The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

What we have in The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (dir. Julian Nitzberg, 2009) is exploitative cultural voyeurism. This documentary about a family of self-avowed hillbillies and outlaws in the mountains of West Virginia is a follow-up to a movie of about two decades ago called The Dancing Outlaw (1991) in which Jessco White talks about himself and his life. In the tradition of his father he dances to mountain music. His personality alternates from that of a jokester to an Elvis imitator to a vicious and violent and dangerous person. He’s a self-conceived outlaw and rebel. This new film takes up where the other left off and moves forward about 20 years.

While The Dancing Outlaw focused primarily on Jessco and his immediate family, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia focuses on the extended family, starting with the two grandparents and moving on down the lineage of three White generations of alcohol and drug abuse, violence, crime, and murder. In one scene Jessco walks through the town graveyard pointing out the tombstones of various family members including his sisters, both of whom died violently, one murdered by a former boyfriend, the other dead in an automobile accident. His father D. Ray was shot to death in a family squabble. The family tree is pockmarked with violent deaths. The film moves systematically through the family tree as sisters and brothers, nieces and nephews, sons and daughters tell about their lives, their sins and crimes, and personal problems. For the most part the film allows the various members of the White family to tell their own stories and they talk without apparent self-consciousness about what kinds of drugs they like, the trouble they’ve been in, the prison sentences they've served, their attitudes towards the law, towards each other, towards the people they dislike, towards the people they want to kill.

What's the point? The film never pauses to consider why the White family is like it is. We hear speculation from a couple of lawyers in town that the White family has been isolated in the hills of West Virginia for generations, that their isolation and ignorance have made them who they are. But that's the only kind of explanation we hear. The film doesn’t ask us to think about why. It just offers the spectacle of the Whites droning on about their sins, their misery, their addictions, their self-abuse, their despair and their indifference to their condition. This film is a form of voyeurism. It's cultural voyeurism. From a superior standpoint the audience of this film is invited to gape at the White family and to laugh.

Producers Johnny Knoxville and Johnny Tremaine are part of the team responsible for the Jackass television series, and the Jackass films. They play the Whites for laughs. They rejoice in the scenes they portray—for example, of a young mother who has just given birth snorting pills with another family member in her hospital room. Only occasionally, through the words of the White family members themselves, do we feel empathy, pity, sorrow for them—the woman who enters rehab when she loses her infant child to the county protection agency, the young man sentenced to 25 years in jail, the hopelessness and helplessness and indifference they all seem to feel. The woman in rehab, and the brother of Jessco who moves to Wisconsin to try to escape the White legacy, are among the few in the film who even try to break away from the family and its self-propelled momentum towards doom and defeat.

Throughout the film when the Whites talk and act out they know they are being filmed. The film itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy—intended to show the misbehaving antics of the White family, it encourages the Whites to make good on the image.

Hurry Sundown

Released in 1967 during the later years of the Civil Rights movement, Hurry Sundown (Dir. Otto Preminger) is set in 1946, and its two main characters have just returned from service in the war. The film serves as a prequel to the movement, exploring through characters and their conflicts the ideas and themes that will bring the movement to national prominence in the middle 1950s. The audience views the film through the lens of the ongoing movement.

Hurry Sundown is a convoluted melodrama that exploits a Southern setting, Southern characters, family and racial relationships, stereotypes, and accents to flesh out and advance its narrative. At times it has force, as when Rad McDowell (John Philip Law) returns from Europe to reunite with his family, or when an old black woman who served as mammy for the rich landowner’s wife explains to her son that she grieves for the failure of her life. More often the film drags along, inert and lifeless. Only the performances of certain characters—Fay Dunaway, Law, Fonda (occasionally), Burgess Meredith (ridiculous as a stereotyped and racist Southern judge) give it some life. Michael Caine plays the corrupt Henry Warren, married to a wealthy landowner, ambitious to consolidate that land and make big money by selling it all to a land conglomerate for development. He’s devious, corrupt, and without scruples. His face is usually emotionless throughout the film. He seems happy only when he plays his saxophone (he’s convinced he could have had his own band, and that success and fame are awaiting him in Hollywood).

This film is so cluttered and busy that its 2 hour and 44-minute length is hardly enough yet also too much.

The score is by Hugo Montenegro, a successful film composer of the day. His most famous scores are for the Man without a Name films, but his work here is conventional, out of place, and hardly recognizable until a final climactic scene late in the film.

