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.