First Step

By JAY COCKS

SOUNDER

Directed by MARTIN RITT Screenplay by LONNE ELDER III

At last, a compassionate and loving film about being black in America. Sounder has the strength of subtlety and the power of emotional commitment to its subject, though not the kind of inchoate fury that can blister and blind. It manages as no other movie has done to take the special pride and trial of being black and work it into an experience that can be shared and felt by anyone. Poverty, desperation and struggle are the special property of no single group, which is why this story of a black boy growing up poor in the Depression South reaches beyond any racial barrier.

Director Ritt has an ambitious but wildly erratic talent. He has made a few fine films (The Spy Who Came In From the Cold), more flawed but fascinating ones (The Molly Maguires) and a great many sloppy failures (The Great White Hope). He has never seemed surer of himself or in greater control than in Sounder, which he invests with simple beauty and insight.

Playwright Elder's script, adapted from a children's novel by William H. Armstrong, nicely catches the tone : of regional dialect and the temper of the time, 1933, when life was even harder than usual. David Lee Morgan (Kevin Hooks) is a quiet kid who works the fields with his father (Paul Winfield) and mother (Cicely Tyson) and gets to school whenever he can. He is eager about his studies, proud that he can read aloud to his parents and his little brother and sister (Eric Hooks and Yvonne Jarrell).

Because the kitchen table has held no adequate food for months, David Lee's father raids a white man's smokehouse for a piece of meat, gets caught and sentenced to a year's labor at a prison farm. There are laws in this Louisiana parish against telling convicted "Nigras" and their families specifically where they are being sent. So David Lee, with his hound dog Sounder, sets out to search for the father.

This is emphatically not a boy-and-his-dog story, however, nor is it one of the soft-focus elegies to youth, like Summer of '42, that trade so heavily on gauzy nostalgia. The movie has a harder edge than that, and a great deal more humanity. Ritt shows the fractional quality of change, the painfully slow process by which some men must gain their dignity. The father, whose eventual homecoming makes for the most poignant moment in this singular film, has every hope that sending David Lee away to a black school in a distant county will spare the boy much shame and suffering. What might have been a sentimental resolution becomes instead a gently ironic one. As David Lee rides off to school it is clear that his life will change, but not so much as it ought, nor so much as he and his family hope.

Like David Lee's journey, Sounder itself is a small first step, and in a sense a safe one. It never challenges the audience, never really risks rage. The film shares instead the characters' feeling of awakening dissatisfaction, which is excellently projected by each of the actors. Paul Winfield brings great strength and quiet feeling to the role of David Lee's father. As the mother, Cicely Tyson is superb. It falls to her not only to display warmth toward her family but also to show such shreds of defiance and muted fury as she dares to a world that has always threatened to grind her down. For its range and its richness, and for its carefully portioned power, it is an indelible performance.

-- Jay Cocks

Her people came from Nevis, smallest of the Caribbean's Leeward Islands, and she was born on the fringes of Harlem, but Cicely Tyson was familiar enough with Sounder's emotional territory of the Depression South. "No one," she says, "can grow up poor and not be affected."

Her father was a great many things --house painter, carpenter--but none so much as unemployed. Her mother would supplement the welfare check by taking a subway to The Bronx and, Cicely recalls, "standing on a corner until someone asked her to come clean their house." For the children --Cicely had an older sister and brother--there were always hot meals, left to warm on the radiator.

Cicely never nurtured any fantasies of escape into movies because the Tyson children were never allowed to go. "We spent a lot of time in church," she says. Cicely was working as a Red Cross secretary when she decided to try modeling, a pursuit that quickly earned her $65-an-hour fees, the covers of both Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and renewed dissatisfaction. "I felt like a machine," she says, so she began to study acting. Her mother was horrified. They did not see each other again for two years.

Mother eventually came round when she saw her daughter in a neighborhood production of Dark of the Moon in 1958. Four years later, after Cicely's award-winning performance off-Broadway in The Blacks, TV and theater offers began to come round too. But her film roles were either forgettable (A Man Called Adam) or fleeting (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). Now Sounder has changed all that.

No American actress since Jane Fonda in Klute has given a film performance of such artfully varied texture. "I rank her with the best actresses I've worked with," says Director Ritt, placing her in such fast company as Patricia Neal and Joanne Woodward. Cicely, unmarried, now lives quietly in Los Angeles, works hard --vegetarian dieting and a daily four-mile run--and looks forward to a time when she can be "hired for a role just because I am a good actress, not because I am a black actress."

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