Hurry Sundown is structured around a struggle for land. Two young men, Reeve Scott (Robert Hooks) and Rad McDowell (Law) return from the Second World War. Rad is a poor white farmer who lives on land next to Reeve, a poor black farmer who lives with his sickly mother Rose (Beah Richards). Friends while growing up, Rad and Reeve have grown apart. Reeve lives on land deeded to his grandfather in 1866. No one seems to know about the deed but Reeve and his mother. It becomes a crucial piece of evidence, especially when Henry argues that no deed of ownership from 1866 made out to a black man could possibly be credible. If Henry doesn’t succeed in securing these two plots of land for sale to the conglomerate, he will lose a potential fortune and possibly his job too. He lusts for power and wealth, neither of which he has ever had until he married the daughter of a rich landowner. The film therefore raises questions about land ownership—who has a better right to the land, families and individuals that have owned it for generations, or a land conglomerate (that happens to be from up North)? Hurry Sundown explores this issue mainly through Henry’s struggle to seize Rad and Reeve’s land. It’s not really a struggle of North vs. South but instead of wealth and power against powerlessness. Does the power of money—directly tied to the local system of law and justice—trump the ownership of individuals without power or money? Does the fact that one of the small landowners is black affect the struggle? In the end, Henry does use race in his attempt to seize Reeve’s land. The film is more interested in the racial structure of the community that in any broadly defined struggle of North vs. South.

Family relationships in Hurry Sundown are complicated. Henry is Rad’s cousin. Rad has struggled to eke out a living throughout his life, while Henry had the good fortune of marrying his wealthy wife Julia. Julia was nursed as a child by Rose and feels kinship to her (up to a point). Henry pressures her to use that relationship to convince Rose and her son to move off the land. Although he never concedes that they own it, he offers to pay them $5000 if they move. Julia is convinced that Rose loves her and her family. Rose is convinced that Julia’s love will protect her land from seizure. Henry offers Rad $7500 for his land and seems to suggest that he will profit in other ways from handing over the land. Rad distrusts Henry on a fundamental level. All these familial interconnections enhance the melodrama and also underlie the film’s contention that in shared family and community connections there is hope for the future.

Judge Potter (Burgess Meredith) is a stereotyped, old-time corrupt Southern judge who rules over the community with the iron fist of arbitrary judgments. He’s the most racist person in the film, though Henry is not far behind. The Judge’s family does not occupy the same social status as that of Julia. His daughter Sukie wants Julia to serve as her matron of honor. This will be a sign of social status. Henry pressures Julia to agree, so that he will have the judge on his side in any land disputes, and at first Julia won’t agree. She regards the Potter’s as beneath her, as from a lower social class. Her cousin Clem de Lavery (Frank Converse) has just moved to town to serve as associate pastor of what appears to be a Catholic (maybe Episcopalian) church. He is open-minded, progressive, friendly towards the black community, and immediately an object of suspicion to conservative members of the community. When he offers Judge Potter communion from a cup that a black woman has just sipped from, the Judge is outraged, spits in the cup, and tromps out of the church with his wife and daughter. For this insult, and for further insults to her cousin at a reception she gives in his honor, Julia orders the Judge and his family to leave her house.

Judge Potter is disliked by most of the towns[people to begin with. They see him as too uncultured, too openly racist, and his wife reminds him that the only reason he gets elected in one race after another for the judgeship is that the people in rural regions of the county always vote for him (implying that none of the city voters do).

Obviously, class is a major issue—let us say a major thread rather than theme. The film isn’t particularly interested in exploring class differences so much as in using them to explain tensions and conflicts among various characters. By having Rad and Reeve live on farms next to each other, and by having them become partners in an effort to keep their farms going in resistance to Henry’s pressures, the film seems to acknowledge the fact that class prejudices and racism are closely linked. Rad is at first resistant to a partnership with Reeve. His wife worries that the family will be ostracized in the community. But their common plight—the threat to their land posed by Henry and the conglomerate, and their childhood friendship—finally overcomes these concerns.

