George Washington

In George Washington (2000) David Gordon Green depicts an alternative Southern landscape and in doing so redefines the terms in which the South can be cinematically envisioned. Rather than a traditional rural South, or an urban modern South, he presents a South in some transitional new world. Watching the opening scenes of this film is in some sense like watching the opening scenes of Terrence Malick's film The New World. The similarity is not coincidental since Malick is Green's model. But the South we see in Malick's film is a South undefined—it is all Nature, unspoiled, undeveloped, unmarked by any historical or ideological conflict. It is only after we begin watching The New World that we realize that the land on which the events of the film take place is the land that will become part of the South and of America, and that the early events depicted in the film mark the first step in the process of defining that geographical space.

George Washington shows us the side streets and back lots and overgrown weeds of the lower-economic districts of a mid-size Southern town. This is not a space we can recognize from most previous films about the South (Nothing but a Man is a significant exception). It therefore appears unaccompanied by the values and themes of other Southern films—no plantation houses, no drag races, no battle of the old South with the New. It quickly becomes apparent that African American children will play a role, and soon after them a few African American adults and young labor class white men. With their appearance some themes of race and racial conflict become apparent, but even then they do not appear in their traditional forms.

The children who are the main characters are from the lower-economic class. They are not profoundly poverty-stricken—perhaps lower-middle class would be a more appropriate designation. Poverty in itself is an indicator of racial themes. Yet the film refrains from fully embracing this kind of theme by including young white and black men who work for the railroad. They all work under the same sets of circumstances. When Damascus—a young black man around 30—quits his job on the railroad after being docked a day's wages , we could possibly see racial implications in the act of a white manager firing a black laborer, yet the situation could quite possibly have involved the white manager firing one of the white employees.

The world presented to us in George Washington is not explicitly a racially defined world, though the racial conflicts of the modern South are implied. Rather it is a world defined by poverty, limited horizons, and the aimlessness of modern times.

It would be easy enough to view George Washington as a sociological tract focused on children without parents—children of the modern Southern ghetto. Once again, the film does not categorize its characters racially, and though we can draw conclusions from the film based on race, they are not the main concern.

Descriptions of the plot of this film usually mention that it is about the efforts of a group of children to respond to the unexpected death of a friend. The film explores that issue, but it is not the film's only or even central concern. Rather it is about children and the experience of being children in a modern world. It's also about the struggle of children to define themselves and to come to grips with approaching and uncertain adulthood. To me the central concern is not the child's death (though he does seem to be the main character of the film's first third) but the boy named George.

George is clearly a strange child. Everyone knows he has a soft spot in his skull, the result of a fontanel that never grew together. He apparently has to wear a football helmet to protect his skull (whether this is his choice or something he has been ordered to do by a doctor is not clear). He can't swim or immerse his head in water because he has severe headaches as a result. People give him a wide berth. Some people may think he is mentally deficient, and his strange behavior at times may bear up the impression. Yet the more we get to know him, the less we consider his possible defects, and the more perhaps we see him as the representative character of the film, the vessel for the film's message, if indeed it has a message.

Nasia, the film's narrator, a 13-year old and preternaturally mature young girl, idolizes George. (Nasia's poetic, poignant voice specifically recalls the voices of Sissy Spacek in Badlands and Linda Manz in Days of Heaven). The film's first scene shows Nasia and Buddy in the act of breaking up. Nasia later tells Buddy's friend that she broke up with him because he was too much like a child. She wants someone more grown up. After Buddy, she chooses George. It's clear she comes to believe in him as a person who will do great things, who will become president of the United States, who is (after he endangers his own life by jumping in a swimming pool to save a drowning child) a hero. George is specifically associated with the first president of the United States, George Washington. He is attracted to figures of fame and prominence. After a July 4^th parade, he sees the man who played Uncle Sam in the parade and tells him that he was the best thing about the parade.

A lot of what George wants for himself is really what Nasia tells us that he wants, or imagines that he wants: "My friend George said that he was gonna live to be 100 years old. He said - He said that he was going to be the president of the United States. I wanted to see him lead a parade and wave a flag on the Fourth of July. He just wanted greatness." George becomes her way of dreaming about the future, and even though in some ways he might be the most disadvantaged character in the film, his aspirations, specifically his desire to be a hero, to save people's lives, to have significance, are what attracts her.

Others in the film, if not desiring fame and recognition, at least agonize over what they will do, over the future. One of Nasia's friends wants to become pregnant because she feels that would be her entrée to adulthood. Vernon, a large boy in early adolescence, feels ridden with guilt for Buddy's death. He doesn't know what to do. He tells Sonya, "I just wish I had my own tropical island, I wish . . . I wish I was . . . I could go to China, I wish I could go out of The States . . . I wish I had my own planet, I wish I . . . I wish there were 200 of me, man . . . I wish I could just sit around with computers and just brainstorm all day man. I wish I was born again." He and Sonya, who is probably no more than 10, try to run away and leave town together, but she rolls the car they steal and they limp painfully away. Sonya thinks of herself as "no good": I don't have much to look forward to. I ain't smart. I ain't no good. My whole family ain't no good. And for the first time in my life, I don't got no excuses for my future."

Another way that George Washington doesn't fit the mold of many other Southern films is its depiction of race. For the most part the children in the film have not grown old enough to become conscious of race. Sonya is the only white child in the film. She's innocent, corrupted already, and blonde, and to the black kids in the film she's simply another one of their group. Buddy and later George have frequent heart-to-heart talks with Rico Rice (played by Rob Schneider, the only name actor in the film). There is no sense of condescension in Rico—he talks to Buddy and George as equals—the fact that they are black and younger than he doesn't come into play.

In a more general way, the white railroad workers that Rico works with and with whom he pals around—advising them on how to eat a healthy diet—talk to the black kids just as kids, and the kids themselves see nothing out of the way in spending time with the white men. This is a South where race matters hardly as much as class and economic status. One might argue that this is unrealistic, and that the film portrays a world that doesn't exist.

In a sense Green uses the black and white characters as vehicles for giving expression to his own sentiments about life and fate and the future. Do kids Nasia's age and George's age really talk like the characters in this film? Do they have the thoughts these characters have? Is any 12-year-old as self-conscious and aware as Nasia is?

Lil Abner

The musical film Lil Abner (1959) is a version of the Broadway musical which was in turn a version of Al Capp's comic strip which itself parodied and satirized Southern mountain folk. Capp actually used Southern mountain folk to parody and satirize American culture and politics. Capp's comic strip was idiosyncratic, distinctive, and often wrong-headed. But it had at its best originality and intelligence. The film strips away from its source the controversy and provocativeness and most of the wrong-headedness and gives us in their place dancing Broadway actors pretending to be hillbillies.

I have not seen the musical, but there is little merit in the film, with the exception of a couple of memorable musical numbers, especially Stubby Kay as Marryin' Sam singing about the revered town hero, General Jubiliation T. Cornpone, whose ineptness allowed (according to town tradition and an inscription on his statue written by Abraham Lincoln) the North to win the Civil War.

The plot of this film focuses on the decision of the federal government to move atomic bomb testing site from Nevada (where it is a nuisance to Las Vegas) to the "most unnecessary place in the world," which turns out to be Dogpatch, the home of all the characters in the film. Because the first A-bomb test will prevent the annual Sadie Hawkins Day Race, wherein unmarried women of Dogpatch get to chase and try to catch the men they love, the citizenry begins looking for a way to prove their town really is necessary. An equally important plot is Daisy Mae Yokum's desire to get Lil Abner to propose to her. She's also being courted by Earthquake McGoon, a wrestler whom no one likes.

Folks break into song at a moment's notice in this film. Those moments don't come often enough. As bad as most of the songs are, they're better than the non-singing portions of the film. Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for the songs. The dance sequence surrounding the Sadie Hawkins Day Race brings a little life to the film, but the race runs on too long.

Some of Al Capp's themes filter through into the film: the bureaucracy of the federal government, the corruption and incompetence of politicians, suspicion of science and technology, the complexity and pretense of the modern civilized world in comparison to the innocence and simplicity of the people of Dogpatch. These people are, according to the film, ignorant, uneducated, licentious, and full of life. They talk with cartoon accents that seem, ironically, taken directly from the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris. There are no African Americans in the film, though there is one Indian, a dancing Indian. Few if any African Americans would have lived in the mountains where Dogpatch might have been located, and that makes it easy for this film to evade any awareness of the civil rights movement in progress at the time of its release. There's a lot of talk about the Civil War and several obvious flaunting of the Confederate battle flag.

It's difficult to bridge the gap of fifty years between the present time and 1959 when this film appeared. It's difficult to imagine an audience liking this film—its manufactured and accidental cornpone, its fundamental inauthenticity. The film was made entirely on a stylized set. Everything is stylized, brightly colored, as if in homage to the story's comic strip origins. Some of the characters do a respectable job of embodying their characters, especially Billie Hayes and Joey Marks as Ma and Pa Yokum. Leslie Parrish is fine as Daisy Mae—she at least looks the part. It's easy to see in Lil Abner the precursor of Jethro Bodine in the Beverly Hillbillies television series, which borrowed liberally from the comic strip and was more lively than this film ever manages to be.

The closest most of the actors in this film ever came to mountain folk was probably through reading the comic strip.

