Thursday, August 07, 2008

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.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

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.