Like America generally, Hollywood periodically addresses its legacy of social inequality in fits of forward-looking progress followed by corresponding bouts of regressive practice. In terms of racial representation, both at the level of movie content and of access to the means of production, this cycle has seen several waves since the birth of cinema in the 1890s.

Perhaps the first such expression occurred in the silent era with the mushrooming of storefront peep booths and traveling pictures shows that created a parallel demand in both white-dominated mainstream audiences and in the black community, especially in urban centers. The commonly understood backlash to this moment was the standardization of viewing circumstances with a dependence on expensive projectors and movie palaces, increased social segregation and the early adoption of racist black stereotypes on-screen as seen in D.W. Griffith's seminal The Birth of a Nation.

A second wave of liberalism occurred in the 1930s as a separate, often independently financed and distributed cinematic practice developed for black filmmakers and moviegoers alike. Hollywood studios tolerated and sometimes abetted this secondary system by producing cheap, socially realist titles for this alternative audience or else by re-making their A-list films with a second cast and crew shooting the same material on the same production schedule at off hours and often in non-English languages. Oscar Micheaux was a pioneer of this movement along with early stars like Paul Robeson who enjoyed a crossover appeal although this separate cinema was largely ended during the fall of the studio system in the late 1940s and the subsequent rise of television.

The third wave of liberalism occurred in the 1960s with the rising tide of Civil Rights agitation, the troubled nature of urban life and the looming tempest of Vietnam. Television news programs, evolving domestic social policies and new immigration practices each played a role in expanding mainstream sensibilities, as did a handful of filmmakers and performers who opened the sieve of accepted movie expressions. Among their number were Melvin Van Peebles, Ozzie Davis, Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, each of whom were pioneers in modern black American cinema. History's reaction to this creative leap was the development of both black-centered, and controlled, moviemaking practices along with a rampant '70s Blaxploitation sub-genre epitomized by such films as Willie Dynamite.

In this unparalleled moment of black moviegoers and moviemakers looking for, and being allowed to fulfill, the ideals of a black sensibility on film is situated Martin Ritt's Sounder, adapted by Lonne Elder from the celebrated novel of the same name by William H. Armstrong. It concerns the Morgans, a five-person nuclear family of Louisiana sharecroppers living in the heart of the Great Depression in 1933, though buoyed by their golden retriever, Sounder.

Led by family patriarch Nathan Lee (Paul Winfield), they work a leased field while family matriarch Rebecca (Cicely Tyson) sidelines doing the laundry of the sympathetic white woman, Mrs. Boatwright (Carmen Mathews). Between days working the farm, nights raccoon hunting with Sounder and their Sundays spent attending church services and playing baseball, eldest child David Lee (Kevin Hooks) enjoys the happiness of life in his respectable family. He looks out for his younger sister Josie Mae (Yvonne Jarrell) and younger brother Earl (Eric Hooks) and helps his parents with the myriad details of an impoverished circumstance.

When Nathan Lee is caught stealing food for his hungry family the Morgans are pulled apart from their center of unity and calm. Convicted for his crimes, Nathan lee is sent to a prisoner's work farm across the state for an indeterminate period and Rebecca is forced to take-over the family plot in his absence. Unable to communicate with him due to the ridiculous policies of the white Sheriff Young (James Best), she sends David Lee on a cross-country odyssey to find his father and bring back news of his safe return.

Along the way the boy discovers, first hand, the problems of being poor and black in the American south of the 1930s. He sees the awesome natural beauty of the Louisiana glades and country roads and discovers his own budding sense of social justice. He also encounters a few racist whites and happens upon a dedicated black schoolteacher who encourages him to become an educated person.

Returning home without news of his father, David Lee settles back into his sharecropper's duties until Nathan Lee returns home. Having been injured in a dynamite blast, Nathan Lee finds himself a disabled free man faced with his family's impoverished circumstances but also of David Lee's invitation to enter school full time. Able to see his son's promise of literacy and new opportunities, Nathan Lee co-signs David Lee's invitation and takes him to school to end the film.

Filled with heart-warming snapshots of a marginal family struggling for survival and self-respect, Sounder tells its story without the benefit of its eponymous dog, absent from the moment of Nathan Lee's incarceration after sustaining a gunshot wound until David Lee's return home as a more mature person. In this ellipsis, or symbolism of transformation, Sounder becomes the film's representation of comfort within a moment of difficult and unpleasant change.

First Nathan Lee is forced to violate his moral precepts and steal food to feed his family. Then Sounder is shot forcing him off into the woods to convalesce until David Lee recognizes the proper direction for his future in the embrace of his mind. At this point Sounder returns home, seemingly healed and rejuvenated, much as David Lee returns to his mother and siblings renewed in his vision of a world with hope in equal portion to the desperation so obviously a part of the Morgans' daily existence.

Not particularly complex as a story, nor particularly remarkable as a piece of film art, Sounder is profoundly of its moment in the cycle of American movies and their periodic redress of racial inequality. Produced and released some five years before the groundbreaking TV miniseries Roots, but competing for box office dollars with the spawn of Shaft, Ritt's picture is touching in all the obvious, sentimental ways now commonly associated with banal feature films and contemporary TV movies of the week. In its moment, though, its complete focus on a black family, but especially a black family assembled whole with a mother, father and children, was a breath of fresh air for which the film has long been remembered.

Not subscribing to the black man as criminal or buffoon or the black woman as mammy or whore stereotypes so typical of the early '70s, Winfield and Tyson turn in respectable, sexually charged and realistic performances. However, the film is really all about David Lee Morgan and to his credit Kevin Hooks is able to carry the movie, even if that movie isn't particularly brilliant as the description of its parts without a wider context of black images within American movies.

Strange about the legacy of Sounder, too, is its place among the critical favorites of 1972. Having been nominated as the Academy's Best Picture alongside Cabaret, The Emigrants, Deliverance and the eventual winner, The Godfather, Ritt's historical drama achieves high marks for adapting Armstrong's beloved novel, but mostly for its appeal to movie audiences willing to accept its family-oriented story of struggle and hope. Yet Sounder's place among the year's best films now seems a specious claim when considered through some 30 years hindsight.

Though the wave of black stars, filmmakers and a much smaller group of executives that arrived on scene in the late 1960s was a laudable, necessary evolution in American movies, it's not to say that every piece of work from the period is brilliant simply for being the first representation of that which had been largely overlooked by Hollywood. Said differently, there is a frequent burden born of work that focuses on marginal experience typically pushed aside by more mainstream considerations. Regarding black American experience this tendency often results in the dangers of stereotype, tokenism and unwarranted positive regard for the black-centered works that crossover with an appeal to mass audiences.

Sounder is a pleasant enough film but it's not a movie classic even if its focus on a loving black family was all but unknown in American movies of 1972. More to the point, it's earned its place in the pantheon of family-oriented movies but a wide appeal to open-minded values isn't to be misunderstood as genius.