Mississippi Marsala

In Mississippi Marsala (1991) director Mira Nair examines racism, both in the American South and elsewhere, through a different lens. The South in this film provides a landscape known for a history of difficult racial relations. We see elements of this racism in the film, mere hints, really. The primary focus is on relations between African Americans and South Asian Indians. By focusing on these groups, Nair views race in a new and unfamiliar context that sheds light on more familiar discussions of the subject.

Nair parallels the experiences of an Indian family in Uganda and in Mississippi. The family regarded Uganda as its home. Meena, the daughter, has never even visited India. She knows no other country but Uganda. When Idi Amin foments racial discord in Uganda, and when Meena's father Roshan Seth makes comments critical of Amin in a BBC interview, the family is forced to leave, along with all other non-Africans. As Roshan Seth's African friend explains to him, "Africa is only for Africans now, black Africans." As a result the family moves to Greenwood, Mississippi, to run a hotel while Roshan Seth pursues law suits against the Ugandan government, seeking the return of confiscated property. Part of the reason why Roshan Seth and others like him were expelled is that they had become wealthy and had been accused of a certain clannishness—Indian families did not, for example, allow their children to marry Africans.

In Greenwood, Meena grows up. At the time of the story, she is 24. Her parents expect her to marry an Indian. In a minor car accident, Meena runs into the van of a carpet cleaner named Demetrius Williams, played by Denzel Washington. Demetrius, with the assistance of some white citizens in the town, has secured a bank loan to start a carpet cleaning company. He has been successful with the company and always pays his bank notes on time. After the accident, he and Meena begin to see each other and fall in love. When their relationship is discovered (they are found sleeping together in a hotel room by one of Meena's relatives), there are extreme reactions in the community from both sides of the racial fence. Meena's father forbids the relationship, though he rationalizes his opposition by saying that he does not want his daughter to suffer racism in the same way he did.

In a scene shortly after the car accident, one of Meena's relatives, a successful businessman in Greenwood, urges Demetrius not to file suit against his family because of the collision. He tells Demetrius that all non-white people are "colored" people, the point being that they all suffer racism and therefore share a common bond. On the basis of this common plight, he appeals to Demetrius, who assures him he has no plans to sue.

After Demetrius' relationship with Meena is discovered, however, the common bond disappears. The Indians unanimously oppose her relationship with a black man. The same relative who appealed to Demetrius not to sue in turn goes to white business owners in town and asks them not to do business with Demetrius' carpet cleaning company. He quickly loses all his clients and the bank threatens to repossess his van. White citizens of the town complain and joke about Demetrius' relationship with Meena. Meena's father decides to move back to Africa to prevent his daughter from involvement with Demetrius.

Demetrius receives criticism from family and friends, from the African American community in general, for his relationship with Meena. His sister accuses him of rejecting black women. His father accuses him of causing trouble. His father, whom Demetrius loves, has spent his life working in subservient roles. He appears to believe in the necessity of playing it safe, of not antagonizing the white power structure by any action or word that would seem to offend prevailing racial codes. In a sense, Demetrius by developing his carpet cleaning business has done the same—it is a service-oriented business, one involving manual labor, not one that threatens to upset the racial order in Greenwood.

Both sides—the Indians and the African Americans—reveal their racial clannishness and their own racist attitudes in reacting to Meena and Demetrius' relationship. Several short scenes show white citizens in Greenwood reacting to the fracas. One old man gleefully remarks on the problems that the Indian family is experiencing with the African American Demetrius.

The parallels that Nair has set up in the film—between Uganda and Greenwood, Mississippi, and between the Indians who have never been to India and the African Americans who have never been to Africa—work well. Both groups feel that where they are—Greenwood—is their home. Yet both groups experience conflict with other groups who see a specific racial identity associated with their citizenship in Uganda or in Greenwood--Uganda is for black Africans; Greenwood is for African-Americans, or for whites, but not for Indians.

Meena and Demetrius ultimately resolve their problems by breaking with their families and with Greenwood. They decide to move away and to work the carpet cleaning business together. The suggestion is that, given the racism both of Greenwood and of their families, this is the only way they can find satisfaction and happiness. This film therefore seems to argue that the solution to racial conflict does not lie in adherence to past traditions and beliefs but rather in living in the present, in accommodating oneself to present-day circumstances and situations.

In a sense this film is not so much about the South as it is about two groups of people who live in the South—Indians and African Americans—and specifically about Mira and Demetrius' families.

Mira Nair has an incisive sense of comedy and satire that comes through especially in her portrayal of various Indian characters in the film, especially one character in particular who covets his car and dresses and acts like a 1950s style Memphis hipster, with greased back hair, in the Elvis style. She's more careful not to satirize African American characters—perhaps she feels her identity as an Indian woman allows her a certain license in satirizing Indians, but not in satirizing other races. Yet she also has a genuine fondness for the humanity of all her characters —African, African American, Indian, or white. She recognizes the comic as well as tragic consequences that can arise from human conflict rooted in racial divisions.

Sharky’s Machine

In 1981, Burt Reynolds was approaching the end of the most significant decade of his career. It began in 1972 with the release of Deliverance, in which Reynolds played a straight role, one of the two most important roles in the film. It was a role that many thought could be his breakthrough into film—previously he had been mostly a television actor. Numerous films followed Deliverance, such as White Lightening (1973), W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), Gator (1975), Semi-Tough (1977), Hooper (1978), The End (1978), and of course Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and its first sequel (1980). In these films we see Reynolds in a number of roles--as an action hero, a comedian, a romantic lead, even a musical star. But the roles for which he is best known are those in which he plays a boisterous comic Southern prankster—a fool-killer with a moralistic desire to upend corrupt authority and in general to run amuck. Reynolds has been trying to live down this persona, and at the same time to take advantage of it, for much of the rest of his career. He's shown an impressive flexibility in the kinds of roles he is willing to take, and at the same time a resilient energy that led to the renovation of his career beginning with Boogie Nights and more recent films. He's even been willing to parody roles that made him famous—see Without a Paddle (2004) and The Dukes of Hazzard (2005). Although everyone knows his name, he did not ever become the great actor and star he aspired to become—there is a difference, of course, between acting and being a star. Reynolds was a competent actor and for a time a big-name star but in neither case a name for the ages.

Sharky's Machine (1981) may be the film in which Reynolds sought to alter the stakes of his career. Not only does he play a big city detective, but he also directs the film, based on the novel of the same title by Georgia writer William Diehl. I haven't read the novel and so cannot consider the film in relation to its source. The film on its own grounds is a mess, wavering back and forth between gritty police drama, character study, and romantic potboiler. Demoted to the vice squad at the beginning of the film because of a shooting that killed a civilian—Sharky is a highly skilled detective who wants to redeem himself and who is naturally disposed to rebel against authority. He and other members of the vice squad (all of them suffer from an inferiority complex because the vice squad is the least desirable assignment for a police officer) become involved in investigating a high-class prostitute who is murdered before their eyes. She is having an affair with a candidate for governor, and also with an Italian crime boss (played by Vittorio Gassman) who controls the city's power structure, and much of the police station. The plot grows increasingly dense and complex, and the film is not up to the complexity. There is a moment in the film when two Ninja assassins attack a police informant—you know at this moment that the film is floundering. Ninja assassins have little to do with the rest of the film--except for a final encounter with Sharky on a boat in the middle of (presumably) Lake Lanier. Ultimately, as Gassman's hitman brother kills off Sharky's colleagues, the film resolves all these complexities by transmogrifying into a film about Sharky's love for (some might say voyeuristic obsession with) the high-class prostitute apparently killed before his eyes.

The film has the quality of a 1970s era TV crime drama. Kojak comes specifically to mind. The cast includes actors who often appeared in such dramas (Charles Durning, Earl Holliman, Henry Silva, Brian Keith).

Sharky's Machine is set in Atlanta. Reynold's choice of this film based on a Georgia book, the name of his production company (Deliverance Productions), and his use of Atlanta seems a deliberate effort to capitalize on his regional connections. Oddly, the film seems almost a deliberate attempt to reconceive Atlanta as a big national city with no regional distinctiveness. There is, of course, no reason why a film would need to adhere to preconceptions about how a regional city should be portrayed. What the film does for the most part is treat Atlanta as if it is just another version of Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. The music is decidedly non-regional—the brassy sort of music you would expect to hear in a film set on the strip of Las Vegas. Few characters speak with Southern accents, and the few who do are glaring, almost awkward exceptions. Reynolds himself underplays his accent—it's hardly apparent. One reason may be that many of the characters in the film may have moved to Atlanta from somewhere else. Even in 1981 Atlanta was beginning to take on its current character as a city of national and international dimensions (hence the Ninja assassins), but few people in 1981 would have thought of the city in that way, though many complained that it was losing, or had lost, its regional character. A few scenes are specifically tied to Atlanta—one in a night club where a blues band is playing (Atlanta is not known as a center of the blues, but at least the scene ties the film to the South), another set in the infield of Atlanta Stadium, where the Braves play. For the most part, Atlanta is presented as simply another big American city. The film as a whole is bland and without distinctive character. This may be a result of the director's failure to take advantage of the regional aspects of the city where the story takes place—doing so would at least have given the film a sense of place and a specific geographical identity. It might also have helped to emphasize what may be a theme of the film, with its Italian henchmen and Ninja assassins and police officers and bad men who seem to come from all over the nation—that the world is coming to Atlanta and one thing the world brings with it is big-time crime and corruption. (This is not to suggest that Atlanta did not already have enough crime and corruption of its own).

