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.

ATL

ATL (2006) is a stylish film with a firm sense of place centered on the city of Atlanta. Place means the geographical location itself—the cityscape, the MARTA rail line, schools such as Spelman, the economic differences that distinguish various sections of the city, the Cascade Family Skating Rink, which in the film is simply Cascade Skating Rink. Though it takes up less space in the film than one might expect, it is the film’s heart, where the four friends and main characters of the film gather every Sunday night to skate and socialize with others and to work on their skating routines. The Cascade is important as a melting pot for African American Atlanta as well. Skaters come from all over the city, from as far South as College Park, and from elsewhere as well. Where one comes from in the sprawling city of Atlanta determines both a particular skating style as well as other more general aspects of identity. The Cascade provides a concrete way of focusing some of the important themes and conflicts of this film.

In the “making of “commentary on the DVD, director Chris Robinson describes Atlanta as a city struggling to recover from its history. It is, he says, a city in transition, and for that and other reasons he sought to make it a literal character in the film. He accomplishes that goal. Well known for his music videos (I haven’t seen them, but then I don’t watch music videos), Robinson is clearly influenced by Spike Lee, who like Woody Allen has consciously made New York a vibrant presence in many of his films. Cinematographically, ATL also shows the influence of Michael Mann. Some dramatic night shots of the Atlanta skyline in particular suggest Mann. Stomp the Yard, made around the same time as ATL, also uses Atlanta as a setting, but it is a more generic, less recognizable city than the one we see in ATL. Anyone who has been to Atlanta, and especially anyone who has lived there, will easily recognize the city in ATL.

Atlanta as a character emerges clearly enough as a visual element of the film’s mise en scene. More deeply embedded are the economic, historical, and ideological tensions and paradoxes surrounding African American history in Atlanta. From the center of the city to its Southern edges, the city is mostly African American, with a large middle class and significant areas of poverty. (Most of the characters in ATL come at least from the lower middle-class). The Northern areas of the city are predominantly white and more affluent. New New Garnett (Lauren London) in the film is the daughter of John Garnett, a wealthy African American businessman who has moved to the north side, has joined a country club, and in a general sense has left many of his African American origins behind him. When he learns that his daughter is dating a boy from the ghetto Rashad (Tim Harris), he is enraged because he wants his daughter to have an affluent, privileged life. He wants her to attend a prestigious college, not Spelman, the college she wants to attend. New New knows from the beginning that her father will disapprove of her friendship with Rashad, so she hides it. And she suspects that Rashad will not be comfortable once he learns who she is and where she lives, so she hides that too. This conflict between social and economic classes is one of the major interests of the film. It’s a conflict also explored in Stomp the Yard.

Historically, Atlanta has been an important center of African American political and economic development. The success of John Garnett (Keith David) is an example of that development. One issue the film explores concerns what African Americans must do to get ahead in a predominantly white world. Here again is a theme we saw explored in Stomp the Yard. One of Rashad’s friends is Esquire, who caddies at the country club to which Garnett belongs. Esquire is ambitious and wants a head start in life. When he is introduced to Garnett, he sees someone who can help him out and eventually asks for a letter of recommendation. The question here is whether one must sell out, do what Garnett has done, in order to succeed in life, or whether there is another way that doesn’t involve rejection of one’s ethnic and cultural roots. Rashad’s younger brother Ant explores still another route to wealth: under the tutelage of a character named Big Boi (played by Antwan A. Patton of Outkast), he begins selling drugs.

Although virtually all of the characters in this film are African American, race is not the dominating issue. Clearly it is an issue, and Atlanta is presented as a city in which racism and civil rights struggles have played an important role. The characters do not have lives that are necessarily easy ones: Rashad and Ant lost their parents several years before in a car accident. They live with their inattentive and often bitter uncle, and Rashad feels responsible for the welfare of his younger brother. But these circumstances are not necessarily determined by matters of race. Struggles with racism and with the white community are not the main concern here. Rather the struggles the main characters engage in among themselves and within their own community are the main concerns. The white world hardly exists in this film, except as a faint and not entirely hostile presence at its outer edges. The four main characters stand on the verge of adult life and must decide how to move forward. Issues of family, friendship, and individual and group identity must be resolved. These are the issues that most young people have to address as they move into adulthood, and they are the primary issues in this film, though influenced and determined by the environment in which the characters live.

