Down by Law

In Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film Down by Law we follow the adventures of three down and out men in New Orleans. The black and white film falls neatly into three parts. In the first we meet the three main characters, Zack (played by Tom Waits), Jack (John Lurie), and Roberto (Roberto Benigni). Lurie and Waits we see in arguments with their girl friends, who find various ways to explain to their lovers what losers they are. Benigni is visiting from Italy. He can't speak English and keeps a notebook in which he writes down idiosyncratic English expressions, such as "not enough room to swing a cat in." The three men end up in prison, Lurie and Waits accused of doing things they didn't do. We don't see why Benigni ends up in prison, though he later tells Waits and Lurie that he is there for killing a man by hitting him with an eight ball. The middle section of the film takes place entirely in the New Orleans prison. Lurie and Waits are sharing a cell when Benigni is put in with them. They try to ignore him, but gradually he charms his way into their graces. This section for me was the most entertaining part of the film as we see the gradual chemistry developing between the cell mates. There are several comic scenes, including one in which Benigni incites everyone in the prison block to shout "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream." The prison cell scenes suggest the Marx Brothers or even the Three Stooges, though Jarmusch's characters are far more understated and subtle that these predecessors. In one scene the three cell mates hang on the bars of their cell, gazing outwards, as if there is something to see other than a cell on the other side of the walkway. The scene is as hilarious as it is confining and oppressive. The faces of the three cell mates, staring through the bars, tell the whole story.

Benigni tells Waits and Lurie that he knows a way to escape. We don't see exactly how the escape occurs—we simply see the three running down an underground culvert, laughing. The third section of the film follows the convicts as they flee their pursuers through the swamps and forests surrounding New Orleans.

There is no plot to this film, which simply follows the path of the three companions. Jack, Zack, and Roberto are introduced individually early in the film, and it's only in the prison section that we realize their fates will intertwine. Fates is not the best term to use. There is no fate per se in this film—nothing final happens to the three characters. They just make their way through the various situations that confront them, and we wait to see what happens. Despite the absence of conventional plot, the film is entertaining and Jarmusch wins our attention by his attention to the three characters and the excellent actors he has chosen to portray them. Waits plays a character that might have come straight out of one of his songs, while Benigni seems to play himself, or at least a character that incorporates many of the manic and comic elements of other roles he has played, such as the father in Life is Beautiful.

Jarmusch says in the commentary that accompanies the DVD version of the film that he had never been to New Orleans when he decided to write a script set in the city. He compares New Orleans to New York and says that both are like other countries separate from the United States. The film is shot in beautiful black and white, and images of architecture from some of the more weathered and run down districts of New Orleans predominate in the first part of the film. In the DVD commentary Jarmusch explains that he doesn't like to use the stock iconic images to characterize a place like New Orleans. He doesn't do that in Down By Law, but the buildings he does show are easily recognized as part of the city. I don't know exactly where Jarmusch managed to film the middle portion, but he contrives to present a run down and dreary prison. The film is not really about Louisiana or New Orleans—it's just set there—the film's real interest is in the three main characters. New Orleans and the sections of the city Jarmusch uses in the film provide a context of decay and hard times that are appropriate backdrops for the three down and out main characters.

Roberto talks constantly, even though he can hardly speak English. He manages to tell Jack and Zack that he likes the poetry of Walt Whitman, and later he mentions Robert Frost, whom Jack refers to as Bob Frost. The Frost reference provides a context of sorts for the closing image of the film, where Jack and Zack wander town two diverging roads, headed off towards separate future adventures.

The title would seem to suggest the film's interest in three characters who for various reasons have fallen on hard times because of real or fictional conflicts with the law. We would consider them "oppressed by the Law," as Jarmusch explains in the commentary. But he suggests that the real meaning of the title comes from its use as prison jargon that describes friends who are dependent on each other. The dependency of the three characters on each other in the film gradually grows and then wanes, as they go their separate ways.

One of the most unlikely elements in the film comes in the third section when the three convicts stumble on an Italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere in the Louisiana swamps. A young Italian woman lives and works there and takes the three men in, feeding and clothing them and giving them a place to sleep. Roberto ends up staying with her.

The film ends without warning, though given the logic it follows one can sense the ending coming at the fork in the road which the restaurant owner Nicoletta describes to Jack and Zack. Nothing is resolved, and everything is resolved.

Mandingo

Incest, bloody fights, hangings, sex, rape, whippings, miscarriage, alcohol, prostitutes, a man boiled alive, sexual repression, adultery, slave rebellion, depravity, decadence, cruelty, racism, decaying old mansions, mint juleps.

Mandingo (1975) is the obverse of Gone with the Wind (1939). In one Southern plantation family it embeds the whole of the institution of slavery, both as it was and as people believe it was. Mandingo serves as antidote to decades of films that extol the virtues of the Old South and ignore the dark realities of slavery. Yet as a portrait of history, it is no more reliable and accurate than the views it seeks to correct. The real intent of Mandingo is not corrective. It is prurient, sensationalist, and exploitative. Within a two-hour span, it manages to include every fact and myth imaginable about slavery and the Old South. Who knows what to believe when this film is over?

Mandingo presents a world in which plantation owners regard slaves as animals without souls. They discuss slaves as they would discuss sheep or cattle. They talk about how to breed slaves—the woman are called "breeders." Slave children are "suckers." They execute slaves who run away too often and poison those too old to work. The white male owners exercise total control over the lives and bodies of slaves. They have sex with the women whenever they like, and in fact Hammond's father (played by James Mason) explains to a young slave girl that she should feel honored to have her first sexual experience with her owner's son: "It's Master's duty to pleasure the wenches first time!" Men have "bed wenches" who give them the kind of sex their white wives are supposedly too frail and innocent to offer. Yet white women are shown as sexually repressed too.

Falconhurst is the plantation where much of the film occurs. It is located in Louisiana, somewhere between Memphis and New Orleans. Compared to other plantations, it's a pretty run-down affair, and perhaps this is supposed to imply that the Maxwells are an exception to the mythic Southern rule of leisure and gentility and beauty. Mrs. Maxwell died years before, and the place has lacked a mistress as a result. The implication is that when a new young mistress comes on the scene, she will motivate Hammond and his father to fix the place up. To do that, they will need money, and to get money they will have to sell slaves, which they never hesitate to do.

Hammond Maxwell, the son at Falconhurst, the plantation in this film, has a game leg. He is portrayed as a kind exception to the norm among slave owners. He dislikes the mistreatment of slaves. He truly loves the slave girl Blanche who becomes his "bed wench" after he buys her in New Orleans. He tells her that she will always belong to him, that no one can take her away from him. He promises that when their child grows up he will set him free. He disapproves when his cousin spanks the slave girl he has been given by a host to spend the night with. He treasures and respects Mede, the husky male slave he buys in New Orleans and who proves to be a vigorous fighter. He doesn't like to see families broken up at slave auctions. Despite all these exceptions, Hammond believes in slavery, is upset when he discovers that one of the house slaves can read, happily leads slaves off to be sold in Memphis, is enraged to the point of madness when he discovers that his wife has had sex with and become pregnant by Mede (she does this to get revenge on her husband and his bed-wench), whom he does not hesitate to murder.

Not surprisingly, slaves in the film lead a double-life. They have no choice but to accept the sexual exploitation the women suffer. They are subservient in front of whites, and more assertive, more "normal" among themselves. Out of hearing of the whites, they argue with each other as to how subservient they should be. Moke in particular is accused of trying to ingratiate himself to Hammond for his willing participation in arranged fights. He is accused by another slave, the rebellious Cicero, of turning against his "black brother." On the other hand, no one blames Blanche for loving Hammond. The movie doesn't explicitly address the fact that she has no choice but to submit to him. He tells her that he will leave her alone if that is what she wants--she responds that she wants to give him pleasure. That Hammond doesn't want to force Blanche to have sex does not mitigate the fact that as her owner he can do with her as he likes—he has the power, whether or not he uses it.

Mandingo pays much attention to racial and sexual double standards among white characters. Hammond becomes upset on his wedding night when he discovers that his wife has already had sex—she is not a virgin (at the age of 13, she later tells him, she had sex with her brother). Yet Hammond himself has been having sex with black women for years. He tells his wife, before they have sex for the first time, that he does not know how to behave with a white woman—he has only been with black women. His father has warned him that white women don't like sex and won't do for their husbands what black women are willing to do. (Black women are invariably referred to as "wenches.") In the world of Mandingo, it is accepted and expected that white men will have sex with prostitutes and with black women, that black women will have sex with the white men who own them, but that white women will have sex (infrequently) only with their husbands and only after marriage. Hammond's father tells him that he will need his "bed wench" after he marries because the black woman will relieve the white wife of having to "submit." White women, of course, cannot have sex with black men.

The primary white woman in the film is Blanche, Hammond's cousin, whom his father more or less arranges for him to marry. Once he discovers she is not a virgin, he wants nothing to do with her. She grows increasingly frustrated, especially as he continues to spend time with Blanche. At one point, while Hammond is away, she whips Blanche and pushes her down the stairs, resulting in the loss of the child Blanche is carrying. Ultimately, she forces Mede to have sex with her by telling him that if he refuses she will tell Hammond that he raped her. This is her way of getting revenge on Hammond.

At the end of the film, Hammond is forced to confront the fact that whether or not he has been a less abusive and oppressive slave master than others, he is still a slave master and capable of committing all the atrocities the role implies. Just before Hammond shoots him, Mede tells him, "I thought you was better than the white man, Masta. But you is just white!"