In 1982, Reynolds starred with Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It marked, in my mind, the end of his great decade. The South that provided the location for his most successful films had lost its commercial and cultural appeal (Ronald Reagan had whipped Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential elections), and Reynolds had demonstrated the extent and limits of his talents. He was at his best as the Southern prankster and good ol' boy, and neither Hollywood nor (apparently) Reynolds himself was interested in further incarnations of that role. The nation moved forward. Better romantic character actors made their way onto the scene, and Reynolds as a comic hero was no longer fashionable—a later generation of comedians replaced him. He would struggle for another fifteen years until appearances in such films as Boogie Nights (1997) and Mystery, Alaska (1999) brought about a resurrection of his career, though probably on the basis of terms he would not have chosen for himself.

The Night of the Hunter

Towards the top of my list of favorite films about the American South is the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, based on the Davis Grubbs novel of the same name. This is the only film ever directed by stage and screen actor Charles Laughton, and its commercial and critical failure following its release convinced Laughton and his producers that he should not direct again. When the film was released, critical reaction was mixed and reflected confusion on the part of reviewers and probably also on the part of audiences. The film was an unusual combination of crime drama, film noir, children's fantasy, and stylized, expressionist motifs. It combined scenes of comedy and tragedy, of violence and religion. Parts of the film were conventional; parts seemed almost amateurish. It is not surprising given the kinds of films being made in the 1950s that The Night of the Hunter sank from view soon after its release. It ran counter to established trends. It took 20 years for critics and viewers to recover this film and to begin to recognize its considerable merits.

Admittedly, the inclusion of The Night of the Hunter in a course about Southern films may seem problematic for some. In fact, the more I researched the background of this film, the more problematic its inclusion became. It is first of all not set in the South, or at least not in the deep South. It apparently takes place on or near the banks of the Ohio River, probably where it borders West Virginia. The film certainly looks and feels Southern, set in a rural region during the time of the Depression. A number of scenes show rolling farmland landscapes, with barns such as one would expect to find in the tobacco lands of Tennessee and Kentucky. A number of characters have Southern accents. It has many of the elements we expect to find in Southern literature—for examples, concern with religion and a gothic interest in violence and murder. It also expresses an agrarian skepticism towards cities, progress, technology, and the modern world and the general decay of values in the modern world. So for these reasons I've felt justified including The Night of the Hunter on my list.

But there are further complications. The traditional conception of Southern literature is that it is written by people who have spent all or most of their lives in the American South and that it expresses attitudes and deals with subjects generally associated with the South. We know that this view is being supplanted with other views, and that Southern literature is more diverse than traditional definitions would allow, but I will let tradition suffice for the purpose of this paper. I must further add that I tend to view films in the same way I view literature, that is, as texts suitable for interpretation. I am not a film scholar. My training has been that of a literary critic and teacher. Film has all the basic elements of fiction—narrative, plot, characters, themes, images, setting, and so on. So I treat it as literature. But in thinking about certain films as Southern films, there is a major difference between literature and film. Literature is usually the product of single authors. Film is collaborative. The director is often credited as the auteur, but others, such as screenwriters, cinematographers, editors, and actors, also have a major role in the final product. There is also not a major film industry in the American South. Films are made here, of course, but the people who make them are not typically Southern. Thus in a simplistic way it may be possible to argue that while Southern literature in its traditional definition is by Southerners and about the South, and reflective of attitudes one might associate with the South, Southern films are largely made by non-Southerners who use the South as a landscape on which to explore attitudes that may be Southern or that may not be.

This is certainly the case with The Night of the Hunter. It was filmed on a Hollywood set. Most of the principal actors were not Southerners. Laughton was British. Laughton convinced James Agee, the Tennessee writer who had written the screenplay for John Huston's The African Queen, to write the screenplay for this new film, but the evidence seems to suggest that Laughton did not like Agee's screenplay and partially or largely rewrote it. It is possible that Laughton saw Davis Grubbs' novel The Night of the Hunter as a "Southern" work and that in hiring a Southern writer such as James Agee to write the screenplay he was reflecting this fact. There is conflicting evidence as to how much of the Agee screenplay was actually used in the film. The best discussion of this question that I have read, based on close study of extant drafts of the screenplay, is by Jeffrey J. Folks, "James Agee's Filmscript for The Night of the Hunter," in The Southern Quarterly (1995). Folks suggests, contrary to what others have said, that much of Agee's screenplay appears in the film. Whatever the case might be, the film does reflect his influence.

A number of reasons explain Laughton's desire to make a film of Davis Grubb's novel. He first of all liked the novel, which he read before it was published. He set out to make a faithful adaptation and worked closely with Grubbs in developing the film. The themes that he emphasized in the film were religious extremism, the dire economic conditions of the Depression and the suffering of the rural poor as a result, the victimization of women and of children, and the loss of values in the modern world. His emphasis on the rural landscapes, on the religious extremism and misogyny of his main character Harry Powell, and on the clash of modern values and the modern world against more traditional values—these are emphases he accepted from the novel—are ones that are characteristic of much modern Southern writing. They make it convenient as well as logical to view this film as a Southern work, and at the least as a work which in tone and content is consanguine with other Southern literature.

For those of you unfamiliar with this film, here is a barebones summary. A man named Ben Harper robs a bank and kills two men in the process. He gives the money he has stolen to his son John and directs him to hide and protect the money at all costs. Harper is captured by police, sent to prison, and executed, but before his death he tells his cellmate, an itinerant preacher named Harry Powell, about the hidden money—but does not say where the money is. Powell, who is in prison for stealing a car but who in fact has been traveling through the countryside romancing and marrying vulnerable widows, killing them, and taking their money, decides to find the widow of his executed cellmate and marry her. Soon after this, Powell finds and marries the widow, he realizes that she does not know where the money is and that the children do, so he kills her and begins pressuring John and his sister Pearl to give up the money. They refuse and flee, escaping down the river in a small boat. They are taken in by an elderly woman, played by Lillian Gish, who befriends orphans. She is a pious, virtuous woman who protects parentless children from the evil of modern times, and from people like Harry Powell, whom she wounds with her rifle when he tries to break into her house, and who at the end of the film has been captured and is headed for trial and execution.

Three characteristics make this film remarkable. One is the character of Harry Powell as portrayed by Robert Mitcham. He is an evil and psychopathic serial killer who believes that he is carrying out God's word. His hatred of women, his animalistic greed, and his willingness to kill the children in order to get what he wants make him one a truly chilling character. Mitcham never surpassed or equaled this performance during the remainder of his career. You can't put out of your mind his singing of "leaning on the everlasting arms"—it's not comforting. The second memorable element involves the visual qualities of the film. In cinematography the film ranges from ultra realism to stylized expressionism to fanciful lyricism. One thinks of this film in terms of the visual images that characterize it: the hands of Harry Powell tattooed with the words Love and Hate, the church-like bedroom where Harry kills his wife; the gruesome image of a dead woman sitting in an old jalopy on the bottom of the river, her throat cut; the lyrical images of the children fleeing downriver from their pursuer, and so on. Cinematographer Stanley Cortez deserves much of the credit for this aspect of the film. The third characteristic involves the film's narratives, which fuse the plights of children and widows in the Depression and a young boy's determination to carry out his promise to his father with an elemental battle between virtue and evil.

This is not a perfect film, and from the technical standards of 2007 it may seem dated in ways, especially in several scenes involving special effects. Parts of it are contrived or overstated. My students were particularly put off by a series of scenes in the film's central section where the fleeing children are juxtaposed with images of wild animals that are supposed to suggest that the children live in a world where the strong victimize the weak, where there are predators and their victims. The Night of the Hunter is clearly a "made" film that seeks to create its own world with its own set of standards, not one that seems to emulate the world we inhabit. I like to think of it as a nightmarish fairy tale, the kind that keeps you awake at night. Yet the imperfections, the utter distinctiveness of this film as compared to most American films of the 1950s, or of any other decade for that matter, make this film what it is.

Driving Miss Daisy

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) records a very narrow slice of Southern life between the late 1940s and early 1970s. The setting is Atlanta. The principal characters are an aging black man in need of employment and an old Jewish woman no longer able to drive, or at least whose son does not want her to drive. She is feisty, stubborn, and independent, and when her son brings to her house the man he has hired to chauffeur her around, she makes clear her lack of interest. Gradually, over the course of twenty-five years, a friendship develops between the two. Although Daisy thinks of herself as a progressive woman who has never been prejudiced, she clearly is. She never recognizes the links between herself and Hoke. When the Atlanta Jewish Temple is bombed, Hoke remarks to her that the same men who committed that crime are also the men who commit acts of hatred against blacks. She fails to see the connection. Later she fails to understand why Hoke might want to attend a dinner where Martin Luther King is speaking—she had an extra ticket she could have given him—he drives her to the dinner but does not attend, waiting for her outside in the car while King gives his talk. Despite all of this, their friendship develops in spite of limitations of prejudice and racial divisions.

