Sounder

Martin Ritt's big-screen adaptation of William H. Armstrong's Newberry Award winning novel, Sounder stars Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks as a black family struggling through life in depression-era Louisiana. The Morgan family is poor, but close. Young son David (Hooks) enjoys hunting ...more

Director Martin Ritt -- who was blacklisted in the 1950s for his association with the Communist Party -- specializes in intimate, earthy southern dramas (Murphy's Romance, Norma Rae, Hud), and Sounder is one of his best works. Taj Mahal's sparse blues score combines with John A. Alonzo's stirring cinematography to create the movie's palpable sense of mood and setting (shot on location in Louisiana). Despite the incessantly arrogant prejudice of most of the film's white characters, the family's ...more