The Southerner is considered to be Renoir's finest American film. "What attracted me to the story was precisely that there was really no story, nothing but a series of strong impressions-the vast landscape, the simple aspiration of the hero, the heart and the hunger," wrote Renoir. In order to achieve pictorial realism, he shot the film almost entirely on location in a cotton field in California's San Joaquin Valley (standing in for Texas in the novel). It told the story of one year in the life of a farmhand (Zachary Scott) who is tired of working for others and decides to go it alone with his wife, his old mother, and his small son. He finds a patch of wasteland and builds a shack on it, and then has to fight off a malicious neighbor, the elements, and malnutrition. Renoir's sense of realism was very much allied with the New Deal documentaries. But by fixing his characters to the landscape through commonplace details, he reduced the monolithic theme of social injustice to the scale of one man.