As the chauffeur Hoke Coburn, Morgan Freeman plays a role that earned him both praise and criticism. He is ingratiating, and there are stereotypical elements in his performance. But he brings Hoke to life not as a general type but as an individual human being. He plays a kind of black man who today would seem a throwback, an anachronism, by 2007 standards. Such men did once exist. To play such a character must have taken courage on Freeman's part, and might well have involved humiliation as well. Jessica Tandy is equally good as Daisy. Criticisms leveled against the film found fault with its portrayal of a friendship between the elderly white woman and her black employee. Such friendships did not exist, so the criticism argues, and the film perpetuates a damaging falsehood as a result. Such friendships may have been rare, but undoubtedly they did occur. Clearly there were black people who worked for white families who felt a sense of kinship with their employers, who may have identified with them to varying extents. Clearly also there were many black people who worked for white families who felt no such kinship at all. Does the film argue that we ought to return to former times, when divisions between the races were more clearly marked, when whites occupied rigidly defined social position over that of blacks? No, I don't think so.

In a sense, the film is about change, progress—both in a good and bad sense.

One can see how the film might be seen to suggest that social progress and modernization have come at a cost. In particular, Daisy's son Boolie and his wife Florine adapt a lifestyle that is decidedly untraditional, at least in the sense of Jewish traditions. They celebrate Christmas and put up seasonal decorations. Boolie may in fact affect Christian customs for the sake of his business, which relies on many non-Jewish customers. He also declines to attend the Martin Luther King tribute dinner because he fears that doing so may cost him the business of white patrons who dislike King. Boolie makes many decisions on the basis of what is good for his business. One might argue that this film portrays a kind of friendship that would have become much more unlikely in post-civil rights days. Thus from this point of view the film may bemoan the loss of such friendships. But what the film doesn't do is argue for a return to the past. It illustrates and marks time's movement forward and the changes it brings. The film effectively illustrates how people grow old, lose their friends, lose their bearings, become more and more alien and alone in a world that is moving forwards and changing without them.

An interesting aspect of this film based on the play of the same name by Alfred Uhry (who also wrote the screenplay) is its low-key portrayal of Jewish Southern life in Atlanta during the mid-twentieth century. In many ways Daisy and Boolie's lives are indistinguishable from the lives of many non-Jewish people around them. Daisy attends synagogue regularly and has her circle of Jewish friends—they play canasta together on a regular basis. They may be outsiders in a predominantly Christian city., but they are also citizens of that city (as Daisy makes clear when she attends the MLK dinner). Some minor conflicts in the film arise from the collision of Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. But Daisy's religion is an incidental context. It's important but not the center of the film. Her identity as a white Southern woman struggling against advancing age and her own prejudices is more important in the film than her religion.

Again we confront in this film the issue of representation. The film portrays an individualized situation—an individual white woman developing a friendship with an individual black man. The film makes no claims that these two are representative of a larger class of people, or that their friendship in some way is representative of a larger phenomenon between white employers and their black employees prior to the Civil Rights movement. But film is a representative medium—it portrays individuals who are also, inescapably, seen as representative types. Audiences are naturally prone to see individual characters in a film as representative of a larger, wider reality. When we watch films (or read books) we often identify with the individual characters—we see them as representative of a larger aspect of experience than their individual situations can imply. It is easy to understand why some viewers of this film may object to the portrayal of a friendship that they do not believe accurately represents white and black relations in mid-20^th century Atlanta. But this whole issue is fraught with complications. Often when we talk about the past, attempt to understand it, to portray it, we skew and distort our visions to encompass a past we want to believe in. How can we know what the facts of the past are to begin with, unless we actually lived through it? Even then our own prejudices and perceptions and memories distort our sense of our own experience.

Colonel Effingham’s Raid

Colonel Effingham's Raid (1946) dramatizes the conflict of modern commerce and traditional values, at least as they are construed in this film based on the 1943 Berry Fleming novel of the same title. In a sense the film is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the elderly. Col. Effingham comes home to Fredericksville at the age of 65 after a lifetime career in the army. His great achievement has been assisting with the building of the Panama Canal. He returns home in 1940 eager to be of use. Col. Effingham in the film is a man of high ideals and principles. He regards himself as a patriot. Although he is overbearing and full of bombast, he is also sincere. He volunteers to write a column on the military for the local newspaper. The newspaper is ambitious to compete successfully with a larger newspaper in town and is not inclined to seek conflict with the political power structure of Fredericksville, a group of older men who have been running the town out of pocket for years, who make deals and agreements under the table, and who have contempt for the townspeople and for the principles of democracy. When they decide to name the town's Confederate Square for a long deceased businessman whom many locals consider a carpetbagger, and when they decide to demolish the historic courthouse and replace it with a new structure to be built by the mayor's brother, Col. Effingham takes aim in his column, calling the citizens to arms and lambasting these threats to the town community and tradition.

The lines of battle are drawn between business , progress, and traditional values. This film about a small Southern town is also set just before the beginning of the Second World War. Therefore at the same time the colonel is battling attacks on tradition and hometown values, the nation is preparing for war. The film (and presumably the novel) explicitly links these two dimensions—Effingham is leading a battle to defend tradition and place and the nation's military is calling up forces to do the same on a wider scale. Oddly, then, this places the nation's enemies—the Nazis and others--in the same category as the men whom the colonel regards as the enemies of the town-- the corrupt political and commercial machine that have always gotten their ways. Not surprisingly, these forces on various scales continue to do battle today in numerous small and large towns and cities around the nation.

One odd characteristic of this film is that while it makes no hesitation to identify itself with a small Southern town there is virtually nothing about the film that is regionally marked. Virtually no citizen has a Southern accent. Col. Effingham himself, played by Charles Coburn (a Savannah, GA, native) has a British accent and swaggers and wears a monocle. I don't really think this is a matter of the film trying to avoid acknowledging its settings (there are a number of black characters playing servants); it may be more a matter of the film's simply trying to avoid the difficulty and expense of teaching actors accents and dressing them up in regional attire. The film may be navigating the demands of authenticity by ignoring them—we have generic Southerners as a result, Southerners who readily acknowledge their region but who aren't much like people who live there. Once you adjust to the peculiarity the rest of the film works well enough.

Effingham's energetic efforts to defeat the town power structure, save the courthouse, and keep the original name for Confederate Square initially seem to fail when every businessman in town refuses to support his efforts—they have too much money at stake, they don't want to anger the city fathers and endanger their own economic welfare. Even the colonel's cousin, a young man named Albert, who also works for the newspaper, is embarrassed by his elder cousin's stand. Only when his uncle suffers a heart attack and lapses into weakness and despair at the defeat he has suffered does Albert begin to feel regret and a sense of duty both to his cousin and the town. Matters take their formulaic course at a rally in the town square held to send the Georgia National Guard off to war.

The South defined in this film is probably based on Berry Flemings own definition in his novel. The South is portrayed as a place of traditions and values threatened by commerce and corruption that have come in from the outside. The lure of money is too much for many of the town's leaders, men who grew up in Fredericksville. It takes the older men like Effingham as well as the women to stand up for traditional and virtue. The newspaper for which Effingham writes his column is portrayed as a paper more interested in its own financial status than in representing the interests of the community.

An exception to the generic South of this film is the black characters, all of whom appear as servants. They play the typical stereotypical roles, rolling their eyes, acting clownish on occasion. My attempts to identify the black actors in the film were made difficult by the fact that the credits don't seem to list them. It's ironic that the one Southern characteristic the film doesn't ignore is the presence of black servants.

Stranded

Stranded is a 1987 film featuring Maureen O'Sullivan and Ione Skye (the singer Donovan's daughter) about a family of aliens who suddenly appear in a house outside a small Southern town. The aliens are fleeing an assassin on a remote world. Why they are the object of assassination is never explained. The aliens are vintage Lost in Space aliens, with bad hair and cheesy costumes and make-up. Based on their coiffures, the aliens owned blow dryers. One of them, an apparent robot, is dressed as a Ninja. We know this film is set in the South because all the human characters speak with Southern drawls. Some carry shotguns, drive pickups, hate black people and other strange people including aliens. The local sheriff is a black man, and at least one of his deputies, not to mention other numerous locals, hate him because of his race. Despite the fact that they kill several people who are, admittedly, trying to kill them, these aliens turns out to be kind and civilized. A teenage alien boy and the character played by Ione Skye seem to fall in love. The grandmother played by Maureen O'Sullivan becomes friends with an alien grandmother. This silly film lacks humor, intelligence, insight, and skill. Despite the fact that in the course of the film most of them are killed, the surviving aliens leave the earth at the end of the film with smiles on their faces. Galactic understanding and good will for all.

I had not heard of this film when I saw it listed on the schedule of a cable movie channel. Stranded construes the South as shotguns, baseball caps, pickup trucks, dimwitted racists, and a few good souls thrown in for good measure.

Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu (2006) is a predictable but entertaining time-travel drama. Set in New Orleans, the actual plot of the film has little to do with the city, other than the fact that various scenes are set in such areas as the French Quarter and that in the closing credits a message dedicates the film to the Hurricane Katrina survivors. The connection, perhaps, lies in the explosion at the start of the film that kills more than 300 people on a ferry—the ferry disaster is connected to the Katrina disaster, though to me it is cheesy and insincere of the film to suggest the link.

In Déjà Vu Denzel Washington plays an agent of the division of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms who investigates the explosion. He becomes interested in the body of a woman that has washed up on the shore of the Mississippi, a body that appears to be that of a disaster victim, even though it washes up two hours before the explosion occurs. Washington is recruited by a secret government agency that has developed a time machine that allows anyone using it to gaze back three days into the past. The agents using the machine hope to track events and find out who is responsible for blowing up the ferry. Washington senses a link between the body washed up on the shore and the disaster. In the process of using the time machine to track the dead woman's movements, Washington finds himself increasingly interested in her, and subsequent events unravel exactly as one would predict—he uses the machine to travel back in time to try to save her and prevent the disaster.

