The Sun Shines Bright

a whore emerges from the sea into a town that buried her long ago, and the film palpably holds its breath--"maybe it's a ghost"? alas, "you can't kill truth (nor ghosts) with a buggy whip", so the judge gets his heart started and fixes a wrong or two. an ostensibly triumphant ending suggests little was sacrificed, but beneath the glimmering ideal lies 'my old kentucky home' and the final shot of priest; one day soon the heart of he and his nation may restart no longer.

The second half took a little sting off my hate for this, but it's still a mediocre offering with offensive caricatures all around. The performances are really stilted, the message is muddled, the narrative is a mess for the first half hour and it doesn't even have Ford's usually stellar visual composition to save it. It seems like Ford is trying to make everyone somewhat sympathetic but instead I found all the characters rather loathsome.

Ford wants us to treat blacks as equals, but paints them in ugly stereotypes, ridiculous caricatures who have no ambition but servitude to their white superiors. I kept waiting for one of them to blurt out "I sho do love me some white folk!". The white characters aren't much better, and tend towards either "annoying" or "bland". And then there's the usual sentimental hooey about God and country. There's a few good scenes, but Ford's predilection for myth-making taints even those.

My ★★★½ review of The Sun Shines Bright on Letterboxd https://boxd.it/4cnQVz

A decent film, oddly ranging from broad slapstick comedy in the first couple of scenes to deathly serious drama later. The funeral procession scene is fantastic and it was brave to hold a scene for that long in 1953 Hollywood. The portrayal of some African-American characters is pretty troublesome (especially the judge's assistant or valet or whatever his role was.) I'm usually fairly lukewarm on most Fords, at least pre 1960, and this one is kind of middle of the road.

Modern audiences might find Ford's uncritical portrayal of the old South irksome, especially the characterization of African-Americans as submissive illiterates, if not the gender politics as well. I actually appreciate his candor, and it's a well-made and pretty good movie if viewed as a historical artifact (and with the understanding of how greatly things have changed). And I do prefer its humor to the mawkishness of the even more oblivious Gone with the Wind.

Essentially a loose reworking of an earlier Ford film (Judge Priest), The Sun Shines Bright is a low key work of subtle complexity about a small town Judge who is eccentric but honourable, presiding over an increasingly fractured community. Working with a smaller budget than usual, Ford doesn't skimp visually, and the way he builds the world of this community through the gradual accretion of detail is noteworthy. The sentimentality can be cloying, but the procession sequences are stunning.

Star Rating: ★★★★1/2

"Is this a Western?" "It's a Southern." http://illusionpodcast.blogspot.com/2015/10/episode-77-unedited-commentary-track.html

watched: 2015, 2020

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737

Really difficult to rate. Could be the strangest film I've ever seen.

708

Probably my favorite Ford film. I loved Judge Priest, which Ford made 20 years earlier with Will Rogers, but the formal control Ford exercises in this film is outstanding even by his standards. The film includes what to my mind is the greatest sequence in any Ford film, a funeral procession that proceeds largely without dialogue for several minutes, ending with a sermon at the church. The poetry of Ford's cinema is never clearer than in this scene. Beautiful and humane.

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