This is a successful film. It idealizes the world it portrays, to an extent. And it ensures a happy ending for all. Its strength is its characters, their warm interactions, the effective direction, the cinematography, and the music. Along with Stomp the Yard, ATL provides a variation on such predominantly white urban coming-of-age films as Diner and American Graffiti and shows the commonality of experience between the different racial groups they portray.

After thoughts: Apart from the characters and plot of the film, ATL is fascinating simply for reasons of style. Chris Robinson has a fondness for bright primary colors. They characterize ATL. Sometimes within a single scene a color will predominate, such as the color green. At other points a competing group of bright primary and secondary compete for dominance. Scene after scene captures your attention. Another distinguishing device: the film is divided into sections, each one labeled with a title. Although the film is not especially episodic, this device also gives the film a stylistic identity of its own.

Stomp the Yard

In Stomp the Yard (2007) DJ is a college freshman at Truth University in Atlanta, Georgia. In ATL Atlanta is always in the foreground, a luminescent postmodern city whose history has clear significance for the main characters. The director and cinematographer of ATL were clearly influenced by the films of Michael Mann, for whom the city becomes almost a character. In Stomp the Yard Atlanta as a visual presence is more subdued and in the background, though several scenes in a museum of black social organizations make clear its significance as a place of important events in the civil rights movement and as the home of such leaders in the movement as Martin Luther King.

Although we see little of DJ's home life, it's clear early in the film that he comes from the lower economic class. Students at Truth U speak of him, disparagingly, as having come from the ghetto. Most of the students at Truth are middle or upper class African American students, and those who belong to the fraternities that play such an important role in the film are clearly among the elite. DJ at first refrains from joining a fraternity because he believes that all the brothers see in him is a step dancer. Even after he joins a fraternity, he often feels that he doesn't belong. Of all the characters in the film he has much to prove, and more to lose.

Stomp the Yard takes the position that African American fraternities are positive sources of brotherhood, character, and service. They possess many of the same traits in the film as white fraternities, and there are clearly "good" fraternities and "bad" ones. DJ is invited to join both types. Fortunately he chooses a "good" fraternity, Theta Nu Theta.

Class conflict is a major issue. So too is the issue of ambition, of getting ahead—of what one must do to get ahead, and of whether getting ahead is worth the compromises one may be asked to make. This is true for both male and female characters. When DJ is invited to join the most popular fraternity on campus, Mu Gamma Xi, one of the members tells him that if he joins he will be able to get any job he wants when he graduates without any difficulty—all he will have to do is say that he is a Gamma. (Interesting that the Good Old Boy network thrives in HBCUs just as elsewhere). The fraternity he finally does join tells him that it fosters brotherhood, and this is in the end a more lofty quality that that of mere ambition.

The main female character in the film, April Palmer, knows she will have and a high-class lifestyle if she remains engaged to Grant, a member of the Gamma fraternity. He treats her as a lapdog. She chooses DJ instead (though it takes her half the film to do so).

The class and ethical conflicts are complicated by the fact that April's father is the provost of Truth University. He believes she will ruin her life by associating with DJ. He prefers Grant for his daughter and makes his feelings known to both. DJ spends time with his aunt and uncle, who live near Truth. His uncle is in charge of the ground crew at Truth. It turns out that Dr. Palmer loved DJ's uncle when they were both in college at Truth, but that she chose her husband over Dr. Palmer, who has nursed resentment over the fact ever since. There is an underlying theme here: that of the existing power structure that will take all necessary steps to preserve and bolster its position, and to cast out those whom it sees as a threat. Dr. Palmer, Grant, and Gamma fraternity are part of this structure. DJ and his uncle are not.

The basic plot in this film is two-fold: DJ must lead his fraternity to victory in a national step-dancing competition. He must also come to grips with the guilt he feels for his brother's death, with his own sense of social inadequacy, his own insecurities. At the start of the film DJ and friends are taking part in a step dance competition which his team wins. Afterwards, a fight breaks out, gunfire erupts, and DJ's brother is killed. Throughout much of the film he feels responsible for his brother's death and comes to college only because that is what his brother wanted for himself. Stomp the Yard sense is thus a coming of age story whose unwilling hero must step up and shoulder the burdens of responsibility and history and enter into life as a mature adult.

