MaryAnn Johanson: Dee Rees's marvelous
film is
of course a terrific look at racism in the rural South in the 1940s: I particularly love how it shows how its two WWII veterans, one black and one white, are changed by their experiences
of race relations in Europe and in the US Army
during the war, that they
discover that the way things have been in America are not automatically the way they must be, that their world could be better and fairer.