Hurry Sundown

Hurry Sundown is a suspenseful 1967 racial drama from director Otto Preminger ("Anatomy of a Murder"). After World War II, a young combat veteran, Rad McDowell (John Phillip Law) supports his family by sharecropping in the Georgia farmlands. Reeve Scott (Robert Hooks), a young black man sharecropper tends the neighboring plot with his mother, Rose (Beah Richards). When a northern cannery needs their land for a large plant, the two small farmers both refuse and form an unlikely friendship and business partnership. Meanwhile, a wealthy landowner, Henry Warren (Michael Caine) wants the land deal to go through. He stands to profit greatly from optioning his wife Julie Ann's (Jane Fonda) inherited land, so he uses the KKK and the courtroom of the bigoted Judge Purcell (Burgess Meredith) to illicitly take control of the land. This period drama of racial conflict and land politics includes an A-list cast that give nuance and humanity to these small town characters.