The movie was placed in the 1930s and focused on a black family of sharecroppers, who struggled to make enough to eat and take care of themselves. It opens up with the oldest son and the father hunting with their dog, sounder, showing that they had to hunt to find meat because they were struggling to get food. The father later gets caught stealing and gets taken to jail, and their dog gets shot by the Sheriff. The oldest son spends most of the movie hoping to see his dog again, which he does when the dog eventually comes back, and hoping to find his father; although he goes on a quest to find his father, he only sees his father when he is released from the prison camp. Throughout the movie, it’s clear that the oldest son is intellectual and enjoys reading, so a good part of the movie focuses on him being allowed to go to school, him reading, him finding a school for blacks with a black teacher, and even ends with him going to said school.
Although I loved the message and theme of the movie, it is older, which means it had a lot of faults. The quality of the picture itself in the movie and some of the action scenes, such as the shooting of the dog, seemed unrealistic and unnatural, but that’s simply because of the age of the movie. However, no matter how old this movie is, it holds great value because it allows generation after generation to see what sharecropping was, how blacks lived after slavery was abolished, and the racism that still existed. For example, they show the mother giving the crops to a white man and only being able to keep a very small portion (sharecropping), the living conditions and how hard they had to work, that the black children sat in the back behind white children in classrooms, and how a white woman can be caught for a crime and not get charged or told on, while a black man would go to prison camp for a year just for theft. Accurately depicted historical movies will always be of significance because viewers can learn from them and can understand more about history and the past. In today’s culture, this is extremely important for two reasons. The first is that people often forget about sharecropping; we focus on slavery and on segregation, but spend little time talking about sharecropping and how it came about. Secondly, there have been more and more protests for equality over the past few years, and I believe that this movie shows that although slavery no longer existed and that they were all “equal human beings,” equality was not present, while racism was obvious. This shows that even if laws or society says that equality exists, it might not be true.