One problem with this film (among the many) is historical accuracy. I do not doubt that in the abstract everything this film argues about slavery is true—that it places white owners in a position of total control over the slaves they owned. Slaves had no freedom, no control over their own lives. Many were mistreated and suffered horribly. Many slave owners took advantage of their position and had sex with and children by their female slaves. There is no doubt that slavery dehumanized both the owners and the enslaved. But did all slave-owners--or even most of them--behave as the Maxwells behave in this film? Is there any evidence that slave owners openly bragged about their relationships and offspring with slave women? Would their wives have tolerated such discussion? Would gentlemanly rules of decorum have permitted such discussion? We have ample historical evidence to document that many slave owners did sleep with their slaves, including the DNA evidence that shows Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemming, whom he may or may not have loved, and who may or may not have loved him. But Jefferson left no written comments on this relationship. There is ample evidence of such relationships throughout the slave-owning South. But to what extent is Mandingo a representative portrait of the peculiar institution? And how many white women in the 1840s—the wives of plantation owners—would try to seduce male slaves? There is certainly no evidence this was a common occurrence. Once again, when a film attempts to portray history or to correct inaccurate portrayals of history, should there be an obligation to portray fact? Or should filmmakers have license to give any version of events they want, in order to serve a particular political bias or to satisfy the sensationalist desires of their audience? Any discussion of the weaknesses and flaws in this film—the excessive melodrama, the unremarkable plot, the poor acting—must include the issue of historical inauthenticity.

Mandingo is beautifully filmed. The music is written by Maurice Jarré. The music is particularly tender in the scenes between Blanche and Hammond, suggesting that what we are seeing is a romantic relationship between two lovers--an oversimplification and distortion of the true situation. Music and visual beauty simply contribute to the overall distortions that the film presents.

The Neon Bible

The Neon Bible (1995), loosely based on a novel written by John Kennedy Toole when he was 16 years old, is a stagey, doleful, impressionistic account of a young boy's life in a torn and eccentric family in the early 1940s. If Toole is in any sense identifiable with the young protagonist of the story, then perhaps we can infer that the novel and film tell us something about the nature of his life with his own mother. But that is speculation at best.

Placed in Georgia (the credits say it was filmed on location in Madison, Crawfordville, and Atlanta), the film is contrived and artificial. It lacks life, has little to say, other than implying that life in the 1940s South was repressive. We see the boy's father (played by an unrecognizable Dennis Leary) take him to a lynching. There are several scenes involving church and revival services where the emphasis falls on sin and hellfire damnation. In one voiceover that accompanies a scene of people sitting in church, the protagonist explains that in his town you had to be like everyone else or you had to leave town—there was no alternative. The film's title is perhaps suggests the repressive atmosphere of the world in which the boy grew up.

The scenes seem to shift back and forth in time, to some extent, although the overall movement of the narrative is chronologically forward. Ostensibly, the film focuses on the arrival in the family of Aunt Mae, the older sister of the boy's mother. She is played by Gene Rowlands, who is too old for the part, but who nonetheless plays it well. Mae is a singer and performer who left the stage for reasons unspecified. She spends much of the film reminiscing about her days on the stage and the men who courted her. As the boy's mother sinks deeper and deeper into mental illness, Mae is the boy's confidante and companion. Her departure towards the end of the film traps him, since his mother has to be watched on a 24-hour basis, forcing him to quit his job as a drugstore clerk.

There are some contrived set pieces in the film, one at a revival service and another at a World War II-era fundraiser where Mae sings. There are scenes in which the camera lingers for long seconds and perhaps minutes on random images—for instance, the dark, cavernous entrance to the tent where a revival is taking place. These scenes suggest the impact of the past, of the boy's memories, perhaps, but they add to the awkward, pretentious character of the film. They seem purposeless. They take up time rather than move the film forward or somehow enhance the portrayal of a character or the evocation of a mood,.

The film is slow and melodramatic. The boy's parents argue and fight. His father doesn't want Aunt Mae in the house. They have no money. We watch the mother gradually lose her mind—we see several scenes of her suffering, mainly evinced by her tendency to cry at revivals and public gatherings. Does she go mad because of a repressive family life, because of her husband's death in the war, because of competition with the more outgoing Mae? The movie doesn't suggest a reason—it simply illustrates. The boy makes tentative but unsuccessful attempts to be friends with girls. Finally, when Mae announces she is leaving to take what she hopes will be a job in Nashville, the boy is trapped. He returns home from the train station where he has told Mae goodbye to find his mother collapsed and bleeding on the upper store of their house. Instead of calling for a doctor, he drags her into the bedroom and puts her on a bed, where he lovingly embraces her while she goes about dying. Is this intentional, his failure to seek medical help? In the novel, the boy kills his mother. In the film, after the mother dies and while he is burying her, a local preacher arrives to cart his mother off to the mental asylum. The boy kills him with a shot gun.

The whole film is told retrospectively, as the boy sits in a train car riding towards an undetermined destination. He looks out an empty dark window and remembers the scenes that the film dramatizes. To my knowledge, this film was never released in wide distribution. The New York Times review describes the film's British director Terence Davies as "a gifted cinematic poet whose semi-autobiographical films 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and 'The Long Day Closes' present a child's-eye view of growing up in Liverpool in the late 1940s and 50s, Davies uses film like Proust's madeleine to recapture the past. Storytelling is wound around a montage of images and songs that have a mystical personal resonance." The same method seems evident here, but for whatever reason—the fact that Davies is not working with his own life, the tentativeness of the novel, his own unfamiliarity with the setting of the story, it doesn't work.

The Story of Temple Drake

The Story of Temple Drake (1933) takes the dark Southern Gothic of William Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary and transmutes it into a 1930s gangster story. Faulkner's novel itself is not "Southern" in a conventional sense. There is the small Southern town in which Temple Drake and other characters reside, and there is Lee Goodwin's home, the "Old Frenchman's" plantation house, which the film portrays as half-collapsed and wholly decayed. In the novel, the South provides a background against which the characters move and talk. But the novel's story of physical and moral corruption is no more dependent on the Southern setting than it would be dependent on New York if it were set there, or on Los Angeles, or Chicago. The Southern setting helps explain certain mannerisms and accents of the characters, and it provides a sordid context for the motley crew of characters who hover in and around Lee Goodwin's house. One could argue that the Old Frenchman's place is the novel's symbol of a decadent and vanished Old South. Finally, the South in the novel with its tradition of vigilante justice and of privilege for the wealthy and disadvantage for the poor helps explain the horrific conclusion of the novel.

The film gives us a few Southern accents, mixed in with Chicago and British accents. Some black servants and the house where Lee Godwin's crew lives alert us to the Southern setting. But the film is not really about the South.

In a number of ways the film replicates important aspects of the novel. Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins) remains a central point of interest, as do Lee Goodwin and his wife Ruby Lamar. The film changes Popeye's name to Trigger, and Horace Benbow becomes Stephen Benbow, a former spurned flame of Temple's. Temple's dangerous flirting personality, the way she entrances men with the offer and then the refusal of her sexuality, is largely present in the film. (Made before the advent of the Production Code, the film's frank treatment of sexuality, even if by implication and innuendo, is still surprising). We can glimpse the trappings of Faulkner's novel, even if ultimately we realize there is only slight substance behind them.

Sanctuary is about the moral and physical corruption of its characters, specifically of Horace Benbow, Temple Drake, and others. Its story is unrelentingly despairing and pessimistic, and it savagely destroys most of its characters. Horace himself is complex, self-deceived, and unlikeable. His attraction to beautiful women, his fascination with the sexuality of women, is a motivating force in his defense of Lee Goodwin (whose wife Ruby he wants, just as he wants his wife's daughter, even as he wants his sister). This is a frequently seen character type in Faulkner—the deluded male who thinks he is doing good when in fact what he is doing is trying to steal another man's wife). In the film, Benbow is a young lawyer attempting to do the right thing. He is earnest and moral and lacks any fixation on young women at all. Faulkner's novel is also about the corrupting force of female sexuality—a force that corrupts men as well as women. Temple is the prime agent of this force. She is a flirtatious flapper, a vacuous Southern belle who flaunts beauty and sex and who once she experiences sex through her brutal experience of rape cannot have enough of it. She is Faulkner's paragon example of a woman corrupted by her own sexuality. Faulkner's treatment of female sexuality is complex and multilayered. Sanctuary is one of the novels critics turn to in order to label Faulkner a misogynist.

The Story of Temple Drake is about a woman redeemed. The film seems to agree with the novel that Temple's reckless and flirtatious behavior placed her in the way of rapists like Trigger, and it suggests as well that she enjoys what happens to her. Even before the rape, she tells Stephen Benbow that there is an evil side to her—she seems to imply that she is incapable of virtue. This is the film's way of suggesting her nymphomania, her inability to be satisfied with any one man. For this reason, she suggests to Stephen, she rejects his proposal of marriage, even though she claims to like and even to love him. So Temple in the film is possessed of a moral self-awareness not allowed her character in the novel. The film provides Temple with a number of opportunities to redeem herself, each of which she seizes. The first comes when Stephen barges into the room where Trigger is staying with Temple at Miss Reba's whore house. Stephen is shocked to find her there and assumes she is a prisoner. But Temple, who knows that Trigger is ready to shoot Stephen, lies and tells him she is there willingly. Shortly after Stephen leaves, she prepares to abandon Trigger, and when he stands in her way, striking her and telling her that he is not through with her, she shoots him. This is her second opportunity for redemption. And her third is when she testifies on the witness stand in Lee Goodwin's trial that she saw Trigger kill Tommy, revealing in the process that she was raped and that she killed Trigger. This moment of personal and social disgrace is her final act of self-redemption. She saves Goodwin at the cost of her own reputation. She then collapses. As Stephen carries her out of the courtroom, he turns to her grandfather Judge Drake and tells him that "You should be proud of her. I know I am." The film ends.

