The best director of all time in the open air

It's clear to me that no one - with possible exception of John Ford? - directed in the open air better than Jean Renoir. We all remember his great en plein air scenes in Grand Illusion and even more so in Rules of the Game (the hunt especially) and last night I saw for the first time one of his lesser-known, undeservedly, American films, The Southerner (1945) - a truly terrific film of its type. The Southerner is beset by a few handicaps, not only it dumb title and its lack of marquee stars and its timing - did Americans really want to watch a movie about farmers trying to make it in the cotton fields as the war was ending? I think they wanted either escapism or war dramas - and it looked old-fashioned even in its day, in grainy black-and-white and narrow-screen format. Yes, the film is kind of a campy melodrama, but told with such passion, humor, and visual imagery that it rises well above all of its limitations. The story is of a small family that leases a field in hopes of getting out of the life of sharecropping and migrant labor, and they suffer all the privations you can imagine during their first year of life on the homestead, flood, illness, poverty, well runs dry, nasty neighbors, and so on. the reasonably happy ending seems tacked on - perhaps a sop to the need of the day for some kind of moral uplift. But such great scenes throughout the movie!: opening in the cotton fields when Uncle Pete falls over and dies, his last words: Plant your own seeds; grandmother stuffing her face with fox grapes, and her fear of snakes as she walks through the rows of cotton (sets us up for ominous dangers everywhere); the flood washing away the farm and the cattle - I actually have no idea how Renoir was able to film this; the knife fight beside the well, one of the more credible film fights ever, much more so that, for example, the balletic knife fighting in West Side Story; the square dance, with the grandma starting to sing hymns; the wedding party (one of the few indoor scenes); the family gathering around the stove for a meal of stewed possum (and hot coffee) - scene by scene, few films can match this one for imagery, oddity, and beauty.