There are holes in the script, and some unlikely coincidental connections—the link between Dr. Palmer and DJ's aunt, for instance. When an ethics panel suspends DJ from school (someone from Gamma passed on information that DJ has a criminal record he did not reveal on his college application), Dr. Palmer declines to uphold the suspension because he does not want his daughter to be with DJ. She tells him that if he does not overturn the suspension, she will never have anything to do with him again. He quickly capitulates and revokes the suspension.

DJ's character is well drawn and interesting. Columbus Short does an excellent job in the role. The dancing in the film at its best is truly exciting and impressive. Another underlying theme (it's part of the focus on class conflict) is the distinction between street dancing and step dancing. These two forms of dance are clearly related. Step dancing is more conventional and traditional, associated with initiation ceremonies and competitions in African American fraternities. It's practiced by the middle- and upper-class students who attend Truth University and other similar schools. Although Stomp the Yard treats step dancing with due respect, it suggests there's more vitality and force in street dancing, DJ's kind of dancing. I suppose the underlying premise here is that street dancing is a more immediate reflection of real African American culture than is step dancing. DJ's enrollment at Truth University, his talent as a dancer, and his ghetto background force the middle and upper class students to acknowledge the energy of street dancing and of the culture that produces it. Not only does Theta incorporate this style of dance into its step-dancing routines. So does Gamma, whose members spy on the practice sessions of the Theta team. Therefore everyone emerges from the film strengthened and vitalized by DJ's presence at Truth University. The film benefits from his presence as well—Columbus Short is the strongest element in Stomp the Yard.

Tarnished Angels

The title of Faulkner’s 1935 novel Pylon refers to the markers that form the three points around which pilots fly in races at air shows. The title has certain phallic meanings attached to the male obsession with technology and speed in the novel, and to Laverne Shumann’s passion for her husband Roger. In Douglas Sirk’s adaptation Tarnished Angels (1958) the phallic imagery is replaced with a reference to Laverne herself, a reference that creates a more moralistic story that the one Faulkner wrote. Nonetheless, Tarnished Angels is a fairly successful adaptation that captures many of the basic elements of the novel as well as some of its nuances—the ever-present voice of the announcer at the air show, the flicking beacon light in the scenes where rescuers search for Shumann’s body, Jiggs’ obsession with boots, the boy Jack’s enraged reactions to taunts about his uncertain paternity.

Where the film falters as an adaptation is in its moralistic and sentimentalizing treatment of Laverne. In both the novel and the film we learn that Laverne was born in the Midwest and that after meeting Shumann at an air show when she was 16 she runs away with him. Faulkner uses the idea of the Midwest to signify where Laverne came from, but not where she wants to return—Faulkner portrays the aviators as essentially homeless, a peculiarly modern breed who have moved beyond, transcended, the need for place, home, and so on. Although there are suggestions that Laverne longs for home and place, she always moves on, and the end of the novel is a dark conclusion. No return to Kansas (or Ohio) for her. In the film, the Reporter finds Laverne in his apartment reading his copy of My Antonia, by Willa Cather, a novel that celebrates the value of patria. At the end of the novel we see her with the novel again—the Reporter has loaned it to her and asked her to return it to him personally at some time in the future. This is the film’s dunderheaded way of making clear that Laverne after all is a good girl associated with the values of patria and who doesn’t really want to live the life she has been living, that she wants something simpler and more conventional and more virtuous. Moreover, at the end of the film the Reporter has talked Laverne out of allowing Matt Ord to keep her as his mistress and instead convinced her to go home to Ohio and start a new life with her son. This is a dramatically different conclusion than the one we get in the novel, where she leaves her son with Roger Shumann’s parents and goes off with Jack (who has virtually no role in the film—his character is largely subsumed into that of Jiggs). Therefore the film sentimentalizes Pylon and turns it into the story of how Laverne, the tarnished angel of the title, resolves to return to the American Midwest of her birth and to a conventional family life, even if without Roger. (A female Nick Carroway).