This hackneyed and corny cinematic ending contrasts markedly with the triple conclusion of the novel—Lee Goodwin's lynching, Popeye's hanging, and Temple's grim appearance in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris. It's difficult to think of a grimmer, more disturbing, more apt conclusion for any American novel than this one.

The film captures the shock value of the novel but ignores or fails to understand the reasons for the shock—the moral hollowness of the characters and of their world. Sanctuary condemns its world, while The Story of Temple Drake confirms that in the world it portrays virtue always wins out.

Both Sanctuary and The Story of Temple Drake seem to be premised on the notion that small Southern towns are threatened by the invasion of big-city evils—gangsters, sex, crime, violence—though it is well worth pointing out that those menaces were really there to begin with, just hidden away, unacknowledged, called by other names.

Thunder and Lightning

Thunder and Lightning (1977) seems like a half-hearted Hollywood effort to jump on the 1970s-decade films-about-the-South band wagon. Produced by Roger Corman, directed by Corey Allen (mainly a director of television episodes), it tries to make David Carradine into a Southern ring-tailed roarer in the vein of Burt Reynolds' Gator McCluskey. The action is intense but without much excitement, the hijinks are forced and unsurprising, the story-line is shallow and punctuated with seemingly endless dune buggy races and car chases. There's a fight in what appears to be a hog trough. There's a protracted scene where Carradine and his girlfriend throw cartons of soft drinks from the back of a delivery truck. There's plenty of moonshine and a range of bucolic good-ol'-boy types along with a few Mafioso enforcers trying to conduct a hit on a golf course thrown in for good measure.

The basic plot concerns moonshiners in the Florida swamps. There are the "good" moonshiners who make high-quality shine and sell it to the locals, and there are "bad" moonshiners who use radiators and car batteries to make tainted shine which they force local vendors to buy. The bad moonshiners spend a lot of time colluding with the mob up North and with the local senator, and with breaking down the stills of the good moonshiners whom they try to put out of business.

Carradine plays Harley Thomas, the hero, who delivers whiskey made by the good moonshiners. His girlfriend is the smoothly coiffed Nancy Sue Hunnicutt (Kate Jackson), whose father heads up the local bad moonshine operation. Harley is the fool killer in this film. He drives fast and furiously, always outwits the bad guys, speaks with the same accent he used in the Kung Fu television series. Kate Jackson at least manages a mild accent. We see a possum in one scene and an alligator in another. In one faintly amusing scene Harley meets Nancy at a church service where the reverend delivers his sermon while wrestling an alligator. Other than them critters, there's nothing authentic or mildly stimulating in this dull and bland production.

The South in Thunder and Lightning is dirt roads, hicks, illegal whiskey, trucks, cars, dune buggies, grizzled old men, dimwits, fistfights, corrupt politicos and businessmen, swamps, and rusty radiators.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) portrays a small town in the rural South of the 1920s and 1930s that tolerates and supports a relationship between two women whom today we would describe as lesbians. That statement needs scrutiny: what would such a community know of a lesbian relationship, which would take place behind closed doors? Would it necessarily be seen as unusual, by prevailing standards of the day? Or would it simply be seen as a matter of two unmarried women living and working together for the sake of convenience, like a Boston marriage? Because no one names their relationship, no one has to react or pass judgment.

At any rate, the two women at the center of this film, and their family, tolerate individuality and eccentricity. They are not what the film presents as the prevailing Southern norm. The norm is Ruth Jamison's abusive husband. The norm is the Klan, which attacks the Whistle Stop Café for its too tolerant attitude towards a black employee. But mostly, it seems, the community simply ignores or doesn't think about or doesn't understand Idgie and Ruth's private life. The town simply accepts them. When Idgie is put on trial for killing Ruth's husband, Ruth is asked why she left her husband to go live with Idgie: she answers that Idgie "is the best friend I've ever had. I love her." The townspeople see the relationship as a friendship, and the film portrays it that way, although there is enough information to allow us to infer a deeper bond.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Intruder in the Dust (1949), and other films, Fried Green Tomatoes examines the South through characters and situations that are exceptional rather than representative. Yet it argues that exceptions such as Ruth and Idgie are part of the community because of a fundamental tolerance for variation and eccentricity. The South is, after all, according to a fundamental stereotype, full of eccentrics and individuals. Shouldn't it be accepting of them? As the film makes clear, such tolerance extends within but not across racial boundaries.

The film has a double-plot structure. A modern housewife named Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) is unhappy with her marriage and her life in general and is suffering a personal crisis. She meets an elderly woman living in a nursing home named Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy) who tells her stories from her earlier days in a nearby town called Whistle Stop. These stories mainly concern Idgie and Ruth. They inspire Evelyn to get her life in order, to be more assertive, and to stand up to her husband. I found the Evelyn Couch scenes deadly dull and uninteresting. Kathy Bates overplays her character and is more a cartoon than a realistic figure. The Ruth and Idgie story is far more interesting. Evelyn's life provides a frame that enables Ruth and Idgie's story to be told (a frame similar to what we find in Princess Bride, 1987, and Edward Scissorhands, 1990).

This film is often grouped pejoratively with other films about Southern women such as Steel Magnolias (1989). The grouping isn't accurate—Fried Green Tomatoes is a better film primarily because of the writing, the narrative coherence, the characters, and the actors. Mary Stuart Masterson (Idgie) and Mary-Louise Parker (Julie) are excellent in their roles, though there is, admittedly, a Hallmark Hallof Fame sheen to both of them. As much as it is a kind of fairy tale about an idyllic Southern past, Fried Green Tomatoes is not (unlike Steel Magnolias) a conglomeration of stereotypes and parodies. It is a portrait of a close and deep friendship and the community around it. Interestingly, both films use the death of a main character as a dramatic focus. Julie's death seems a way by which the film evades long-term issues about her relationship with Idgie.

Fried Green Tomatoes is also, like many Southern films, a nostalgic excursion, told from a future vantage point in time, looking back towards a past that some might prefer to the present day. In the old days, the film implies, Ninny would not have been left in a nursing home. Friends and relatives would have taken Ninny in, as Evelyn seems ready to do at the end of the film. The past is clearly past—times have changed. This is an underlying premise of Ninny's stories about the old days in Whistle Stop. The café closes, and Whistle Stop withers away after the train no longer stops there. This signifies the passage of the old order.

Ironically, the train is the source of the town's economic life, yet it is also a threat from the beginning. Idgie's brother Buddy is killed in an early scene when a train kills him after his shoe becomes stuck between the tracks.

Fried Green Tomatoes depends on notions of Southern local color and quaintness for much of its secondary interest. It is about a former time and place, an enclave of isolation from modernity and all of its inhospitable elements.

Macon County Line

Macon County Line (1974) was a primary entry in a genre of films that emphasized the South as a place of violence, vigilante justice, and hostility to people from outside the region. In such films as Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and 2001 Maniacs (2005) and in such more reputable films as Easy Rider (1969) and Deliverance (1972) down-home Southerners were portrayed as depraved and vicious.

In Macon County Line two hipsters on their way to enlist in the army pick up a Southern girl on her way to Dallas. The hipsters—college-age boys—the girl is 20—have little money. Their car breaks down in a small town that is apparently Macon, Georgia. While it is being repaired, they meet the local deputy sheriff, Reed Morgan (Max Baer), who is hostile but who after some intimidation lets them go their way. Later, their car breaks down again—ironically—just in front of Deputy Morgan's house. His wife has just been raped and murdered by two hoodlums. When Deputy Morgan discovers the crime and sees the car, he assumes the boys and their female friend committed the crime. With his ten-year-old son in tow, he chases them down. Murders ensue.

Though this is a poorly made low-grade film, Deputy Morgan is not as simple as one would think. He wears a Confederate flag shoulder patch on his uniform. He is pretty much a product of his times. He loves his wife and is kind to her. He buys an expensive gun (a 12-gauge shotgun) for his son, Luke, whom he loves. He imagines giving the shotgun to his son and then going hunting with him. When his son explains that he would rather play baseball with friends, Deputy Morgan finally agrees to delay their hunting trip until later. Morgan sees his son talking to some black kids and explains that the roles of society dictate that blacks and whites do not spend time together—they live and go to school separately.

What the film seeks to demonstrate—above and beyond the fact of the South's savage violence—is that a violent heritage breeds violence. The deputy sends his son to a military school and wants to instill in him the same racial values and love of hunting that he holds. His idea of an expression of love is a 12-gauge shotgun. At the end of the film, as he hunts the people he believes have killed his wife, his son makes good on that heritage by shooting and killing the girl and one of the boys. At the beginning of the film, an ominous message on the screen suggests that the story about to be told is based on true events. At the end, a similar message informs us that Luke at the age of 29 still resides in a mental institution, where he will remain for the rest of his life. It is as if the supposedly factual basis of the film is somehow meant to justify the exploitative nature of the violence in the film.

There is little suspense or pacing in the film, which fundamentally lacks excitement. The best scene involves a romantic tryst in a watering trough.

