SOUNDER – Paul Winfield, Cicely Tyson

Sounder (1972)
Direction: Martin Ritt
Screenplay: Lonne Elder III; from William H. Armstrong’s book
Cast: Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, Kevin Hooks, Carmen Mathews, Taj Mahal, James Best
 

 

Sounder probably features more extremely wide shots than any movie besides Lawrence of Arabia — and Martin Ritt’s movie is only half as long.  Time and again, humans become antish dots on the horizon, visually overwhelmed by the vast wilderness around them.  It’s Ritt’s way of establishing the world of David (Kevin Hooks), a young boy living in the Louisiana woods with his sharecropper family and the titular dog.  That world completely envelops him in these shots, which perform the old pastoral trick of contrasting the human and [...]

by Dan Erdman | July 31, 2009   
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