes further. It manages to outright reassert the patriarchal slave order of the Old South, and endorse its standard iconography of racial subjugation, whilst doing so via a mechanism of reform.
Most Ford flicks take place within a burgeoning civilisation on the edge of a beautiful wilderness. Ford then typically gives us little bastions – usually army bases, forts, small towns etc – at which American "values" take root or battle for victory. In "The Sun Shines Bright's" case, such values include tolerance, law, justice, community, the virtue of local elections, independence and so forth, though blacks remain "too young to vote", as our esteemed Judge reminds us.
Aesthetically, "The Sun Shines Bright" is strong, Ford's framing and cutting immaculate. The film overloads on antebellum nostalgia/sentimentality, but was regarded by Ford as one of his finest creations. The film's racist caricatures are typically explained away by critics as being a "product of their time" (some say Stepin Fetchit's portrayal is "subversive"), but that idea is nonsense. 1953 wasn't the Dark Ages, and Western artists have been sympathetically portraying blacks since the 1700s.
In 1960, Ford would attempt to address accusations that his films depict a thoroughly whitewashed version of the Old West (by 1870, approximately 290,000 African Americans lived in the sixteen territories comprising the West, approximately twelve percent of the population) by directing "Sergeant Rutledge". That film revolved around a "Buffalo Soldier" (played by Woody Strode as an archetypal "strong, righteous black man") who is wrongfully accused of raping a white woman during the Indian Wars. Here Ford attempts to debunk the myth of the "black rapist", a spectre which has hung over cinema since "The Birth of a Nation", but as is often the case with Ford, such well meaning gestures are negated by the film itself; this was ultimately a picture which ignores the fact that it is about oppressed minorities armed to slay oppressed minorities, and one which has total faith in the dignity and morality of military service, an institution which Ford's hero naively believes provides "freedom" and "self respect". Released during the rise of American Civil Rights movements, black audiences rightfully rejected "Rutledge"; you cannot reconcile black pride and black sexuality with the authoritarian, racist system of the white-controlled military.
Within his own life, Ford embodied similar contradictions. As the child of immigrants, he was the member of a persecuted racial and religious minority, a fact which led to him identifying with anyone who faced victimisation. In the early 1950s, when Hollywood was being mauled by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which investigated Communist influence in the film industry, Ford would also speak out against the attempts of right-wing directors to take over the Directors Guild of America and enforce their own blacklisting policies. On the flip side, Ford also allied himself with the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Protection of American Ideals (MPAPAI), which attempted to search out Communists in the industry. Such contradictory motions are common in his later works.
4/10 – Worth one viewing.