Despite the deputy sheriff's lecture to his son about race relations, and despite the incompetence and corruption that pervades local law enforcement, the film curiously avoids any commentary on contemporary Southern affairs—it is set back in the early 1950s--1954, to be exact. We see the deputy's wife watching the Joe McCarthy hearings shortly before she is raped and murdered. McCarthy himself was a public official who like Deputy Reed ran amuck and became besotted with power. I doubt Max Baer intended this film to be a commentary on McCarthyism.

Max Baer, of course, played Jethro Bodine for a decade on the popular 1960s The Beverly Hillbillies television series.

The Green Pastures

The Green Pastures (1936) is based on the 1930 Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same title by Marc Connelly, which itself is adapted from Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam and His Chillun (1928), a series of Bible stories told from an unlettered African American viewpoint. Connelly and William Keighley co-directed the film. From the 1936 perspective, the film was intended to be appreciative and sympathetic to African American culture. But it achieves sympathy at the cost of paternalism, condescension, and racial stereotypes. Undoubtedly Connelly thought he was presenting an authentic portrait of African Americans and their religion. What he was really doing was portraying a white man's view of African American religion—how whites liked to think that African Americans conceived of their religion. Although there may be elements of truth in the film—children in particular would have responded to the film's images of African American angels flying around in heaven (the Green Pastures), singing, playing chase, fishing, having picnics—as a whole it is a well intended but misinformed and misguided effort.

Despite its pious subject, one purpose of Green Pastures is comedy—to elicit the laughter of a mainly white audience in response to images of African Americans dressed as angels cavorting in heaven and acting out Bible stories.

The Green Pastures was the first major motion picture with an all-black cast. Rex Ingram portrays "de Lawd," with Oscar Polk as Gabriel and Eddie Anderson as Noah. The film shows a Sunday school teacher explaining God and the Bible to a group of young children. He describes "de Lawd" as someone vaguely resembling Dr. Du Bois—is this W. E. B. Du Bois? The teacher's talk with the children and their rapt faces segues into a series of scenes portraying black angels in heaven. When "de Lawd" arrives on the scene, he complains that the pudding lacks something of substance and decides that it doesn't have enough "firmament," which he thereby creates. A sequence of scenes shows the creation of the earth, of Adam and Eve, the story of Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood (one of the central scenes in the film), and the fall of Babylon, after which de Lawd decides not to try to help the human race anymore and retreats to heaven.

The portrait of God in this film is deeply humanistic and anthropomorphic. De Lawd is shown agonizing over the sins and tribulations of the human race. He is constantly disappointed at how humans manage to sin after he intervenes to help them or to clean things up. Even after he retreats to heaven, he is shown suffering over his decision, struggling to discover a way to help the human race without violating his decision. This leads him to an understanding of mercy, suffering, and finally the meaning of faith. The crucial moment comes when de Lawd realizes that though he may have lost faith in mankind, mankind (some of them at least) have kept their faith in him. With these discoveries de Lawd decides to send Christ to the earth as his representative, though this decision is only indirectly implied.

Much of this film is quite watchable. It has its charms. Ingram in particular as de Lawd is impressive. The excellent traditional spirituals sung by the Hall Johnson Choir are used throughout the film to highlight and accompany the Biblical dramatizations. The best scenes are the earliest ones, and as the film moves past the creation of Adam and Eve towards Noah and the flood and the fall of Babylon it becomes too literal and begins to drag.

The Green Pastures exemplifies a view of African Americans that was pervasive in the 1930s, not merely in the South but throughout much of America—a view that regarded them as pious, simple, and primitive—as the bearers of a folk and racial tradition that merited preservation mainly as a form of racial local color.

Southern Comfort

Southern Comfort (1983) is about cultural imperialism—about how one culture reacts when another encroaches on its territory. A squad of Louisiana National Guardsmen is assigned as part of a training exercise to make a cross-country hike through the swamps. This is a weekend jaunt for most of the men, who have other jobs. Soon into the hike one of them finds and cuts through a net line belonging to local residents of the swamp, whom we assume are Cajuns. Later they find carcasses hung out to dry. Then they take two boats belonging to the swamp residents and use them to cross a river. (They do leave a note explaining that they will return the boats). When the guardsmen look back and see the owners of the boats watching them, they try to explain their actions, but there is a language barrier—the Cajuns speak French, and they are too far away to hear. As a joke, one of the men in the squad fires his automatic weapon at the men on the riverbank—it's filled with blanks, but the Cajuns don't know that and duck for cover. One of them returns fire that kills the lieutenant in charge. The plot of the film is thus set in motion. The guardsmen try to make their way across the swamp and are picked off, one-by-one, by the local residents.

For most of the film the Cajuns are portrayed as violent and murderous swamp dwellers who resort to all sorts of devices—booby-traps, quicksand, raging dogs, fear tactics—to work revenge on the guardsmen. At the end of the film, the surviving two guardsmen leave the swamp and catch a ride into a nearby Cajun settlement where a celebration of some sort is occurring. Now the Cajuns are portrayed as joyous and fun-loving people who invite the guardsmen to dance and join the celebration. The residents of the settlement are dancing, playing music, cooking. Then the men who had one by one killed the other guardsmen come into the town and try to kill the two survivors. It's not clear whether the townspeople know this is going on and use the noise of the celebration to cover it up, or whether they're unaware. This final scene, with all its ambiguity, exemplifies the guardsmen's essential lack of understanding of the Cajuns—and, since we are viewing the action from the guardsmen's perspective, our own lack of understanding as well.

During the film the guardsmen capture a Cajun man who they believe is responsible for killing their lieutenant. Some of the men abuse the prisoner either for purposes of revenge or to get information out of him. The prisoner watches the guardsmen and recognizes that they are all individuals and that not all of them are to blame for the abuse. As a result, perhaps, he later helps the survivors find their way out of the swamp.

What the film does make clear is that the guardsmen set in motion the events that cause their problems in the film. The swamp dwelling Cajuns interpret the guardsmen's lack of respect for them and their property as an attack. Despite the fact that the Cajuns are the initial victims, however, they are portrayed as murderous and violent, more than up to the task of exacting revenge on the invaders of their territory. Ultimately the film portrays the guardsmen as the victims. Are the Cajuns as a group portrayed as murderous and violent, or does the film place blame only on the men tracking the guardsmen in the swamp? Are the guardsmen as a group responsible for their actions, or are only certain individuals to blame. It's difficult to weed out the guilty from the innocent, and the Cajuns in this film in general are shown as primitive, violent, and dangerous.

Yet this is not purely a film about cultural misunderstandings. It is fundamentally a film about men trying to escape a threat to their lives. Suspense and action, with no small emphasis on violence—are the point—the unpreparedness of so-called civilized men when they are plunged into a life-threatening situation in an alien environment. The commanding officer of the squad dies early in the film, and the officer who takes over for him proves wholly unprepared to lead the men or prevent them from falling into complete disorder and disarray. One can make comparisons with Deliverance (1972) and Lord of the Flies (1963, 1990), and one can draw comparisons, as I believe some reviewers did, of the men in this film with American soldiers in Vietnam. In Deliverance as well as Southern Comfort, we must ask who the real victims are. Both films, moreover, consider what happens to morality and respect for human life when the restraints of civilization are stripped away. In Deliverance these questions were clearly and overtly at the film's center. In Southern Comfort they may be more of a pretext for the action and violence than they are the real subject.

The plot of Southern Comfort, in which the guardsmen are killed off one by one by an unseen enemy, is the typical plot of many a horror and suspense film—think of Halloween (1978) or Alien (1979) or Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), for instance, or even the Agatha Christie film And Then There Were None (1945). It's a too often used, hackneyed device, and it doesn't provide an effective way of exploring the collision of the two cultural perspectives in this film.

Cool Hand Luke

Cool Hand Luke (1967) is a major entry in the American tradition of chain gang films, a tradition that extends back to Mervyn Leroy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). The American South provides a logical setting for the film, since chain gangs are associated with the South, though in fact they were used all over the nation. The South is also a suitable setting for this story because of its reputation for strict enforcement of law and order and its purported lack of sympathy for lawbreakers and the down and out. Race is not an issue in Cool Hand Luke, in part because in the 1960s most Southern chain gangs were segregated. The absence of race as an overt theme simplifies matters for the filmmakers, perhaps. Yet race can be viewed as a subtle theme in how the film portrays the struggle of individuals, specifically Luke himself, against a system that does not favor people who do not fit neatly into a predetermined, predefined place.

The real theme of Cool Hand Luke is the individual against the system. The opening shots of the film show repeated images of a garish red sign reading "VIOLATION." We next see a drunken Luke struggling to twist the head off a parking meter. He's arrested for this small act of vandalism, for "defacing public property." The film doesn't argue that he should not have faced arrest. Instead it argues that the degree of his punishment is extreme, and that society's insistence on conformity, its intolerance of individuals, is extreme as well.

Luke is the son of a lower-class family. We briefly meet his dying mother when she comes to visit him at the prison farm. Clearly, whatever progress he makes in life has been of his own doing. We learn that he has always had difficulty fitting in, especially since his traumatic experiences in war. He apparently suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, an affliction for which there was no name when the film was made. He is, in effect, a psychically wounded war veteran.

Cool Hand Luke has much in common with other films about men imprisoned or trapped or confined in an oppressive environment. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Stalag 17 (1953) are examples. It is also linked in this sense to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. In such works, the prison or the hospital ward, and the individual's struggle with the institutional structures and authority they embody, become an emblem of society at large.