Race is another major issue, but I am not sure this film can be accurately described as a film about race. As with class, race is an element of the Southern context that the film uses to enhance tension and the essential conflicts. Viewers born after 1970 may be surprised by the completely segregated society that the film accurately portrays. In reality, society was probably even more segregated and separate in 1947 than this film suggests. We see separate bathrooms for the white and colored races. We learn that the local Sheriff, an inept bumbler played broadly by George Kennedy, has an ongoing sexual relationship with a black woman, that he enjoys the company of black people in general, but that he doesn’t hesitate to back up efforts of Henry and Judge Purcell, and of the “hunting club” (Ku Klux Klan—not named in the film but its members wear white hoods) to deny Reeve and Rad their rights to their land. It shows how in a difficult and life-threatening moment the black characters behave in a friendly, ingratiating way as they talk to the Sheriff in order to protect Reeve. (This is a deliberate strategy—they know they must play the stereotype to get what they need from the whites). Reeve’s friend Vivian (Diahann Carroll) even ingratiates her way into Judge Potter’s favor so that he will allow her to do research in the county court records. (Vivian has lived in New York for some time, seen other parts of the world, had a previous relationship with Reeve. She has come home, for some reason, and wants to move away again—she is an exception to the general portrayal of blacks in this film as honest, good-natured, and uneducated. In general, the black characters in the film all have similar traits and behave in similar ways. When black children learn a song in the local school (where Vivian teaches) it is a blues song about catfish,. When they gather to congratulate Reeve on having successfully opened up an irrigation canal for his and Rad’s farms, they sing and eat in celebration. For a film that seeks to portray racism and discrimination in a direct and open way, its portrayal of black characters is flat and paternalistic.

The racism that the film portrays is undeniable. The film seems aware of nuances in racial attitudes of the time—the difficult relationship between a white girl and the older black women who raised her (her mammy), the vulnerable position that Rad puts himself in by agreeing to work with Reeve and by backing up his claim to the land up in court. On the other hand, racism was far more complex and pernicious than even this film makes it out to be, to have been. Yet all the black characters in the film are portrayed with a uniform brushstroke of goodness. There is little variation. That is, a subtle paternalistic racism permeates the portrayal of the black characters whom the film clearly means to support.

Hurry Sundown tries to maintain audience interest with a strong dose (1967 style) of sexuality. Although Henry gives Julia numerous reasons to hate him, he always manages to overcome her qualms with sex. One night, after she has made him mad by showing concern for their son, he locks her out of the bedroom. The next day she returns the favor, but he climbs into the room through a window and practically rapes her—she resists at first and then responds. In another scene Henry plays his saxophone rather than respond to his wife’s sexual overtures. She sucks whiskey from a bottle in a suggestive way. Then she takes the saxophone from him as he reclines back on a sofa, ready (I assume) for oral sex. She pantomimes oral sex in a graphic and obvious way as she takes the saxophone, holds the grip in her hands, and tries to blow a note. In another scene Henry receives oral sex from Judge Purcell’s daughter (the same daughter who is getting married). Sex here is one of the hot passions that govern the South (e.g., Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Long Hot Summer, Baby Doll). Frankly, Julia’s scene with the saxophone is the best scene in the film. Something real is happening there.

In the aforementioned saxophone scene, Julia’s pantomime is one of the few instances of subtlety in the film, and even in that scene the film strains to make clear what it’s suggesting. Most of the time this film uses sledge hammers. Everything must be made clear, repeatedly. It’s not enough to show that Henry’s ambition to acquire the land of Rad and Reeve is a major character flaw. To make sure we understand that Henry is a bad man, we must see him abuse and lie to his wife, commit adultery in a convertible, mislead his cousin, conspire with the corrupt judge, lie in court. The worst sledge-hammer blows come when we learn that Henry’s mistreatment of his son left the child emotionally damaged—an offense he repeats later in the film when he locks the child in a storage room while he goes to check on some business. The child pulls shelves over on himself and is left unconscious. Then Henry lies to the law enforcement folks that careless use of dynamite by Reeve and Rad injured the child. No doubt about Henry—a mean old bad man. Michael Caine never once in this film seems comfortable in the role.

It amazes me that Horton Foote had a hand in the screenplay.

The Littlest Colonel

In The Littlest Colonel (1935; dir. David Butler) the border state of Kentucky is the Deep South. A white columned plantation house, an elderly colonel who refuses to accept defeat by the North, loyal black servants indistinguishable from slaves, courtly manners, Southern belles. The South is a setting for this tale of how a winning little girl brings reconciliation between an estranged father and daughter. The film also serves as a vehicle for the 1930s child star Shirley Temple. Her acting never varied much from one film to the next, except that over the decade she got older.