Although the film doesn't dwell much on the supposed science behind the time machine, and although it does seem aware of some of the theoretical implications of time travel, when it tries to explain how the machine works, anyone with the faintest knowledge of physics will recognize the hoopla. Fortunately, the film doesn't emphasize the science behind the machine, and even the implausible machine itself is underplayed.

The connections of the New Orleans setting to the concerns of this film are minimal. The film contrasts the rationality of the scientists who develop and use the machine with the humanistic and spiritual implications of its existence. (The actual inventor of the machine admits near the end of the film that he believes in God). As a center of African-American culture, New Orleans provides a background where the film's interest in issues of the spirit—one scene takes place near a church--can be tentatively and haphazardly explored. The woman whose body washes up on shore appears to be African American, and the father who mourns her death appears to be white, so New Orleans as a place where inter-racial relationships and marriages are common provides a social context that explains these different racial characteristics, though the film does nothing to expand this dimension.

One scene shows the destruction left by Hurricane Katrina, but it lacks organic connection with the remainder of the film.

As bad as it was, The Skeleton Key made better use of New Orleans as a setting, linking the New Orleans culture of voodoo and superstition directly to the plot of the film. Déjà Vu is certainly a better film, though only in relative terms.

Porgy and Bess

Porgy and Bess (1959) is unavailable on tape or DVD and has been shown only a few times since its initial commercial release in 1959. The Gershwin family apparently felt that the commercialism of the film ruined the opera, and they have refused to allow its release as a result. Concerns about the portrayal of African Americans in the film perhaps also discouraged its release. With high production values and an outstanding cast of African American actors, this film based on the most famous American opera, with music by Gershwin and the book by Dubose Heyward, is a significant landmark work. Featuring Sidney Poitier as Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge as Bess, along with Pearl Bailey, Sammy Davis Jr, Brock Peters, Diahann Carroll, and others, it is difficult to think of a film with as impressive an African American cast. One may argue that films featuring African American actors in the 1950s and 1960s played a significant role in heightening the public consciousness about civil rights, just as did, in other contexts, African American figures in sports and music. If so, Porgy and Bess was one of the most accomplished of those films.

Mainly filmed on a set, most of the film takes place in Catfish Row, the fictional section of Charleston, South Carolina, where its characters live.

Porgy and Bess is a folk opera that seeks to portray the lives of African Americans in Charleston in what appears to be the early part of the 20^th century. It presents the love affair of Porgy, a crippled man, and Bess, who enters the film in a relationship with a man named Crown (Brock Peters). Crown gets into a fight during a gambling match and kills a man. He flees to the swamps to hide, leaving Bess behind. When some of the people of Catfish Row blame her for the murder because of her relationship with Crown, Porgy takes her in and offers her protection. They fall in love. Later in the film, when Porgy is taken into custody as a witness to a murder, her attention wanders and she is seduced by the character Sportin' Life (Sammy Davis Jr.).

The music and singing in the film are outstanding, though the singing voices of several major actors—Poitier, Dandridge, Carroll—are dubbed. Poitier's deep bass singing voice seems totally unlike his speaking voice. Sammy Davis Jr. and Pearl Bailey, not surprisingly, do their own singing. They have the standout roles of the film. Davis' rendition of "It Ain't Necessarily So" is one of the best of a many great numbers. I never realized that the song is Sportin' Life's attempt to cast doubt on the religious beliefs of other characters. He is the great seducer in the film, and he offers cocaine to Bess and ultimately lures her away from Porgy.

Does this film show stereotyped portrayals of African American characters? From a modern point of view the answer may be that it does, in a certain way. The characters are full of life and joy; they dance and sing, love and gamble and fight. Although they are shown expressing deep emotions, deep thoughts are not so common. Bess in particular is fickle, moving with some ease from one lover to another. For the most part Porgy and Bess shows these characters interacting with one another within their own community. But the film clearly means to show these characters in a positive and sympathetic light. Undoubtedly many of the activities we see them engaged in were realistic portrayals, given the place and time of the film. The film emphasizes how they are at the mercy of the white law and the sheriff, who can enter Catfish Row whenever he pleases, accusing residents of crimes they didn't commit, hauling them off to jail for whatever reason. There is nobility in the best of these characters, especially in Porgy and in Pearl Bailey's character Maria.

One could argue that Porgy and Bess shows the African Americans of Catfish Row as shallow and as preoccupied with the simple pleasures. Yet it also shows them doing their best to respond to the difficult circumstances within which they live.

Although the film seems to end early, with Porgy on his way to try to win back Bess, it is still a powerful work. The picnic and hurricane scenes are especially effective. It memorializes the passions and the nobility of the people of Catfish Row. Even if it does invoke some stereotypes, it doesn't patronize or condescend and it avoids resorting to shuck and jive comedy stereotypes . Its fully rounded characters support and depend on one another and attempt to live their lives in the best ways they know.

Band of Angels

Band of Angels (1957) is based on the 1955 Robert Penn Warren novel of the same title. In the novel, young Amantha Starr, the daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner, returns to her father's funeral and discovers that she is the daughter of her father and a slave. He spent all his money on gambling and a fancy woman, his plantation is in debt, and Amantha is seized by a slave auctioneer, to be sold with all the other slaves on the plantation. The film devotes itself to how Amantha reacts and adjusts to her new station in life.

Band of Angels as a novel is so densely philosophical, so infiltrated with Warren's sometimes murky musings about slavery and identity and guilt and consequence, that the story itself seems secondary. Amantha is purchased by a former slave runner named Hamish Bond and at the end of the novel ends up married to Ethan Sears, whom she knew as an aspiring minister who visited her in finishing school. Although he was an ardent abolitionist as a young man, when he discovers that Amantha is part black, he is repelled, though he doesn't leave her. Warren loved this kind of irony and hypocrisy, loved to be able to show that even the most idealistic people often cannot live up to their ideals.

The film based on the novel strips away much of the philosophizing and moralistic musings and instead focuses on slavery and race. It foregrounds the relationship of Amantha and Hamish. Although well intentioned, and progressive for its time, as a film Band of Angels is confused. Most of the characters from the novel remain in the film, though some are relegated to minor status (such as Ethan Sears). The point of the film is to show the wrongness of slavery and racism. It does this in ways that are both overt and subtle. The home of Hamish Bond allows for subtlety. He owns slaves whom he treats as employees and near equals. The mistress of the house, Michelle, is a slave whom he has obviously had a relationship with, and she shows minor signs of jealousy when Hamish brings Amantha into the house. Perhaps as a result, she helps Amantha in an attempt to escape upriver to Ohio, where she attends school, though the attempt fails. Amantha, who has never been a slave until her father's death, never knew that she was part black or that her mother was a slave, regards the bars on her second-floor bedroom as a sign of her enslavement, while Michelle tells her that the bars are Hamish's way of trying to keep out the external world. There is ambiguity and uncertainty attached to the boundaries of Hamish Bond's house and yard. Within those boundaries the house servants (slaves) are allowed to come and go as free members of the household. Those who cross the boundaries and go out into the outer world do so either by permission or as a matter of trust with Hamish. The film implies that if they wished to leave Hamish would not prevent them, and that they do not leave because of how well he treats them. Yet there is one moment when Amantha, assisted by Michelle, tried to leave and turns back when confronted by Rau Rau. Would he have prevented her? The most important slave characters in the film are Rau Rau and Michelle. They are apparently allowed to do as they wish, but in return for the way Hamish treats them they remain to do his bidding. It seems likely that Michelle loves and respects Hamish, while Rau Rau, whom Bond has educated and reared as his own son and to whom he has given much responsibility, hates him—hates him because he is, after all, the Master. Despite everything Hamish has done for Rau Rau, the fact that he remains a slave provokes his hatred. These slaves—educated, respected by their owner, dressed in fine clothes, entrusted with important and serious tasks—are hardly representative of the typical slave in the American South and their relationship with their owner is hardly typical of the average owner-slave relationship. Of course, in New Orleans, where slavery took on new and complicated dimensions compared to the rest of the South, these issues become even more complicated. The film examines these issues through Amantha, who is a special case, and through Rau Rau.

In the film, Hamish Bond tries to atone for his terrible sins as a slave runner by treating his own slaves with respect and by purchasing Amantha, thereby protecting her from being sold as another man's mistress or into a brothel. In his house, she may become his mistress, and the implication is that he may have purchased her for that ultimate purpose. However, he makes no moves towards her, waiting for a moment to develop that will bring them together. This happens during a thunderstorm (recall the Kate Chopin story "The Storm"). After they have slept together for the first time, Hamish later seems remorseful and tells her that she is free to go, that he will help her travel upriver to Ohio and provide support for her to live there. Instead, as they arrive at his plantation, she declares her intention to remain with him. Is this a declaration of love on her part, where she chooses love over freedom, or is it a matter of the slave choosing to stick with the comfortable life afforded by the Master? The movie seems to hold both possibilities up for consideration. This is both a slave choosing to stay with the Master who owns her legally and sexually, but also the woman who has been placed in bondage by a man and who chooses to stay with her out of love. It reminds me of that scene in the William Gilmore Simms novel The Yemassee, where a slave owner tries to emancipate a loyal slave who then begs not to be released because of his love for and allegiance to his master. Undoubtedly such scenes may have occurred in reality, in isolated episodes, but Simms uses the scene to exemplify his contention that slavery was a beneficent institution that served the welfare of the slaves. How Band of Angels means us to see it is another matter, perhaps. It also reminds me of the rape scene that Scarlett O'Hara so clearly relishes in Gone with the Wind. These aspects of Band of Angels are clearly dated. Rather than focusing on the fact that Amantha, Michelle, and Rau Rau are slaves, the film focuses on Hamish's kind treatment of them, as if that mitigates his role as the enslaver or their roles as slaves.

