Summary
A sun-bleached morality play set among the white bolls of a debt-ridden Delta plantation, Cotton and Cattle pits the rust-red dust of a cattle spread against the spectral phosphorescence of hooded terror. When rapacious banker Buck Garrett circles the Carson acreage like a turkey-vulture, Ethel Carson—equal parts steel-magnolia and proto-feminist strategist—summons her laconic rancher lover Jack Harding and his saddle-sore posse to wage war with pick-sacks instead of six-guns. Garrett, ever the opportunist, weaponizes local superstition: a single newspaper squib births the “Night Rider,” a caped klansman whose flaming crosses scatter Black sharecroppers and whose midnight raids torch cabins into constellations of ember. The crop must reach the gin by moon’s end; time is measured in dew-soaked dawns and the slow creak of wagon tongues. Kidnapping, mistaken identity, and a climactic unmasking that rips the burlap veil from Garrett’s sanctimony all unfold in chiaroscuro flickers, as if the film itself were a tintype scorched around the edges.
Synopsis
Because Buck Garrett threatens to foreclose the mortgage on her father's cotton plantation, Ethel Carson enlists the aid of her sweetheart, rancher Jack Harding, and his cowboys in quickly picking the crop for market. Garrett gets an idea from a newspaper, and the next day Carson receives a note from "the night rider" warning him to cease harvesting. Carson stubbornly refuses, and his harassment begins: the black pickers are frightened away by hooded men, their huts are burned, Carson is kidnapped. Donning the cloak of a felled "night rider," Jack finds Carson, subdues the band's leader, and unmasks Garrett.
Director
Cast
