Cotton and Cattle

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.