Cool Hand Luke is an episodic film that follows Luke's entry into the prison camp, his adjustment there, his growing conflict with prison authorities, and three escape attempts. The inmates who accept their confinement are portrayed as content with their lot. They are shown having parties, dancing, gambling, and engaged in other activities with prison personnel standing nearby, nodding approval. The main representative of this group is Dragline, played by George Kennedy. He's been in the camp longer than most of the prisoners, and he sees the way to survival through complying with prison rules. He's worried by Luke's rebelliousness, and in various ways he urges Luke to go along with the rules. Dragline is not a coward, but he clearly has a different attitude towards life, towards survival, than Luke. The men like Dragline may be more likely to survive the prison camp, but they do so at the cost of their individuality, their identity. Luke may ultimately retain his identity, but it comes at the cost of his life.

Contrasted against scenes of prisoner camaraderie are those in which Luke wages his struggle against the prison authorities, against authority in general. Perhaps the most famous scene in the film is the egg-eating wager: where inmates bet on whether Luke can eat fifty hard-boiled eggs in a sitting. Paul Newman as Luke is the center of the film, which is built around his character rather than around some coherent central narrative that moves the film forward. The distinction between a film of character and a film of narrative may be minor. But the film is memorable because of Luke's character and because of his struggles against authority, rather than because of any narrative involving other characters in the film. We could imagine the film with a different slate of secondary characters, with a significantly different narrative, but we could not imagine it without the character of Luke or even without Paul Newman himself. Cool Hand Luke is not a groundbreaking film, but Newman's performance as Luke is one of the best of his career.

One motif in the film concerns how the inmates live vicariously through Luke's rebelliousness. They enjoy talking about his exploits and they clearly feed off his resistance to prison authorities. They compensate for their own lack of resolve and strength by drawing on the example he provides. When he escapes from prison, they talk about him while he is away, and when he is captured and brought back they enjoying hearing about his exploits. After the egg-eating contest, Luke lies prone on a sheet of plywood, his arms stretched out to either side. The symbolic posture suggests crucifixion, and there is clearly a sense in Luke's character of the savior who suffers for those who believe in him.

After his second escape attempt, Luke is returned to the camp severely beaten. His entire demeanor has changed. He shouts at the other inmates when they brag about him: "Oh come on. Stop beatin' it. Get out there yourself. Stop feedin' off me. Get out of here. I can't breathe. Give me some air." When he's forced repeatedly by the prison guards to dig a ditch and then fill it in, he finally breaks down and tearfully begs the guards not to beat him. In anger, the inmates turn against him, refuse to help him when he collapses to the floor, and tear up souvenirs of him they have saved.

The prison guard who wears opaque sun glasses—"the man with no eyes"—is the source of the sheriff in O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)—who tracks the three convicts. The two characters are fairly similar—associated with the devil, or at least with fate, with an impersonal and indifferent Authority that exacts punishment when a transgression occurs.

A Time to Kill

In A Time to Kill a contemporary (1996) trial provokes events (cross burnings, physical attacks, arson, riots, a kidnapping) that seem temporally out of place. It is not that such events could not have happened in 1996 or that they even could not happen today. It is rather that all of the events taken together seem an unlikely pastiche constructed from the past seventy years—a collection of the worst possible examples of racial hatred. I liked this film for the acting and the narrative. However, the historical details concern me. I am not sure the film is historically as accurate as it could be. I worry that extreme manifestations of racial terrorism and hysteria have been appropriated by the film to enhance its sensationalist and entertainment value. I may be wrong about this—further research into Klan activities in Mississippi during the 1990s will support or refute my point.

All historical films are inaccurate to some extent—some more than others. Often the inaccuracy may not matter. The point of the film may be simply to entertain, to divert the audience. But when a film has as its intent to deliver a message about the state of American race relations, the stakes are higher, and the need for accuracy more pressing.

A Time to Kill means to examine an ethical paradox or allegory. It concerns a black man named Carl Lee Hailey whose 10-year-old daughter is attacked, brutally beaten, and raped by young white hoodlums. The young men are quickly arrested by the local sheriff, who himself happens to be black. Convinced that the young men will be found innocent by a local jury, the girl's father sneaks into the court house and shoots the two men to death as they enter to stand for their indictment.

Everyone sympathizes with Carl Lee. There is little doubt that the two young men attacked his daughter. They're toothless rednecks who drive a pickup, swig beer, shout racial epithets, and behave in a menacing way to black citizens of the community. There is nothing redeeming about them. Other than the fact that they're shot down without benefit of a trial, there's nothing to find in their defense. And it's true as well (at least according to the film) that a white jury in this particular Mississippi county might find these hooligans innocent, or at least not issue a sentence appropriate to their crimes. On the other hand, Carl Lee has committed a vigilante murder. He's violated the law and denied these men justice.

The point of this arrangement of events in the film is to portray a crime and an accused man who might be found innocent and who might be found guilty, with no disputation of the facts, only of their significance and their interpretation. As one disbarred lawyer in the film remarks to Carl Lee's defense attorney, "If you win this case, justice will prevail, and if you lose, justice will also prevail. Now that is a strange case." It's ironic, of course, in a pointed way, that the man accused of vigilante justice is a black man, and that his victims are white—a reversal of the usual circumstances that led to numerous lynchings in the American South and elsewhere through the seven or so decades of the 20^th century.

A Time to Kill doesn't investigate this legal dilemma very thoroughly. Any film about theoretical interpretations of the law faces a challenge. How do you make such a film entertaining? Here, however, the film clearly sides with the accused and with his lawyer, Jake Tyler Brigance (Matthew McConaughey), especially with the various problems encountered by Jake and his colleagues and family as the local chapter of the Klan begins to flex its muscle.

About the Klan: this film gives it too much credit. One of the murdered men has a brother with Klan associations, and he meets with the leader of a Klan chapter elsewhere in the state. He is encouraged to recruit members to join a local chapter of the Klan (one of them a police officer) to take action on behalf of the white victims and against those defending Carl Lee. They effectively wage a campaign of terror—they issue numerous threats, beat up the husband of Jake's secretary (he dies), kidnap a law student who is assisting him (Sandra Bullock), burn down Jake's house, attempt to shoot him as he leaves the courthouse (instead seriously wounding a police officer), and in general wage a war of terror.

The Klan's presence in the film makes clear that despite all the superficial signs of a changed Mississippi, beneath the surface there is still racism. Yet the film does a good job of making clear that white racism is still an issue even without the Klan. The mostly white jury seems headed towards a guilty verdict against Carl Lee—white juries do tend to convict black defendants more often than white defendants. The film shows several scenes in which the jury deliberates Carl Lee's guilt or innocence—it's clear that his fate is in danger. Jake's final presentation to the jury hinges on his asking the jurors to imagine the victim of the crime for which Carl Lee took revenge as a white girl rather than a black girl. "How would you feel," he in as much says, if this girl were white? He plays on the jurors' racism to make them see the case from Carl Lee's perspective.

The Klan is an unnecessary additional means of making these points clear. In 1996, the Klan might have appeared to demonstrate at such a trial, and its members might have made various folks uncomfortable, but they probably could not have waged the kind of terror campaign the film portrays. A fundamental paucity of Klan members and of intelligence, and a lack of community support, would probably not have allowed the Klan to do in reality what it does in the film. If the film had been set in 1925 or even 1965, we would have a different situation perhaps. But not in 1996.

A more successful film that demonstrates how racially charged incidents can provoke a community to erupt into riot and discord is Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). I'd be surprised if Lee's film were not in the back of director Joel Schumacher's mind as he worked on A Time to Kill. Schumacher seeks to show how the killing of the white murderers provokes a situation that makes clear the hidden racial divisions in the town. One scene in particular, shot from overhead, shows a face-off between members of the Klan and their supporters and members of the black community and their supporters. There are similar scenes in Do the Right Thing. Such scenes seek to historicize the event the film portrays—to make it an emblem of the racial struggles and themes that characterize so much of American history. Thus it is no surprise that Roger Ebert, in his Chicago Sun-Times review of the film, calls it "a skillfully constructed morality play" (July 26, 1996).

Time to Kill illuminates racial struggle through the perspective of white participants who are sympathetic to the cause of civil rights, but who have never been called to put their reputations and lives on the line for that cause. When they do that, they discover both the risks involved in the position they have taken, and the ambiguities and uncertainties in their own attitudes. Ebert rightly points out that the film doesn't do much with presenting the view of the black characters. On the other hand, one film can't do everything.

Perhaps the main defect in this generally well made and entertaining film is that although it seeks to portray a legally and perhaps morally ambiguous situation (a vigilante killing) as a way of uncovering the fundamentals of American race relations, it is in itself not ambiguous. It's easy to determine what the film's point of view is. There's no doubt about the sympathy it expresses for Carl Lee and his feelings as the father of a brutally beaten and raped girl. The film doesn't take the kinds of risks this topic might have led it to.

Oddly, and ironically (given American history), the film does seem to suggest that a finding of innocent for a man who without hesitation admits to killing two other men to avenge their crimes against his daughter is just. It sides with a vigilante murder, a position that raises all sorts of moral and legal issues that the film seems aware of but that it largely evades. Clearly this is a post 1960s, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate film.

Matthew McConaughey as the defense attorney in this film does a fine job. His accent is authentic. The film was made in Corinth, Mississippi, and the buildings and scenes in the countryside lend authentic local color and detail that give this film a clear and convincing sense of place. Patrick McGoohan as the ominously named presiding judge Omar Noose is cranky and full of character but somewhat out of place. So too is Donald Sutherland as Jake's alcoholic disbarred mentor, Lucien Wilbanks. Samuel L. Jackson is effective as Carl Lee Hailey—no surprise there.

