THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT (1953) *** Post Civil War Kentucky was....a quaint place. A mixture of wild contradictions; only the whiskey was straight. Which goes on the positive side of the ledger, I'd say. Somehow John Ford doesn't have any trouble catchin' it all, and if Charles Winningham isn't quite as great a Judge Priest as Will Rogers it's the same reason that no one else could have been, either. Yes, racism-by contemporary standards-is quite evident, but the momentum is towards disrupting it, and there's no denying the innate comedic talents of Stepin Fetchit, a genius that absolutely transcends whatever confusion it may have caused in lesser men. The center to it all, as most any good Southerner will still tell you, is a common decency and religion. We were going to watch a Christmas movie instead, and early on I turned to my wife and said, "This isn't a Christmas movie." I was wrong.
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