The North-South division is the crux of the event that tears father and daughter apart. The colonel wants her to marry a gentleman from the south. She plans to marry a northerner, aptly named Jack Sherman. Father and daughter are resolutely stubborn. She leaves with her fiancé and her father tells her never to enter the house again.

The strongest figure in the film is Lionel Barrymore, who plays old Colonel Lloyd. He struts and huffs and puffs and overacts and holds your attention. There are entertaining moments between the house servants and Temple, entertaining within the narrowly defined lives of the servants. Bill Robinson plays the head house servant, Walker. He knows and has opinions about everything going on in the house, but he usually holds his tongue. (This in is a stereotype—the knowing, avuncular house servant who doesn’t say what he thinks). He and Temple perform two dance numbers together, one on the inner stairs of the colonel’s house, another in a barn where he looks after horses. Robinson was a wonderful dancer, as the scene on the stairs makes clear. Hattie McDaniel appears in her stock role as personal servant, or Mammy, to Shirley Temple’s character. McDaniel played these parts well—she was human and believable despite the constraints of her roles.

The characters played by McDaniel and Robinson are important secondary roles, but none of the black characters in the film ever wanders outside the prescribed social boundaries. Nor would they in a film like this, that exists only to tell a story, to broadcast the talents of its child star, that isn’t interested in subverting or questioning or satirizing. The Littlest Colonel accepts the conventions of the Old South without question.

Other black characters in the film, in particular two children, and one house servant, provide comic relief. Children can be funny without much effort, of course. These two children—a little boy and an older girl--play roles secondary to Temple’s. They follow her around, obey her commands, and make comic statements and comic actions. The little boy can do little more than moan and groan and utter monosyllables. This film offers further confirmation of the fact that African Americans in the 1930s had virtually no choice of roles beyond those involving servitude and slavery and low comedy. I wouldn’t characterize the portrayal of black characters in this film as viciously racist, but instead as conventionally racist. Given the decade, that’s about what one could expect from an A-list film written, directed, and produced by whites for a mostly white audience.

The film shows whites and especially blacks as accepting of their positions in life, as masters and servants. It purveys the notion that within this range of acceptance blacks and whites lived comfortably together in a nurturing community, helping and supporting one another when circumstances called for it. It’s important to remember that the story takes place in the 1880s, long after the end of the Civil War, when the former slaves could have left the plantation for better opportunities. That they have remained with the colonel simply reflects the golden gaze of Thomas Nelson Page apologetics that underlies this film’s conception of historical reality.

I’m always a sucker for films that show reconciliation between parents and children. In this one there’s no question, from the earliest scene in which they argue, that reconciliation will come for the colonel and his daughter. What gives the film interest, beyond Barrymore’s wonderful overacting and Temple’s carefully managed talents and the merits of other actors is the question of when that moment will occur. It comes not a moment too soon. And then, except for a final scene in which all the characters, black and white, enjoy a barbecue together, a scene filmed in color (in contrast to the rest of this black and white film), the affair is over.

That Evening Sun

That Evening Sun (2009; dir. Scott Teems) foregrounds place. The setting is Tennessee. Intensely visual cinematography, a strong soundtrack of insect sounds and other ambient noises, mountains in the background, views of fields, houses, tenant shacks, pickup trucks, a nearly abandoned small town. These do not image a stereotypical American South but instead a particular one.

The South is not the subject or even the primary issue. Rather it is a context. The dramatic focus is an 80-year old farmer, Abner Meecham, who has been living in a retirement home for three years. It is a dreary, depressing place. We learn that after the death of Abner’s wife, his son Paul convinced him to move there. But Abner decides he cannot tolerate the home any longer and packs up to walk back to his farm. When he arrives, by walking and by taxi, he discovers someone else living there. He learns that as soon as he moved to the retirement home his son rented the house and farm to Lonzo Choat, a ne’er do well local citizen struggling to make his way. Although he lives only off the benefits from disability checks, he wants to make the farm work. The conflicts here revolve around class, age, and family. Lonzo is around 40 and holds Abner in contempt. Some years before Abner refused to rent a tenant shack to him. Abner hates Alonzo—he calls him white trash, accuses him of laziness, thievery, and worse. While Abner wants to return to his farm and live out the remainder of his life, Lonzo wants to make a home there. Both desires, the film gradually brings us to know, are not likely to be fulfilled. This is not a narrative in which two stubborn, resolute characters struggle and argue and finally come to an understanding. As the conflict between Abner and Lonzo deepens, each becomes more firmly set against the other. They are stubborn, yes. But Alonzo’s stubbornness may be fueled by alcohol and upbringing, while Abner’s may come from advancing age if not early senility. There are moments when it seems the gap between these men might be bridged, especially through Alonzo’s wife and daughter, both of whom are sympathetic to Abner, but they lead nowhere.