Gator

Everything potentially interesting and entertaining about the film White Lightning (1973) is missing in the sequel Gator (1976). Burt Reynolds as Gator McKlusky has been blow-dried, face-lifted, uplifted, and sanitized. What was dark and brooding about him in the first film is here smoothed away. Gator in this film is a good old boy with a starched shirt and neatly combed hair. He's not that much of a good-old-boy—he's suave and urbane, in a lizardly sort of way. He drives a succession of fancy cars. He has somehow acquired a daughter—she's nine years old. He flirts with young girls in the town square. And his dad, who once lived in an old farm house in the country, now lives in an old house in the middle of the swamp. While car chases were the byword of the first film, fast boats are the trademark here. Gator is a package.

The plot of White Lightning seems to have been repackaged here: Gator is just out of jail, where he spent a second sentence for moonshine. An agent from New York, Irving Greenfield (Jack Weston), convinces the local police to pressure Gator into helping them bring down Bama McCall (Jerry Reed), the crime boss of the fictional Georgia Dunston County. He cooperates, but the Gator introduced in the first film is long gone. Gator in this film is a moral man in the conventional way. He goes undercover to work for Bama, not aware that his former friend is deep into the underworld. He soon becomes disillusioned with Bama's criminal ways. He is offended by the young girls employed by Bama as prostitutes. He's offended by how Bama treats black people. (He makes clear that he is "color blind and that "black is beautiful"). These traits are carried over from the earlier film, where they made sense, but here, in a context that is more cartoon-like than real, they seem like meaningless sops meant to assure the audience that Gator is a "good man." All the interesting ambiguities (such as they were) of his former character are now sharp and clear. The sequel offers the same criminal milieu as its predecessor, but in a context more influenced by the crime of the big city—protection money, prostitution, drugs, murder. This is intended as an indication of how the modern world has come to the urban South.

Part of the humor in Gator is based on the clash between Greenfield's Jewish New York background and the conservative protestant Southerners of Georgia. The Georgia governor in the film inasmuch asks why the government is sending a New York Jew to assist him in uncovering corruption in a backwoods Georgia county. He doesn't believe such a person could be effective. Greenfield comes across as determined and committed, but also as ignorant of the area he is investigating. Although the film makes no further overt references to his religion, he does mug and clown around in a way that can be associated with Jewish stereotypes. The film exploits the idea that he is a fish out of water. And although Greenfield is supposed to be an experienced officer of the law, he's none-too-subtle in his behavior—he calls attention to himself in various ways—hanging out at the swimming pool of a hotel where he is not registered, getting drunk at a town bar, and in general acting out of place. His main role is one of comic relief. It's Gator who has the abilities, if anyone does, to deal with the corrupt Bama and his minions. The film does not use the contrast between Greenfield and Gator (or other Southerners) as a way of exploring the underpinnings of Southern culture. It does not fully explore the friendship (of sorts) that develops between Greenfield and Gator, but that friendship is clearly implied, and it's another sign of Gator's openness, his lack of prejudice.

Gator takes place in Georgia. An early scene supposedly takes place in the Governor's Office of the state capitol building in Atlanta. Savannah is apparently the setting for another scene. Geographically, everything is out of place, but no matter. This film sometimes seems to be a comedy and sometimes a tragedy and sometimes a tragicomedy and in all three instances it fails to meet the demands of the genre.

As a Southern hero, Gator in this film moves Burt Reynolds forwards towards the character he'll portray in Smoky and the Bandit. There's not much difference between Gator and the Bandit. Interestingly, the second unit director and stunt coordinator on both Gator films is Hal Needham, who went on to be the director of the Smoky films. Although Jerry Reed's Bama character is apparently killed at the end of this film, he is restored to another name and life in the Smoky films as the Bandit's friend and compatriot.

There are a number of instances in Gator (as in White Lightning) where the characters seem to be waiting around, trying to figure out what to do next. This particularly seems the case in a scene where Bama has laced Gator's drink with a drug intended to knock him out. The scene seems poorly improvised and tedious. Needham's abilities as a director to avoid such scenes, his focus on action and car chases, suited him for directing the film that would be the major hit of Reynolds's career and that would catapult the star, for a time at least, to the level of a Southern cultural icon.

In general, as a film Gator is a mess. It lacks basic coherence. Reynolds directed. Jerry Reed overacts, Reynolds underacts, and Jack Weston lampoons. Lauren Hutton as ambitious Yankee reporter Aggie Maybanks is in the film, apparently, only to provide a romantic interest for Gator. The film does not develop their attraction to each other in a gradual way. It's simply there, chemically speaking, from the first time they see one another. As Gator, Greenfield, Hutton, and Emmeline Cavanaugh (played by Alice Ghostley--her role has no rational explanation—she's present simply to provide another layer of comic relief) hide out from Bama in a beach house, Aggie and Gator sneak off to the beach for a romantic tryst totally at odds with the rest of the film. In sharp contrast to the largely comic tone of the film, Greenfield and Ghostley's character are soon after brutally murdered by Bama and his henchman.

Worst of all, Gator as a manly, physical, rebellious hero comes across in this film as a slightly dyspeptic golfer in an acrylic shirt. He is Burt Reynold's self-parody.

White Lightning

White Lightning (1973) melds the politics of moonshine with the counter culture of the 1960s and 70s. Perhaps working in the wake of Thunder Road (1958), this film defines its moral stance through its main character's conflict with a corrupt local law enforcement official and the Federal government. Although characters in the film take the typical complain about the college students and "hippies," in their opposition to government policies and corruption, in their marginalization, they and the "hippies" occupy a similar social niche and hold similar opinions and values, at least in some instances.

The film makes its province clear in the opening scene as we watch two men rowing a boat across a lake. They are towing another boat in which two handcuffed young men sit, handcuffed to cinder blocks. Soon the two men—a law enforcement officer and (as we later learn) the local county sheriff, J. C. Connors—use a shotgun to blast a hole in the boat, which sinks, carrying the two hapless young men with it. One of the young men is the brother of the film's central character—Gator McKluskey. (Sheriff Connors is perhaps named in reference to Sheriff Bull Connor, the Montgomery, Alabama, sheriff who played a forceful role in trying to suppress demonstrations in support of integration during the 1950s and 1960s).

Moonshine is illegal because its makers do not pay taxes to the federal government. Its making is an assertive act of individualism, of resistance to civil authority. When Gator tells his parents he intends to oppose the sheriff, they beg him not to because they fear the powerful sheriff will have him killed. But they are much more upset to learn that their son has agreed to cooperate with the Feds in return for an early release from prison. They regard this as a betrayal. It's cooperation with the Enemy.

Moonshine is everywhere in the community this film portrays. It is a fundamental community value: the right to manufacture and sell a product free of regulation or taxation by outside authorities, be they local, state, or national. What defines a character as good or bad is not whether he makes moonshine but how he treats others. By this standard the sheriff is corrupt and evil. By this same standard the moonshiners (most of them) are virtuous in how they stand up for community values by resisting federal interference and delivering moonshine to people who use it make a living for their families or even to raise money for the local church. Therefore moonshine symbolizes this film's Southern community. In fact, the film's portrayal of a community that regards moonshining as a venerated tradition is not accurate. Although 19^th century folks may have tolerated moonshine and believed that no one should prevent others from making it, by the 1960s and 1970s, the public associated moonshine with marginal characters, with crime, and with news stories about how it poisoned those who consumed it. Communities such as the one in this film did not exist. Of course, corrupt law enforcement officials did exist. Moonshine in White Lightning provides a metaphor signifying the values of the rural Southern community and its conflict with the federal government and the modern world at large. Moonshine in that sense is tradition, while efforts to stop its manufacture, to tax it, or to exploit it are attacks on tradition by the North and by immoral people such as the sheriff.

We therefore encounter in this film moonshiners who are portrayed as family-loving hardworking men—men who try to stay out of trouble (relatively speaking) and who worry about falling out of grace with the sheriff. The mechanic Dude Watson (Matt Clark) is a good example. He at first resist's Gator's requests for help because he is afraid of the sheriff. Ultimately he relents and becomes Gator's ally—because he recognizes the corruption of the sheriff and the damage he has done. Not surprisingly, he pays for this transgression with his life.

We find in Gator the same posture of resistance to authority and corruption that we will later encounter in Smokey and the Bandit. But here that political and moral stance is more carefully and forcefully defined. While the sheriff complains that federal interference will bring integration, Gator positions himself in a sympathetic manner next to black children, college students, and unwed mothers. Although he never states his moral or political position, by his actions and by the people he associates with he makes his position clear. This position is made clear towards the end of the film when Gator learns that his brother and a friend were murdered by the sheriff because they were "demonstrating" in his county, resisting his authority.

Gator offers a more hard-bitten, hardboiled version of the Bandit in Smokey and the Bandit. We know much more of Gator's
background than of the Bandit's. Gator comes of a lower-class poor white dirt farmer family. His parents live in a run-down unpainted house, and they've lived hard lives. Late in the film we learn that the only member of the family to have gone to college is Gator's brother. When he first appears in the film he is in the fourth year of a prison term for moonshining. He is doing his time without apparent complaint, and the film seems to suggest that for lower-class whites like Gator in this rural, lower-economic class world, people always on the social margins and congenitally predisposed towards conflict with people in authority, prison time is not only unsurprising but even expected. When Gator learns that his younger brother has been killed, he soon guesses who is responsible and begins trying to escape prison in order to take revenge. Gator doesn't hesitate to break the law when he is so moved, but according to his own lights he is a moral man, intent on seeing that the sheriff responsible for his brother's murder is punished. He is in this sense related to a number of populist movie heroes in the 1970s who stood up for what was perceived as "right" even if that meant opposition to the Law: for example, Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry (the first film appeared in 1971), Billy Jack (the first film appeared in 1971), Charles Bronson characters (especially Death Wish, 1974), and later on in the 1990s characters portrayed by Steven Seagal.

