HURRY SUNDOWN

Critically reviled at the time of its release this Otto Preminger film indeed suffers from some serious miscasting, (Michael Caine as a gentleman from the Deep South; Jane Fonda as his Southern Belle of a wife), and it does lay on the hysteria a tad thickly not to mention having a few plot strands that could do with some serious tidying up, but like so many of Preminger's pictures it's also seriously underrated. Preminger was always in his element when dealing with serious subjects in a melodramatic fashion, (here the issue of racial prejudice as well as the sexual shenanigans of the well-heeled and not so well-heeled white folks). If the accents vary widely the large cast otherwise acquit themselves with aplomb, (Fonda is excellent, then there's always a young Faye Dunaway, Burgess Meredith, always good as a villain, Robert Hooks, Beah Richards and George Kennedy), while the director once again makes very good use of the wide-screen. If the material is handled more conventionally than in several of Preminger's preceding pictures it nevertheless shows a master's hand at work making this a movie ripe for rediscovery.