Rock Hudson’s portrayal of the Reporter (who in the film is named Burke Devlin) is fairly effective. Hardly as complex or bizarre as the Reporter is in the novel, considerably more benign, nonetheless his fascination with the aviators and especially with Laverne clouds his judgment. Largely through him the film tells its story. In one of the final scenes in the film, Devlin goes to the newspaper room where he used to work and tells the story of the Shumanns that his editor did not allow him to write. There is a parallel scene in the novel, but there are significant differences between the two stories.

Shumann in the novel does not have much of a past. In the film, he is a former World War I ace aviator (many stunt pilots were former military pilots). When he dies, he is hailed as a hero who directed his plane into the lake rather than risk injuring spectators by a crash landing on the shore. In the film, before his final race, Shumann apparently tells Laverne that he loves her and wants to settle down. There is no such sentimentalizing moment in the novel. Shumann dies untamed and undomesticated, and Laverne exits the novel in much the same way as well.

In both the film and the novel New Orleans is an important setting—Mardi Gras and the airport where the air races take place. Faulkner invests the novel with an atmosphere of the surreal and the bizarre. The effect is disorienting and in part is meant to convey the very different world of the aviators that the Reporter is encountering. It is not only what Faulkner describes that creates this effect as it is his method of description. The distinctive idiosyncratic language of the novel—the coining of words, the run-on sentences, the piling of adjective on adjective, the highly subordinated sentences—place the reader in the Reporter’s perspective, to an extent. The film doesn’t have the advantage of language, except that spoken by characters, but it manages to capture some of the effect of Faulkner’s language by having characters—especially the Reporter—speak it, sometimes almost line by line.

Pylon did not seem a “Southern” novel in any traditional sense of the word. One of the points of the novel was that it was describing a “new” South, one of technology and cities and new kinds of human relationships. We can say the same about Tarnished Angels. There are few if any Southern accents in the novel, and the only way we can identify it with the American South is through our knowledge that New Orleans is the setting.

Faulkner novels are difficult to film because they so often are narrated from within the consciousness of one or more of his characters. This is certainly the case in Pylon, where the Reporter is the focus of the narration almost exclusively throughout. It is both the story that he tells as well as the way he tells it. The state of his consciousness is as much a part of the story as is the story itself. Tarnished Angels doesn’t go nearly as far as the novel does in inhabiting the consciousness of the Reporter and conveying it to the audience. The Reporter in the novel is an emotional cripple who wreaks damage on the aviators through his self-absorbed meddling and voyeurism. In Tarnished Angels he is merely a romantic who allows his fascination with a beautiful woman to cloud his judgment, and in the end he behaves in a moral and conventional way by giving her money and arranging for her to return to a respectable life in the mid-west. In the novel, the Reporter and Jiggs secretly send money with the boy, stashed in his toy airplane. One of Shumann’s parents, enraged by the plane and what it represents, and wanting to wipe out entirely the boy’s memory of that part of his life, throws it into the fire.

The Searchers

In John Ford's The Searchers (1956) Ethan Edwards is a Confederate Civil War veteran who returns home several years after the war's end. Although we do not know where he has been or what he has been doing since the end of the war, the look on his sister-in-law's face suggests that she believes he has been up to no good. He does have suspicious gold coins in his possession. The implication is that he has been involved in robberies or other criminal behavior. Ethan's identity as a Confederate war veteran is crucial to the film. First and foremost it makes him an outsider, like a man without a country. He no longer has anything to swear allegiance to, so he is a man out for himself and his own goals. Now that the North has won the war and is the source of legal authority, it makes him as well a person who resists and distrusts authority—in fact, a man who distrusts any form of organized authority, be it the Texas Rangers or the federal cavalry. Thus he is the quintessential individual.

A second element of Ethan's Confederate identity is of course his racism. Since we do not have African Americans in this film, racism is aimed at the Native Americans, whom I hereafter refer to as Indians because that is what they are called in the film—they are mainly Comanches. Although the exact cause of this racism is not made clear, it is easy enough to believe in because many people in Ethan's time hated Indians (remember Sherman, who thought they should be exterminated) and also because early in the film Comanches raid the farm of Ethan's brother, killing him, his wife, their son, and kidnapping two daughters, one of whom is later found dead and scalped. The other daughter, of course, is the object of the title search.

