THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 818, 1 April 1955, Page 16

THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT

(John Ford-Republic) [-IRST things come first on the page this week, but, let me admit it, not without effort. I was impressed by Martin Luther, but I Joved The Sun Shines Bright. John Ford, its director, is one of the great figures of the American cinema. He is of Irish extraction, was born. an Easterner (State of Maine), has directed films as diverse as The Informer and They Were Expendable, and will almost certainly be remembered by the generality of filmgoers as the high-priest of the Western. But if The Sun Shines Bright means anything at all his heart belongs to Dixie. Films which are the fruit of an affectionate devotion, though few, are almost always memorable, but I find it difficult to recall one-Flaherty’s Moana or Louisiana Story perhaps excepted-in which the sun shone more softly than in this one, or where the whole warmth of a director’s affections was more patently engaged. . The picture is built upon three tales by Irvin S. Cobb, and Cobb’s Judge Priest, a grassroots Democrat, is the

central figure and the unifying element in the story. I suspect that Judge Priest (in whom old Charles Winninger finds the role of a lifetime) combines in the one person most of the qualities Ford respects, as well as a flock of smalltown eccentricities from which Ford distils the gentle humour which pervades the whole production. The Judge typifies loyalty and tolerance, Southern courtesy and political shrewdness, the slow, easy-going tempo of the South in civilised contrast to the hustle and bustle of the damyankees (the period is 1905 and the Civil War is not forgotten). The story, though it is occasionally sparked by spells of excitement or tension, moves for the most part with a deceptively casual rhythm creating almost by accident, it seems, a full rich hostalgic evocation of time and place. And the materials which Ford uses are the veriest clichés — steamboats on the river and mint juleps on the porch, Kentucky colonels and fallen women, sweet-singing darkies, lynching bees and political processions. But they are clichés polished with such loving skill that they shine like jewels. I commend to you The Sun Shines Bright and I will be surprised if you can tell, when the last reel has run out, whether the shimmering soft-focus photography is a camera trick or exists only in the eye of the beholder.