As Hamish Bond Clark Gable plays a part curiously similar to his role as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. At least it is difficult to tell the difference. Yvonne DeCarlo, who went on to fame as Mrs. Herman Muenster, actually handles her role well. In 1957 Sidney Poitier was always the actor of choice for African American roles—he is, as ever, refined and articulate, too much so for a character such as Rau Rau who is supposed to be burly and muscular as well as educated. In Warren's novel Rau Rau is somewhat less elegant but perhaps more convincing, given his background.

A major difference between the film and its source is that Amantha and Hamish reconcile after a separation. Hamish has a duel with a rival plantation owner, a reconciliation of sorts with Rau Rau, and finally escapes the Northern military officers who are trying to capture him on a fishing boat. As weak as the ending of Warren's novel may be, the end of the film rivals it in credulity.

Heart of Dixie

Heart of Dixie (1989) uses a Southern sorority in 1957 to examine race relations and a college student's awakening into the meaning of racial equality and human justice. This is a commercial film drawn with broad strokes. It is told from a white girl's point of view. There is only one black character in a minor role of any consequence. Still, it has merits and effectively dramatizes the power of social pressures and of race itself at the time of the story.

The college where the story takes place is a thinly camouflaged version of Auburn University. The novel Heartbreak Hotel (1976) by Anne Rivers Siddons on which the film is based was an autobiographical account of the author's experience during the 1950s at Auburn University, where she caused controversy for writing editorials sympathetic to integration. She was fired from the student newspaper after publishing the second editorial. Her membership in Tri Delta sorority obviously influenced the novel and the film as well.

The sorority to which Maggie belongs is portrayed as a backwater in the modern world. All of its members want to be pinned and to get married as soon as they graduate. Maggie DeLoach, played by Ally Sheedy, at first is like everyone else in the sorority. She's never been exposed to beliefs different than the ones she grew up with. Two elements gradually wake her up: one is Hoyt Cunningham, a young photographer she meets at a bar. He is played by Treat Williams. Williams reads a newspaper editorial Maggie wrote about Autherine Lucy, the first African American to enroll at the University of Alabama, and although he is impressed that she wrote it he finds it timid. When he expresses support for the notion of integration, Maggie's friend asks him whether he is a communist. The other is her mildly bohemian friend Aiken Reed, played by Phoebe Cates, who apparently does not belong to a sorority.

When Maggie attends an Elvis concert with the photographer, she witnesses a young black man beaten up by a white concertgoer and then by a policeman who stops the fight. She is upset and angered. A talk with the black friend who works at the sorority leads her to write an editorial for the newspaper. The dean threatens her and the editor with expulsion if it is published. They publish it anyway. Her sorority sisters, including her best friend, shun her, she breaks up with her boyfriend, and she is expelled from school for refusing to apologize for the editorial.

Two key scenes: one at the Elvis Presley concert where she witnesses the beating; another where the first black student walks through a hostile mob to enroll at the university.

The sorority is a symbol of the pre-civil rights south: the sisters want to live like they are characters in Gone with the Wind. One sister is overheard saying she wants to marry Rhett Butler while her friend wants to marry Ashley Wilkes. When Maggie questions the automatic assumption that after graduation she will marry, have children, and live a life of leisure, her friend Maggie is astonished. Several scenes involve sisters talking about the desire to marry, resisting sex with their boyfriends, and so on. When Aiken announces she is pregnant at the end of the film, Maggie is astonished at her plans not to marry, to drop out of college, and to go live in Greenwich Village.

Maggie's gradual realization that she believes in racial equality, her decision to reject what she has believed for all her life, is the main focus of the film. It happens as a result of her exposure to various expressions of racism (such as her boyfriend's father the judge who explodes in anger at the notion of civil rights) and the bearing at the Elvis concert, and her exposure to ideas contrary to the ones she grew up with. The film shows the development of Maggie's racial consciousness and along with that her independence and integrity.

The scene in which the first black student enrolls at the university is moving, even though Maggie is only a witness to it, though she picks up and returns a handkerchief and returns it to the student. The fear on the student's face raises the scene above the ordinary. The scene seems to have been influenced by films of the integration of the University of Alabama in June, 1963, with Governor George Wallace first barring the door and then stepping aside to allow the first black students to enter.

Heart of Dixie is a film similar to Intruder in the Dust and To Kill a Mockingbird in the way it dramatizes a young character's awakening to the meaning of social injustice and racial prejudice. It is not as good a film, however, and it lacks their depth and richness. Heart of Dixie is self-consciously a film about race and racism. It wears its heart on its sleeve, which is not to say that it doesn't lack in subtlety. It does have its virtues. And its portrayal of racism and the social pressures it could bring to bear on people in the 1950s is accurate. The hothouse atmosphere of a college sorority may not provide the best means of exploring the themes it undertakes to explore. The South was hardly as homogeneous as the film would have it, and the sorority, and Greek life in general, don't offer a way of showing anything other than homogeneity.

To its credit, Heart of Dixie doesn't suggest in any way that Maggie's awakening has much of an impact on the civil rights struggle or the welfare of blacks in Alabama. Instead the changes that matter in the film are the ones that occur within Maggie. This is the story of the development and awakening of her character. By extension, they were changes that would occur in the hearts and minds of individuals all over the American South, and throughout the United States as a whole, in the years and decades that followed the year which the film concerns.

Madea’s Family Reunion

Madea's Family Reunion (2006) delivers a good message through a faulty medium. The film begins as if it is a Woody Allen movie for African Americans. The first scene involves a posh apartment and three well dressed young women. In later scenes we encounter characters from differing social classes—a bus driver, two elderly retired people, a young woman trying to succeed in her own business. Despite this, the film offers an idealized, smooth, sometimes saccharine portrait of its characters and their lives. The wedding scene at the end of the film is difficult to swallow.

Set in Atlanta, Madea's Family Reunion focuses on a mother, Victoria, and her two daughters Lisa and Vanessa. Victoria is a haughty and scheming woman who uses her daughters to get what she wants. Lisa is about to marry a wealthy businessman who beats her and generally abuses her. When she confides in her mother about the abuse, the woman tells her she must put up with it. She believes that woman must accept their lot, and what comes with it, if they want to be comfortable and cared for. Vanessa is generally ignored by the mother—later in the film Vanessa reveals the abuse she suffered from one of her mother's several husbands, abuse the mother not only countenanced but arranged for.

Madea is the aunt of the mother. She is a loud, brash, domineering woman who takes foster children into her home and disciplines and loves them rigorously. She and her husband Uncle Joe are comical characters in a serious soap opera. Madea is full of energy and is the heart of the film. She is played in drag by the director Ryan Perry, who also plays Uncle Joe. Their comic shenanigans often seem out of place given the serious problems of the other characters, but without them the film would be much less entertaining than it is. Madea and Uncle Joe are both stereotypical characters—Madea is similar to Big Momma in the two Martin Lawrence films of that name, while in Barbershop (2002) portrayed several characters like Uncle Joe. White filmmakers have used black stereotypes for years, and it is interesting to see them in films by black directors. Barbershop was criticized by Jessie Jackson for its use of stereotypes he regarded as damaging. What ultimately prevents Madea's character from being overwhelmed by the stereotype she portrays is her strong positive character and the support she provides to Lisa and Vanessa.

Social responsibility and family unity are the message of this film. It suggests that a black matriarchy seeks to uphold positive social and moral standards and to defend women and children from the onslaughts of destructive irresponsible males. The matriarchy also resists the decline of values evident in contemporary society. In general, the women characters have been victimized by men in one way or another, while the men are either weak and foolish or brutal victimizers. Madea is the strong and positive woman in the film, while her husband Joe is a flatulent fool. Lisa's fiancé is rich and ruthless—he sees Lisa as just another possession. The one positive male character is the bus driver Brian, who falls in love with Vanessa. Because of her painful experiences in earlier relationships, she resists him. Lisa wants to abandon her fiancé but he threatens her, even threatens to kill her, and her mother insists that she stick with the engagement—her financial welfare depends on the marriage, for reasons the film details.

Events work themselves out as they usually do in this sort of film.

The heart of the film is a family reunion where the 90 year-old-matriarch of the family is upset when she sees her descendants gambling and dancing licentiously in skimpy clothes. Cicely Tison and Maya Angelou give moving speeches about family and social responsibility, upbraiding the family members for their errant ways. As Eleanor Ringel in the Atlanta Journal Constitution pointed out in her review. "Perry shares an agenda with Bill Cosby and Spike Lee: He wants young African-Americans to take responsibility for themselves. He has no patience for drugs, careless sex, guns, fists, sexually provocative behavior, or blaming everyone else for what you're doing to yourself." This is one of the film's central messages, but the speech that Tyson delivers, and Angelou's comments, and the family reunion itself, seem awkwardly placed in the film focused on the serious problems of Lisa and Vanessa. The film is episodic and consists of a number of loosely linked set pieces, the reunion is the prime example, but a farting episode involving Uncle Joe is another. The different parts of the film don't really fit together, it's schizophrenic in a sense, and although the film is entertaining to watch and, in the end, moving, especially Tison's speech, it is not successful. It is a loosely assembled. It as if Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy collaborated on a film and could never agree on what they wanted to do, so that each directed his own individual scenes.