Gator is more than a moralist. The film's title, among a number of meanings (including its reference to the 1959 George Jones song), does refer to Gator's temper, his libido, and his strength. In a strange way, it refers as well to his race, for this film is basically about lower-class whites suppressed by difficult circumstances and a ruthless boss man. Gator is clearly aware of his social and economic circumstances and he seems increasingly willing to stand up to the sheriff as a representative of his marginalized class: he makes the decision to stand up to the sheriff at a rural home for unwed mothers that takes him in and nurses his wounds after he is viciously beaten by a moonshiner who works with the sheriff. In this scene (one of the most outlandish in the film) he comments that the only member of his family who ever made anything of himself is his brother. There is some suggestion that Gator's determination to ensure that the sheriff pays for his crime is reckless and even self-destructive. As a moonshine runner, he knows how to drive a car in the most fearsome of ways. His final showdown with the sheriff takes place in an automobile chase. It is as if Gator feels that if losing his life is the ticket to revenge on the sheriff, then he's willing to pay that price. It's also an indication that he feels he has no other options in his life. In this regard he reminds me of the main character in Harry Crews' Feast of Snakes, a novel whose main character Joe Lon Mackey has much in common with Gator, and who takes the final act of immolation in the novel as a way of expressing the emptiness of his life. Gator, of course, does not have to take that final step. He survives to appear in a sequel. One can also see that the community of this film, with its lower-class white moonshine runners, has much in common with the characters of the early novels of Erskine Caldwell.

Although the rural Southern world of this film is nuanced and detailed, it is largely imagined and contrived and full of subtle and obvious stereotypes, such as the pigs that run back and forth in the unkempt yard of the main moonshiner in the town. Lou, the girl who is Roy Boone's lover, is a veritable Daisy Mae, compulsively promiscuous, throwing herself at Gator. What is most important, however, is the way in which the film defines the Southern community as a community on the margins, afflicted with poverty and political oppression, riven with corruption, threatened with extinction by the outside world. One way the film represent's this threat is the lake where Gator's brother is killed, and where some of the final action in the film occurs. It is a hydroelectric impoundment, and the film shows the trees and saplings still growing up through the water that, we can assume, is gradually rising to cover up land and homes where people used to live.

There is a fine short scene in an African American bar, where Gator talks to the black proprietor who used to know his father. There are numerous other scenes apparently filmed in authentic locations—houses, and neighborhoods, and farms. But the authentic setting does not make up for the stereotypes, the inaccuracies, the invented South of hokum and hillbillies.

White Lightning is not a film for the ages in any sense. Ned Beatty does a fine job in his role as Sheriff Connor, though the script gives him little more to do than look grim and occasionally become angry. As Gator Burt Reynolds is adequate—even so, he defines the character type. The pacing of the film is often lugubrious. Yet it uses the politics and the iconography of a region to give expression to conflicting yet strangely similar cultural and political attitudes of the early 1970s.

Steel Magnolias

Steel Magnolias (1989) is one of a number of films that focus on the 20^th-century Southern community as a warm and sustaining force. I don't know when these films began to appear. Intruder in the Dust (1949) focuses on the Southern community, but there community is a force of racism and oppression. In Steel Magnolias community is a positive force. Although the film is contemporary to the time of its making, it is infused with a nostalgia more geographical than temporal. By this I mean a tendency of typical viewers (demographically, they live mainly in urban and suburban areas) to believe that in "other" parts of the nation—that is, in small towns located away from large cities—there is a different kind of life—a simpler life with traditional values, where individualism as opposed to the cult of the corporate masses is not only accommodated but even encouraged. This is part of the myth of the small town that Americans yearn for, believing that it offers a better world than the one in which they live. This is the world Steel Magnolias portrays.

The title expresses the paradox that is the crux of the film—the primary women characters have all the characteristics of the traditional Southern magnolia—grace, courtesy, friendship—but at the same time they possess a steely resilience and a resolve to survive.

Steel Magnolias is a melodrama about the lives of women in a small Southern town. The Southern setting to an extent provides a rationale and context for the characters and their lives—they are all individuals of one sort or another, they live in a traditional world where marriage and family are expectations (they have met these expectations in different ways), and they cope as best they can through support of one another. One could imagine a film that gives more emphasis to the dominance of men—a film in which women have to strategize and navigate their ways through the efforts of their husbands and lovers to control and suppress them. Such is the terrain of Tennessee Williams. In this film, however, men for the most part are ineffectual and marginal. The women outsmart them (though there is only rare need for this) or mostly tolerate and ignore them. There is no direct conflict. Even so, the film at least implies the male-dominated world in which these women live.

The problems the women in this film encounter have little to do with the region in which they live. Their problems are ones that all women (all people, for that matter) confront—marriage, illness, difficulties in work or domestic relations. This becomes especially so in the film's second half, where a character's worsening health dominates the attention of the others. Here, the community of women becomes a source of support in a difficult time, but one could imagine how this might be so in many other geographical settings as well.

The film falls neatly into halves. The first half introduces the characters and their lives and relationships. M'Lynn Eatenten (Sallie Fields) is the mother of Shelby (Julia Roberts)—when they first appear they're in the final stages of planning for Shelby's wedding. Truvy Jones (Dollie Parton) is a hairdresser married to an unhappy man having difficulties finding work (Sam Shepard). Clairee Belcher (Olympia Dukakis) is a widow. She is good friends with Ouiser Boudreaux (Shirley MacLaine), a bitter and hilarious iconoclastic woman who has gone through two unhappy marriages. Annelle Desoto (Daryl Hannah) is a younger woman recently separated from her husband (he's disappeared after involvement in some kind of drug scandal). She's not at first a member of the group, but when Truvy hires her to work in her beauty salon, she soon becomes one. The group ranges in age from very young to sixty or so—lower to middle class white women. (The film shows the progressive racial attitudes of the women by including a few black characters in party and community scenes. However, it also shows a few black domestic workers—these are the only real acknowledgements that there is a racial dimension to the American South. As with many other films about the South, Steel Magnolias finesses the South as a landscape for racial conflict by ignoring it). (The names of these characters are one of the only nods the film makes to its Louisiana setting).

The second half of the film focuses on Shelby's medical problems—her severe diabetes makes pregnancy for her a dangerous risk. After she has a child, her kidneys fail, and she receives a transplanted kidney donated by her mother. Her body rejects the kidney, and she dies. The group gathers around and supports M'Lynn in her grief.

Much of the action involving the central group takes place in Truvy's beauty salon or in M'Lynn's home. Truvy's salon is reminiscent of the beauty parlor in Welty's "The Petrified Man." That story in numerous brilliant ways explores the beauty parlor as a symbol and expression of sexual tensions. Those tensions are barely hinted at in Steel Magnolias. One thinks also of the novels of Lee Smith, which sometimes portray an similar group of characters. Smith's novels are more subtle and do not rely as much on stereotypes.

Each woman in the film has her own set of complicated issues, and the first half of the film is devoted to exploring them.

The basic message of the film is that "Life goes on" and that you need friends around to support you. One would expect from the film's first half that some sort of plot complication would grow out of Annelle's recent unhappy marriage, or Truvy's struggling marriage to her husband—some sort of difficulty that would throw this community of women into conflict with their men or their male-dominated community. But this film does not seek controversy. Instead the dramatic center of the film is Shelby's illness.

Most of the acting in the film is undistinguished. Dollie Parton plays the same stereotypical character she plays on stage and in other films—the down-to-earth country persona of a folksy women who hides her own problems and who is always spouting earthy, corny witticisms. Example: "Sammy's so confused he don't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his butt." Dukakis is poor in her role. She hardly seems to know where she is, or what a Southern accent is. Has she ever been to the South? Sallie Fields is effective, and when her daughter dies and she erupts in a fit of anger and grief that is one of the best performances in her career. The most interesting character in the film is Ouiser. As played by Shirley MacLaine, Ouiser is full of venom, bitterness, and caustic humor. She insults everyone, friends and strangers, but all the friends know what to expect from her, so they're not bruised. We are given to know that bad marriages and ungrateful children have made her bitter. However, rather than exploiting her character more fully, the film shows how after she becomes romantically involved with an old flame she gradually softens. At the end of the film she even admits to praying. Thus while the film offers this edgy, interesting character, it also sets about to demonstrating that, after all, she's just like the other women in the film. The other characters frequently laugh at her behind her back or play jokes on her—she's disarmed, rendered powerless as a result.

In short, none of these characters comes across as especially authentic. They're someone's ideas of what people in a small Southern town might be, but they seem designed more for dramatic or comedic effect. The film's view of the Southern community is idyllic and utopian and not convincing. There are certainly individuals like Ouiser around in the South, and there are individuals around like the others, but how frequently they interact with one another, how genuinely tolerant of eccentricity and deviance from normal standards of morality and behavior the residents of a small Southern town would be, I don't know. This film is more interested in portraying its own view of "what ought to be" than in portraying representations of reality.

