Rent The Reivers (1969)

Southern Nostalgia. - The Reivers review by Steve

Comedy-drama based on William Faulkner's novel set in the American south of the distant memory. A car is delivered to a rich family in a small rural town in Mississippi. The stable boys Boon and Ned (Steve McQueen and Rupert Crosse) 'borrow' the car and drive the family's 11 year old boy Lucius (Mitch Vogel) to Memphis where bawdy adventures take place and life-lessons are learned.  

The narrator (Burgess Meredith) declares that the citizens of Mississippi in his youth were a 'pleasant courteous people'. This was a time of apartheid, religious fundamentalism and great inequality. There is racism in the film (and free use of racist expletives) but it is stripped of menace. There are rednecks, a stupid fat sheriff, ribald sex workers... all the archetypes of southern comedy.

Perhaps this defanged idealisation of the past is more credible because it is a memory film. The suffering has been forgotten. If that hurdle can be overcome, and McQueen's rather grotesque, broad caricature, then there is a warm coming of age story set in the endless summers of all our pasts.

The film is quite beautifully photographed. There is a folksy score by John Williams, all banjos and fiddles, and well as a sentimental orchestral theme for moments of nostalgia. There is a sense of the past being a place of safety and childhood being a time of adventure, which may be a little guileless, but allowing for its faults this is a gentle, tranquil period film.