Madea's Family Reunion is a sequel to Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2002). Both were directed and acted in by Ryan Perry, whose plays of the same titles served as the source for the films.

Black Snake Moan

"Black Snake Moan" is the title of an old blues song about a man's grief over losing his wife. The song plays an important role in the film of the same title, directed by Craig Brewer, previously known for Hustle & Flow. The principal actors in this film are Samuel Jackson and Christina Ricci. Jackson (who appears in more films than anyone I can think of) plays an aging blues singer named Lazarus whose wife leaves him early in the film. His head is half-shaved in the film, evidently to suggest a radically receded hair line, but it looks fake. Christina Ricci's character is Rae, who is half-naked throughout much of the film.

Black Snake Moan (2006) begins with film clips from an interview with the bluesman Son House, who explains the blues as a musical form about relationships of men and women. The film then alternates between scenes involving Rae and her boyfriend Ronnie (played well by Justin Timberlake) and scenes involving Jackson. Lazarus meets his wife in a cafe hoping to repair their faltering marriage, but instead she tells him that she doesn't love him anymore and is leaving. In a later scene Lazarus' younger brother tries to talk to him in a bar—he is the person whom Lazarus' wife is leaving him for. Lazarus comes close to slitting his brother's throat with a broken beer bottle, so he is a man capable of violence, and his former life as a bluesman suggests that he is a man of talent as well as complications—now he is a farmer who takes his produce to town and sells it. He is so angry over his wife's departure that he plows under her rose garden and breaks apart furniture in their house.

Rae, on the other hand, is upset because Ronnie is leaving to join the army. They are not breaking up, but she seems pathologically upset about his departure and says she will not survive without him. Ronnie and Rae are codependent. Ronnie suffers anxiety attacks that only Rae can soothe. Rae is well known in the town for her sexual voraciousness. Everyone knows about her and the various diseases she has caught and passed on to others. In the early scenes of the film she is constantly coughing, as if she has a chronic illness such as TB, though later in the film she coughs not at all. Rae is what used to be called a nymphomaniac, and only Ronnie can satisfy her. We later learn that her problem stems from sexual abuse she suffered from her father. When Ronnie leaves, she runs amuck, taking drugs, getting drunk, playing football with most of her clothes missing, and having sex with a random man in the dirt. Ronnie's best friend offers to drive her home after a drunken evening and ends up trying to have sex with her—she rebuffs him and he beats her viciously, pushing her out of his pickup truck on to a dirt road, leaving her there in the middle of the night. Lazarus finds her the next morning and carries her into his house, where he undertakes to nurse her back to health—physically as well as spiritually.

At times Black Snake Moan wavers among being several different types of films—a film about the blues, about redemption, about the need for mutual dependence between the races, about social problems such as sexual abuse of children and its consequences. The notion of Rae's nymphomania seems not only a sexist cliché but also a hackneyed Freudian gimmick, not to mention a sensationalist ploy. Christina Ricci is a beautiful woman with an attractive body. For the first half of the film she appears frequently in various stages of undress. She compels one to view jean shorts in a new light. But the film's fascination with Ricci's body becomes fetichisist, voyeuristic—there is too much of it.

Why does Lazarus pick Rae up, take her back to his house, and try to "fix" her?—he's interested in doing this in a spiritual sense. Our first glimpses of him show him to be a man of potentially violent passions—he's angry and bitter and does not seem particularly pious. But as soon as he finds Rae on the road, he's interested in her soul. It's clear that at moments he's attracted to her in a different way, in a sexual way, but he always resists that attraction, even when she throws herself at him.

Black Snake Moan wants us to see Rae and Lazarus as kindred souls. It does not matter that he is black and she white, that she is young and beautiful and he is not, that she has a notorious reputation and he is respected. It matters that both have broken hearts, she from the departure of her boyfriend and from sexual abuse in her childhood, he because of the betrayal by his wife and brother.

Jackson is great in his part. But he's not wholly believable. His desire to redeem Rae isn't quite logical. Why does he want to help her? What specifically qualifies him to redeem her? How are we to view the fact that her presence in his house reawakens his interest in playing the blues—he takes her to a club where he plays publically for the first time in twenty years, and he plays well? Redemption works both ways.

Some reviewers criticize this film for using the stereotype of the wise old virtuous black man who helps save the needy white girl. The stereotype is there, but if the human realities of the film are vital enough, if the power of the script and the performances by the two actors are distinctive enough, the stereotype fades. Rae is a stereotype too, the nymphomaniacal white trash girl who sleeps with every man in town.

Black Snake Moan is about wounded people, wounded black and white people who need each other, sometimes, to recover from their lacerated emotional traumas. It is also, incidentally, about music, the blues. The film has a great soundtrack, and Samuel Jackson is very good in his role as a bluesmen. The film clips at the beginning and near the end that show Son Housie talking about the blues and their concern with relationships between men and women lead us to conclude that, in the context of this film, broken hearts, guilt and grief over the loss of love, are what white people and black people have in common and therefore are the reason why the blues serve as an effective metaphor and binding force for racial interdependence.

When Ronnie returns to town after being discharged from the army—his anxiety attacks prevented him from firing a rifle with accuracy—he finds Rae with Lazarus and threatens Lazarus with a pistol. Lazarus talks Ronnie out of shooting, him, essentially by provoking anxiety in him. Then he calls a preacher friend and arranges for Ronnie and Rae to marry. At the end of the film, when Ronnie has an anxiety attack driving with Rae down the road, sandwiched in between two large trucks, it is clear that life is going to be hard for both of them. Marriage is not going to solve their problems, but at least it provides a basis for struggling in the right direction.

The notion that the film presents African Americans as redemptive and soulful people capable of providing the spiritual support and guidance that white people need is clearly apparent in the final scenes. A black minister officiates; a young black teenager whom Rae seduced earlier in the film serves as best man; Lazarus and a woman from town in whom he has a romantic interest are present as witnesses. The only white people present are Rae and Ronnie.

In most small Southern towns that I know of, people like Rae and Ronnie wouldn't spend much time with black people. Racists don't typically associate with the race they hate. Rae sports a Confederate flag t-shirt early in the film; Ronnie calls Lazarus a "nigger." The film argues that the need for redemption drives Rae and Ronnie to seek the support that Lazarus and his preacher friend can provide. In Hustle & Flow Craig Brewer seemed to suggest as well that white and black people need each other, that they have more in common than they have differences. This may be one of his main themes, but it works better and makes more sense in Hustle & Flow (where economic survival is a motivating force) than it does in Black Snake Moan. The latter film does not offer convincing logical justification for Lazarus and his character and his desire to help Rae.

This is not to say that Black Snake Moan doesn't work as a film, only to argue that it does not consistently stand up to close scrutiny. Aspects of the film simply don't make sense. As a whole the different parts of the film don't cohere. One major plot strand seems unresolved—Ronnie's best friend tells him that he slept with Rae, and that Rae slept with others in town. For this betrayal, Ronnie simply tells his friend to leave. Although Ronnie confronts Lazarus with a gun—Lazarus the black man whom he believes has been sleeping with Rae—he does nothing to his best friend who betrayed him, just as Lazarus did not ultimately use the broken beer bottle on his brother.

The end of the film, with the reconciliation between Rae and Ronnie, the wedding, the helpful presence of the various African Americans who have brought about their redemption, seems contrived and sentimental. The fact that Rae and Ronnie face an uncertain future, and that Lazarus has a new love interest, doesn't make the ending more believable.

Black Snake Moan is powerful, moving, provocative, and disturbing. It's entertaining and emotionally fulfilling, but it's best not to think about it too carefully.

2001 Maniacs

2001 Maniacs (2005) is a remake of the 1964 film 2000 Maniacs, once a cult classic because of violence and gore but now largely and fortunately forgotten. Why the remake? I don't have an answer. Neither the original nor the remake has any value, but they are still accessible for public viewing. Both are available on video, and the remake recently played on a cable channel. It follows the same basic plot as the original, and uses low-budget but more up-to-date technology to depict various acts of torture and violence and various body parts. The Plot: College students from the North who are headed to the beaches of Florida become lost in rural Georgia and accidentally wander into the lost village of Pleasant Valley, where a celebration is in progress which the students are invited to join. Citizens of the town systematically frighten, torture, maim, and kill the students, with cannibalism as the ultimate goal.

The film does place more emphasis on the revenge that the ghoulish citizens of Pleasant Valley are seeking against Yankee college students for atrocities allegedly committed against the town by rogue Union forces near the end of the Civil War. The town comes back to life once every year on the anniversary of the massacre. The desire of the townspeople for revenge will drive them, we're told, to torture, maim, and kill Yankee tourists until they have matched the death toll of the original massacre. Confederate flags are evident everywhere. Townspeople openly discuss their desire for revenge against the Yankees. The mayor wears an eye-patch with a Confederate flag on it. In one scene, as the townspeople prepare to slaughter and consume the last two surviving Yankee students, they stand around their intended victims and chant "The South will rise! The South will rise!"