Sentimentality, stereotypes, and shallow writing are weaknesses of this film. With the exception of Shelby, by the end of the film all the characters' difficulties have been resolved—Truvy's husband finds work on an oil rig and their marriage improves; Annelle gets pregnant and finds God and another husband; Ouiser finds love; M'Lynn finds in her grandson and her friends hope and a way of getting past her daughter's death. Even though Shelby is dead, she did die the mother of a young child, and she says while arguing with her mother about her pregnancy that "I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special." So even she gets what she wants.

However, the scenes involving the aftermath of Shelby's death—the funeral and the grieving—are moving and accurate.

The humor in the film mostly derives from Ouiser and her bitter pronouncements and insults, and the antics of the men on the margins. The humor mostly operates on the level of a "You might be a redneck if . . ." routine by Jeff Foxworthy.

This film for various reasons—Shirley MacLaine is one of them—reminded me of the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. There the character Aurora Greenway had much in common with Ouiser. There also, the melodrama of the film ends up focused on the illness and death of one of the main characters, as if the writers couldn't find another way to wrap things up. There also the message of endurance and mutual support in tough times is central.

The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece, by Jan Stuart

Jan Stuart narrates the making of Robert Altman's 1975 film in The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). The book is not a scholarly work. Rather it is written from the perspective of an admirer of the film. Stuart is a film reviewer for Newsday, so he understands films and the film industry. His writing style is casual, chatty, and informal, sometimes hyperbolic. Stuart makes no bones about his enthusiasm for Nashville or for Altman. His book is most useful in what it reveals about Altman's filmmaking methods. It is less useful in explaining the film, but Stuart's frequent use of interviews with various actors, writers, crew members, and Altman himself, along with his discussions of the screenplay and of the changes Altman made to it, provide glimpses into what Altman was seeking to convey. The introduction makes clear Stuart's conviction that Altman sought to make this film not about a large Southern city but instead about contemporary America: Watergate, Vietnam, etc.

Especially interesting is the discussion of how Joan Tewkesbury came to write the script, which was a major shaping force for the film. Her vision of a movie that interweaves the lives and characters of 24 individuals is important. Altman significantly altered her script as he shot the film (he told the actors to "ignore" the script), but he preserved the multi-narrative nature of the script's narrative along with many of its themes and patterns. Interlayered, intertwined multiple narratives focused on characters became a paradigm for many of Altman's films following Nashville.

One of the most interesting changes Altman made to the script: in Tewksbury's original script the assassination victim was Hal Phillip Walker. Altman decided to make Barbara Jean the victim, against Tewksbury's wishes. He wanted the film to have a contemporary political dimension in addition to others, but he also wanted to intermix politics, the music industry, and the burgeoning celebrity culture, where ultimately the death of an entertainer can seem as significant as that of a president or political candidate.

Altman shot so many hours of film that he seriously considered making two works: Nashville Red and Nashville Blue, which he thought could tell the same story from the perspectives of different characters. Funding difficulties, the editor's lack of enthusiasm, and commercial issues nixed this idea. The single film really took shape as Altman cut and edited the film down to its current form. Shortly after the film's release there was talk of making a Nashville miniseries that would use scenes and songs cut from the film.

Despite advance critical notices that hailed this film a masterpiece, it did not fare well at the box offices. By the time of this book's publication in 2000 Nashville had earned only some nine million dollars at the box office, a paltry figure in 1977 and now. I suspect revenues from tape and DVD sales would raise the figure.

In the middle 1980s Altman considered making a sequel to Nashville using the original actors and characters (excepting Barbara Jean, of course). This sequel came close to being filmed, but ultimately the project was postponed and then cancelled.

Stuart's book offers interesting accounts of the reactions of the city of Nashville and of the country music industry to the film. There was, not surprisingly, a lack of enthusiasm, and in some cases outright disdain Country music stars found the film's music amateurish and of course did not appreciate the satiric, edgy portrayal of their industry.

Stuart's book is full of interesting anecdotes about the actors who appeared (and did not appear) in the film. Robert Duvall was initially slated to play Hamilton Haven but dropped out because of the low pay Altman was able to offer. There were rivalries among various actors, personal problems and insecurities, that influenced how they participated. Altman himself treated his actors in a variety of ways—as a father, as a tyrant, as a taskmaster. He never fully revealed his thinking to the actors, often goaded them to get better performances, told them to ignore the script, criticized them when they did not give the performance he wanted or when they did not show up to view the dailies. They stood in awe of him—and some of them didn't like him. Altman himself said that he stood in awe of the actors. How he interacted with them in his film is one of the most interesting aspects of the book.

Any admirer of Nashville will enjoy this book—for what it reveals about Altman as a filmmaker, for what it reveals about how the film was conceived and made, and for the anecdotes and gossip and information about the various people involved.

Steamboat Round the Bend

Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) is basically a vehicle for the humorist and comedian Will Rogers to make witty, sometimes self-deprecating observations. Rogers in 1935 was such a low-key humorist as compared to contemporary comedians, who mostly eschew subtlety, that one might wonder what the ruckus was. Rogers was much respected and admired in his day, and when he died in the 1935 plane crash somewhere in Alaska with Wiley Post, the nation mourned--I am told that my great grandmother wept in sorrow. In the film, Rogers basically plays himself—he's not dynamic, he doesn't over act or under act, he just pronounces homespun witticisms, mumbles, bumbles and dodders, is generally likeable, and provides a genial presence that keeps the film going.

Set on the Mississippi River in the 1890s, on the borders of Louisiana and Mississippi, Steamboat Round the Bend tells the story of how Dr. John Pearley (he sells an elixir guaranteed to cure any pain or affliction), also known as Steamboat Bill, owner of the most decrepit steamboat on the river, takes part in a riverboat race in order to get to Baton Rouge in time to save his nephew Duke, condemned to death for a murder committed in self-defense. The only witness to the murder, a wild-eyed evangelist known as "the New Moses" (he has an uncanny resemblance to John Brown and to Orson Welles) has disappeared, and Steamboat Will looks for him as he makes his way down the river.

This film is mildly amusing and is interesting as a curious artifact of its times. It is shot as if it takes place on a stage. There are long silences as characters apparently struggle to decide (or remember) what to say, and the plot as a whole seems unimaginative and contrived.

The Will Rogers character Dr. Pearley is a snake-oil salesman—this is one source of humor. The Prophet is another such salesman—his rantings are one of the only forms of entertainment for people along the river. We briefly see his competitor, the "New Elijah." Although the film is set in the riverboat environment of the 19^th-century South, it offers no genuine glimpse into the wild frontier of that world that found its way into much humor of the 19^th century, including Mark Twain. The riverboat world of Steamboat Round the Bend is fully domesticated, though, admittedly, the wildest of the riverboat days occurred some fifty or so years before the 1890s.

Although this film takes place in the South, no one in it speaks with any kind of accent. The only real nod to the setting is the river, the steamboats, and an ongoing rivalry between the people who live in the swamp and those who live on riverboats—they don't like each other. Duke falls in love with a swamp girl, Fleety Belle, and this entanglement leads to the killing for which he is condemned. (Whether this rivalry has any historical basis, I don't know).

African Americans are also an aspect of the South in this film. A group of black prisoners sings at the wedding of Duke and Fleety Belle before he is slated to be hanged. Several mates on Bill's riverboat are black. But the most notable black actor in the film is Stepin Fetchit, who plays a clown-like riverboat mate whose clumsy, loud, imbecilic antics are intended as comic relief from a narrative that itself is supposed to be comic. Stepin Fetchit throws himself fully into this role--he understands the stereotype he is playing, knows what it will take to reap laughter from the white audiences of the film, and as sad and offensive (from our modern standpoint) as his character is, you can understand why he was popular in his day. He's not just going through the motions—there is no subtlety in his acting, but there is a lot of energy.

The General

Buster Keaton starred in and co-directed The General, a silent 1927 film loosely based on the famous 1862 Civil War episode in which Northern spies stole a Southern train (named the General) and were pursued by Southern troops. (The episode is known as the Great Locomotive Chase). Keaton plays a train engineer named Johnnie Gray whose locomotive is stolen. Annabelle, the girl he loves, is accidentally aboard the train, checking her trunk, and when the northern spies take the train she goes with it. This 75-minute film is fun to watch, and it rarely flags. The General is not what I would call a slapstick film, but there is plenty of comedy, most of it visual comedy involving Keaton walking back and forth on top of the train, jumping from car to car, once even riding up and down on the side rods that drive the locomotive. Taken individually, most of the stunts are not that impressive. Taken all together, however, they constitute a seemingly endless and intricately varied series of jokes, stunts, tricks, pranks, and pratfalls—effortlessly, naturally executed. The film is highly entertaining.

The General is told from a southern point of view, but this is only because Keaton's character is a Southerner. Other than the mere fact of whose side he is on, there is little that makes this film southern or northern. The issues and causes of the war have nothing to do with this film, nor is there any romanticism attached to the conflict between north and south. When the war begins, Keaton tries to enlist in the Southern army but is refused by the enlistment office because, they say, he can do better service as a train engineer. His girlfriend mistakenly believes he refused to enlist, so she stops talking to him. When his locomotive is stolen by Northern troops, he has a chance to do service to the southern cause and win back the heart of his girl at the same time. That's about all there is to this film--sight gags, action, constant motion (the trains are in pursuit of or attempting to escape each other throughout the film), ingenious comic stunts, valiant and quixotically incompetent efforts by Keaton's character to thwart the spies, and a dramatic battle and train wreck at the end. The Northern troops are defeated, the Southern troops win, Keaton wins back his girl, and he is allowed to enlist.