That Evening Sun is based on a story by Tennessee writer William Gay. The director and screenwriter Scott Teems is a native of Lilburn, Georgia. Ray McKinnon, who plays Lonzo, has appeared in a number of Southern films, including The Accountant, The Blind Side, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? His production company, “Ginny Mule Pictures,” which he co-owns with Walton Goggins, who plays Abner’s son Paul in this film and who also appeared in The Accountant, has produced several films about the South. Although Ginny Mule Pictures did not produce That Evening Sun, McKinnon was a producer. To some extent, then, this film is the creation of Southern writers, director, and actors. This may account to an extent for its realistic treatment of the Southern setting. The film shows us an old farm nestled in the mountains. It is instantly recognizable. We are not surprised that it is Southern. It is particular unto itself—it doesn’t seem constructed from preconceptions of what a Southern farm ought to be. It simply is what it is. The makers of That Evening Sun give us the South of their own experience. Of course, their Southnernness simply means that they bring their own preconceptions to the film. But compared with the treatment of the Southern farm in such films as The Long Hot Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, this one seems quietly real.

Although Abner Meecham’s farm is near the small town of Ackerman’s Field, only a few scenes occur in the town. There is no real farm vs. city conflict here, though the setting makes clear that the town is a part of the rural South that has been left behind by modernization, urbanization, and homogenization. It is analogous to the small town in Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart, left behind when the highway passed it by, or Eula Springs in James Wilcox’s novel Modern Baptists. In a sense, all the characters live on the margins. Abner is old and isolated. He lost his wife (whom he remembers in occasional flashbacks and dreams) three years before. His only friend, Thurl Chessor, a nearby farmer played by Barry Corbin, has difficulty walking and cannot drive. Abner lives on social security and support from his son Paul. A long history of unemployment, domestic violence, alcohol, and an injury to his leg have given Lonzo the reputation of a terminally unemployed no-count. He is struggling, as his wife explains to Abner, to make something of himself, and he was (apparently) successfully managing to avoid abusing alcohol and his family, until Abner returns to the farm. The two women in the family are trapped by Lonzo’s domineering personality, his violence, and their love for him (though ultimately the daughter leaves).

Too many conflicts and struggles afflict That Evening Sun. The main one is Abner’ s struggle to come to grips with his age, the loss of his farm and his wife, and his difficult relationship with his son Paul. His son is a lawyer and while it’s apparent that he’s not a wealthy man he at least has money. He complains to his father at one point about how much it costs him to keep him in a retirement home, and it’s clear that he never had much of a relationship with the old man. Abner complains that all Paul has ever done is lie to him. In fact, Abner’s conversations with Lonzo and Paul are full of insults, rancor, and bitterness. He feels abandoned and betrayed by everyone, and the worst insult comes when he returns to his farm to find a man whom he has long disliked renting his farm (with an option to buy) from his own son.

Abner blames everyone for his misfortunes. Gradually events lead him to realize that to some extent he bears responsibility for some of the things that have happened, including his difficult relationship with Paul. He comes to see how cruel and difficult he has been, even to his wife. We recognize, even if Abner does not, that Abner is much like Lonzo after all.

Abner shows some sympathy for Lonzo’s wife Ludie (Carrie Preston) and daughter Pamela (Mia Wasikowski). Ludie tries to be friendly with Abner, perhaps hoping to soften the developing tensions with her husband. She seems to understand Abner both as an old man with his own problems and also as a threat to the life she and her husband hope to build on the farm. It is Pamela, a sixteen-year-old girl, whom Abner at brief moments talks to and even behaves kindly towards. She seeks him out on several occasions simply for conversation, as if she is looking for a warmth and connection she cannot get from her embittered father. When Lonzo, drunk and angry over her being out late at night with a boy, beats her and his wife with a hose, Abner threatens him with a gun and turns him into the local sheriff. Later he warns and then demands that Pamela leave the farm, for her own safety (Ludie has encouraged her to leave as well). We see a dimension of Abner in these scenes that suggests he is not all gruffness and bitterness. In these two woman he may see something of his former life, of his departed wife. At the same time, Lonzo’s abuse provides him with a convenient excuse to escalate their dispute.