A key early scene informs us of what this film is really up to: one of the college students plays his guitar and tries to keep up with the banjo-picking of a demented looking Pleasant Valley citizen. The scene recalls the famous dueling banjo sequence from Deliverance (1971). It enforces the notion that the South is full of genetic throwbacks and demented low-lifes, something the movie proceeds to confirm in numerous ways. The women are quick to doff their clothes and engage in sex that usually end in genital mutilation or acid drinking or other horrific events for the male participants. In another scene (taken from the original film) a young woman's arms and legs are tied to mules that her tormentor then swats with a branch, so that her limbs are torn from her body.

The South in 2001 Maniacs is a place of Gothic horror, supernatural terrors, demented goons, perverted and violent sex, and general ":Never Fergit" dimwittedness. The filmmakers count on the audience regarding this film as a joke, and that it is—but a sick joke. Even though only someone as limited in intelligence as the citizens of Pleasant Valley would take the film's depiction of the South seriously, it is easy enough for viewers willing to sit through the film to suspend disbelief and temporarily accept this depiction of an alien Other—a place that encourage the viewer's own sense of his or her civilized and refined superiority because it is not the viewer's place. It is the South, which by definition (at least this film's definition) accommodates the horrors of Pleasant Valley.

Why anyone would want to watch this film is beyond me. I fast-forwarded through most of it.

Idlewild

Idlewild (2006) focuses on two childhood friends, Rooster and Percival, and their diverging though related paths in life. One stays close to home and works in his father's funeral parlor, though he also nurses his musical talent and works on the side in a speakeasy. The other ends up running the speakeasy. These roles are played by the two main members of Outkast, Andre Benjamin and Big Boi. Both are great in their roles, especially Benjamin as Percival, the son of the undertaker.

Idlewild is distinguished by visual flair—flashy, frenetic dance numbers; an effective fusion of cinematography and music, an impressive use of digital effects that speed or slow the action, place emphasis on different characters, or lend tension to a scene. The music throughout is a major strength. In many ways the best music and dance sequence in the film comes during the closing credits, although there is a stunning sequence early in the film.

The film is set in a small Georgia town named Idlewild. It is just the opposite of the town associated with the New York airport formerly of the same name, though the club that is the center of the town—at least for the characters in the film—offers as much action as one could find anywhere in New York.

Idlewild did not receive particularly strong reviews. One reason may be that it seems something like a folktale or fairy story. It gives the effect of realism without being realistic—how could a club like the one in this film exist in the remote hinterlands of rural Georgia in the early decades of the 20^th century? The film reminded me in ways of the folk ballad "Frankie and Johnny" and even of Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, which is like a folk or blues song set in high literary form. Idlewild brims with magical realism. One example is the flask of liquor that Rooster (Big Boi) carries with him throughout the film. It is emblazoned with the image of a rooster that talks to the owner of the flask throughout the film. Another example: when Percival looks at the pages of music he has composed, the notes become stick figures that walk and dance across the page. Several characters seem drawn deliberately larger than life: Terrence Howard as Trumpy is an especially vicious gangster who uses threats, violence, and murder to get what he wants. The musical styles of Outkast are laid on top of, combined with, musical styles of the time period of the film. The same is true of dance. In this sense the film suggests Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge (2001), which combines dance and music styles from different time periods. There are scenes every bit as phantasmagorical in Idlewild as those in Moulin Rouge.

Another reason for the lack of critical acclaim may be that Idlewild might seem a film more of music, visual imagery, and style than of substance. Other recent African American films such as ATL and Stomp the Yard explored a number of contemporary issues important to African Americans: questions of class and economic tension, of assimilation, of personal responsibility. One can find those issues, by looking carefully, in Idlewild—one example is Percival's struggle to break out of his staid rut to assert himself as a musician and composer--but they are largely overwhelmed by the spectacle of the film. Spectacle, however, is no mean thing.

Idlewild begins with images of sepia-toned photographs of African American culture in the early 20^th century. One of the points in these photographs is to make clear that the story about to be told is from the past, part of history, and as such is a part of African American tradition. I noticed a Eudora Welty photgraph in the sequence. In ways Rooster and Percival represent different aspects of the African American struggle for success and respectability in a predominantly white world (though there is virtually no evidence of that world in the film). Rooster at first chooses the life of a gangster, running whiskey and working in a speakeasy. Percival is attracted to the wild life, but sticks close to home, working for his father and playing piano in the speakeasy on the side. He represents loyalty to place and to family, to tradition, but only by breaking with these virtues in the end is he able to give full expression to his talent.

This may be the first major production directed by Bryan Barber. He apparently had his start as a director of Outkast music videos. He has much promise. Idlewild comes across as the work of an experienced and confident director. Cinematography is one of the film's strongest elements. It's immensely entertaining.

Idlewild is the best musical I've seen since Moulin Rouge.

Seraphim Falls

Seraphim Falls (2006) plies the tired notion that hostilities between North and South did not wane following the end of the Civil War. It does so by focusing on the efforts of Colonel Carver (Liam Neeson) to track and kill Captain Gideon (Pierce Brosnan). The film begins in medias res, as it were, with Gabriel high in the mountains of Colorado. A rifle shot wings him in the shoulder, and he runs down the mountain, apparently aware that he is being tracked. My son and I wagered over how long it would take for this film to offer a flashback that would begin to provide background information about why Carver is tracking Gabriel). My son bet 20 minutes; I bet 10. The first flashback came in 14 minutes, though it offered only brief images, and it is not until late in the film that a substantial flashback provides this information. That mystery is about the only genuine source of tension in the story, other than the question of whether Gabriel will escape or Carver will catch up with him.

The first half or more of the film is fairly naturalistic, following the efforts of Gabriel to escape and Carver to capture him. The narrative is episodic: at one time or the other Carver and Gideon meet a band of thieves, stop at the cabin of settlers, encounter, religious zealots in a wagon train, stop at a camp building a rail line, meet an Indian by a small pool of water, and finally, in the middle of what appears to be Death Valley, meet a woman selling miracle tonic (Angelica Huston). When first Gabriel and then Carver encounter the Indian, the film takes a somewhat surreal turn, and it occasionally seems to recall the films of Sergio Leone, and some of the earlier Eastwood films, by suggesting that these encounters may be allegorical and that it is the struggle of Carver and Gabriel to come to terms with the tragedies of their own lives that is the real focus of this cat and mouse game they are playing. (Gabriel lost his two sons on the same day during the Battle of Antietam; Carver's wife and children were killed in a fire accidentally set by Union soldiers). But the allegory is not very coherent and the film is largely turgid and without suspense. The film does not really draw distinctions between the characters of Carver and Gabriel. Carver is overwhelmed by the fate of his family. Gabriel is haunted by his past and presumably the deaths of his sons. But they could easily change places. The point of their conflict is not in their regional loyalties but rather in the intersection of private and random events that overcame them, events that they personalize and blame on each other.

Brosnan is good at huffing and groaning. Neeson hides his accent. Angelica Huston is effective but out of place.

The film ends in Death Valley—is there an echo here of the ending of McTeague, by Frank Norris?

Dixiana

Dixiana (1930) is a vaudevillian series of acts and skits set in the iconographic context of the Old South. The film brings almost every conceivable stereotype to bear on the evocation of its setting. It opens with images of slaves working in the fields and of the multi-columned plantation house that is one of the main locations. An early scene shows a man who appears to be the plantation patriarch sitting on the porch of the house, sipping a drink served by a house servant (anticipating one of the opening images of So Red the Rose). Two other locations are a playhouse and a gambling house in New Orleans. Mardi Gras celebrations are important in the film's latter half. In one scene a black actor dances to banjo music. African Americans are rarely anything more that clowns. The possibility of a duel is ever-present and provides the climactic scene, to the extent there is one.

The plot basically involves a young man, Carl Van Horn, who falls in love with a circus performer named Dixiana. He takes her home to introduce to her father and step-mother. The father is thrilled at his son's fiancé but the stepmother is horrified at the presence of a circus performer in her house and orders Dixiana to leave. The film follows the wandering fortunes of these two lovers who are separated after Dixiana's rejection from the plantation house.

What passes for comic relief comes in the form of Dixiana's two partners in the circus. They are played by Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsley, comedians from the 1930s who made a series of popular films for RKO Studios. Woolsley brandishes a cigar and glasses in a way that may have inspired the comedian George Burns. Woolsley and Wheeler perform as a comedy team, mimicking the behavior and actions of other characters in the film. Their comic shticks have virtually nothing to do with anything else in the film, although as the possibility of a duel between Van Horn and a corrupt gambler becomes increasingly likely (due to their competing interest in Dixiana), the two comic performers challenge one another to a duel for similar reasons.

The South in Dixiana is a place of exotic intrigue, fawning house servants, Mardi Gras celebrations, singing slaves, plantation houses, duels, romance, and cotton fields. With the exception of the duel, the South really has little to do with the plot of this film. The Van Horns themselves are from Pennsylvania; they moved to Louisiana when the father married his second wife. Few people in the film, excepting the African Americans, speak with a Southern accent. The numerous song and dance numbers that punctuate the film are typical Broadway-style performances—there is nothing Southern about them.

Interestingly, Carl jokes with his father about how the old man is always freeing the slaves. This is the only indication that the film does not accept slavery as normal. Perhaps the old man's desire to free slaves is meant to be seen as a sign of his weakness and old age.