Ethan hates Indians not merely because they killed his relatives and in general (in this film) exhibit brutal behavior towards whites. He hates them in a basic, fundamental way—he does not see them as human and speaks of them as if they are a species apart from the whites. That is, he is a racist. Although at first the search for Debbie is a rescue mission, it gradually becomes Ethan's obsessive quest to find and kill Debbie. By living too long with the Comanches, she has, he believes, becomes one of them and therefore must be killed out of deference to who she once was, and to the fact that as a woman presumably befouled sexually by Indians (the film does not imply one way or the other whether Debbie was sexually molested by the Comanches) she deserves killing. (Underneath Ethan's hatred of Indians, and its focus on their sexual defilement of white women, is a basic revulsion against female sexuality). Martin Pawley, whom Ethan's brother adopted as his own son after his parents were killed, is 1/4 Indian, and Ethan refuses to accept him as a member of the family. At the same time, they become friends during the five years they spend searching for Debbie, and when Ethan thinks he is going to die he writes a will leaving all his possessions to Martin (part of the reason he does this is his belief that since Debbie has "been with" Comanches too long she is no longer his relative). Martin follows Ethan partially because he wants to find his sister but also because he wants to prevent Ethan from killing her.

We should consider the extent to which the film itself in its treatment of Indians parallels the racism of Ethan. On the one hand it attempts to portray the Comanches and other native Americans as human beings, not simply as savages. Clearly the band led by the chief known as Scar is a renegade band—everyone thinks of it in that way. Other Indians are apparently afraid of Scar and for that reason refuse to tell what they know about him. Indians are portrayed as intelligent and wily—they often outwit the white men who are pursuing them. On the other hand the Indians are shown as capable of much savagery, which they fully exhibit in their attack on the farm of Ethan's brother. Of course, there is ample record of Indian raids and brutality against white settlers. What The Searchers fails to make clear (few films of its time made this clear) is that there was a full record of similar atrocities committed by white settlers against Indians, not to mention the fact that Indians regarded the whites as encroaching on their land. To the Indians, the whites were invaders.

I believe Ford was attempting to do justice to the Indians even as he was portraying the racism of the whites. Debbie and Martin are key characters here. Martin has a small portion of Indian blood running in his veins, while Debbie has lived with the Indians long enough that she has, in Ethan's eyes, become an Indian. Ethan does accept Martin as his partner and even the inheritor of his worldly possessions. Although Ethan intends to shoot Debbie and at one point moves tries to do just that, in the end he embraces her and brings her back to her family. Roger Ebert in his excellent discussion of the film and its racism wonders whether this scene is enough by itself to redeem the rest of the film from its racism, and whether the film's anti-racist sentiments were too subtle for audiences in 1956, which would have been more inclined than audiences a half century later to share Ethan's racism. This is an important point to consider, whether the film is as racist as Ethan is even as it attempts to back off from that position. Click here to read Ebert's review.

Thus it is interesting in this film regarded as a study in racism that the main racist is a Southerner. It is somewhat paradoxical as well since many Indian haters were non-Southerners—hatred of Indians was not a regional attitude. But of course The Searchers was made at the beginning of the modern civil rights era in America, so Ethan as an Indian hater becomes an emblem of American racism and the challenges it pose.

John Wayne's persona doesn't vary much from one film to the next, at least in the ones I have seen. But however limited his talents may have been, within those limits he fully inhabited the persona. He has never been better than he is in this film—the rugged individual, masculine, resistant to authority and romance, single-minded in his goals, unwilling to deviate from his principles and beliefs. I do not know whether the film was written with Wayne in mind (it probably was, since Wayne was a leading actor in other Ford films), but it was an ideal vehicle for his persona. Wayne's acting in this film is three-dimensional, multi-faceted, credible.

John Ford is often mentioned as a director whose love of landscape, especially the landscape of the American West, is a leading characteristic in his filmmaking. This film may be in part responsible for that aspect of his reputation, but the landscape in The Searchers helps to make the search itself and Wayne's struggle with his hatred of Indians the epic challenges that they are. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times review of The Searchers appropriately criticizes it for having too many scenes shot on sets. Next to the beautiful landscape scenes, they seem half-hearted and cheesy, However, they don't bring the film down. In general, the landscape cinematography in this film is spectacular.

This film certainly deserves the high reputation it holds. It's a full, rich, wonderfully complex film, highly entertaining, beautifully filmed, well acted, and a pleasure to watch.