Sam heeds his uncle's advice, so Nona, their children Daisy and Jot, "Granny", and he leave the migrant camp and set out to work a vacant 68-acre tenant farm with little more than two mules, a second-hand plow, and some cotton seed and fertilizer.

Sam and his family nearly freeze and starve during their first winter on the farm, surviving largely on a limited diet of opossums, raccoons, and other small game that he is able to shoot.

In return for the fish and the bragging rights that he was the one who caught it, Devers agrees to give Sam his garden and allow him continued access to his well, a deal that effectively puts an end to the trouble between the two families.

Sam, stunned by the sudden devastation, lets Tim accompany him as he searches for the family's missing cow, which they find alive but struggling in the swollen river.

Upon returning to the battered farm, though, he reconsiders his decision after he sees the resilience of his wife and grandmother, who are busy cleaning up what remains of the house and professing their resolve to start over again.

Although Scott did not possess McCrea's "star power" as a leading man and had relatively little experience in feature films, he did have one distinct advantage in preparing to portray Sam Tucker; he was a native of Texas, the setting for The Southerner.

In its May 2, 1945 issue, the widely read trade paper Variety recounts the despair fostered by the film's generally bleak tone but praises the performances of the film's stars and principal supporting cast:"The Southerner" creates too little hope for a solution to the difficulties of farm workers who constantly look forward to the day when they can settle forever their existence of poverty with a long-sought harvest—a harvest that invariably never comes...Zachary Scott and Betty Field give fine performances, as do Beulah Bondi, the grandmother, Percy Kilbride, Charles Kemper and J. Carrol Naish.

[18] For Agee, however, that sense of reality ended with the dialogue and attempted southern accents used in much of the film, which he deemed wholly unrealistic, as were in his view the actors' mannerisms and overall behavior on screen.

Later that written record, accompanied by the photographs of Walker Evans, formed the highly acclaimed book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was published just four years prior to the release of The Southerner.

[24] The film-industry trade magazine Boxoffice, in its issue of May 5, 1945, cautioned theater owners that although The Southerner was an "outstanding picture", it was hampered by "an inept title" and by "a cast of questionable drawing power.

[27] With regard to promoting The Southerner in 1945, Boxoffice furnished to theaters a card-sized reference that contained the following "Selling Angles" for the film:Obtain bookstore tieups on George Session[s] Perry's novel "Hold Autumn in Your Hand," from which the picture was adapted.

[28]The recommended "angle" offered by Boxoffice to attract even fishing enthusiasts to The Southerner relates to scenes in the film involving a catfish so large that it has "chin whiskers like lead pencils".

Later in the story, when Sam Tucker actually catches "Lead Pencil", its huge size proves that Finley's earlier description or suspected "whopper" about the fish was no exaggeration.

Boxoffice also gave theater owners "catchlines" or promotional phrases to use on their marquees and to send to newspapers and local radio stations to publicize The Southerner.

In addition to "There Were Two Loves in His [Sam Tucker's] Life—His Family and His Farm", one other catchline given by Boxoffice to exploit the fishing angle, though misleading, was "Things Went From Bad to Pieces .