There is no peaceful resolution here. After Abner is injured in a fire, he wakes up in a hospital room to find Paul watching over him. They agree that Abner will go to live in a retirement community apartment near Paul’s home. Paul tells him he will have a backyard where he can grow tomatoes, and Abner, true to form, answers that he would rather grow corn. In the final scene we see Abner peering into windows of the abandoned house where he once lived. Lonzo and his wife have moved out, but, significantly, Abner does not enter the house. He walks around the front of the house, peers through the windows at vacant rooms and unused furniture, and then walks out of view.

Hal Holbrook is excellent as Abner Meecham. His is a one-note performance, of sorts, but then Abner is a one-note sort of man. McKinnon is effective as Alonzo, but then again Lonzo too is a flat character whose basic stubbornness only deepens as the film moves along. Preston, Wasikowski, and Corbin are a fine supporting cast.

Abner Meecham and Lonzo Choates are vaguely Faulknerian names. The struggle here between a displaced landowner and the lower-class white man who has supplanted him suggests Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy. The plot of the film as a whole, about a man displaced and struggling with his age and ownership of land, reminds us of The Field (1990), with Richard Harris in the lead role, an even darker and grimmer film than this one. The ultimate ancestor of both is King Lear, about an old man raging against age, betrayal, and abandonment.

That Evening Sun has comic moments but is not a comic film. Abner’s plight is sad and hopeless, as is Alonzo’s. No one seems headed towards a happy outcome. Abner and his friend Thurl will die soon. Lonzo will continue to falter in an ongoing downward spiral. Maybe his wife will put up with him a while longer. And who knows what will happen to their daughter?

The Blind Side

The Blind Side (2009; dir. John Lee Hancock) offers another melodrama about white and black folks getting acquainted in the American South. The message: mutual interdependence will make us better people. In the film, a conservative, wealthy Christian woman befriends a large and passive African American boy who is practically a street person. She feels sorry for him. His mother is an addict, and his father is nowhere to be seen. When she sees him walking down the street in the rain and asks where he is headed, he answers that he is going to the gym. She knows the gym is closed and realizes he has nowhere to sleep. To the surprise of her family, she offers to let him stay at her house for the night, and then for as long as he wants. She buys him clothes, pays his tuition at the local private school that her children attend, and ultimately she and her husband become his legal guardians. He calls her Mom, and she calls him her son.

There is much potential for sentimentality and stereotyping here, but though the film has its sentimental moments it for the most part evades both pitfalls. The characters run contrary to type. The woman, Leigh Anne Tuohy, is exactly the sort of person you’d expect to have no interest at all in homeless black kids. Michael Oher, the kid she takes in, is not your stereotypical street-smart black teen-ager. He’s shy, unassertive, and virtually never talks. He’s been bruised and traumatized by his difficult life. School bores him because he’s convinced he can’t do the work. He’s given up on himself and on life—he’s fundamentally depressed. Most of all he’s alone. Tuohy would undoubtedly say that Christian charity is why she took Oher in, and the movie offers no alternative explanation. It’s fairly free of platitudes and points of view. It speaks through the actions of its characters.

I dreaded watching this film for three reasons: it was about football, it featured Sandra Bullock, and because of the first two reasons the advertised length seemed too much to ask. It’s difficult to conceive of a subject less interesting on film than football. Unless it is golf, or maybe bowling. And Sandra Bullock, well, I’m just not a fan. On all three counts, the film won me over. Football is an issue, but only a minor one. Sandra Bullock, though she still plays another version of herself, is fully convincing as Tuohy. Quinton Aaron, who plays Oher, is excellent. There’s not tremendous depth to this film, but there is a winning and earnest sincerity. Sincere films normally drive me howling out of the theater. But in this case I was entertained and moved.

But perhaps also I was seduced, lulled, by the vulnerability of Oher, by Tuohy’s earnest concern for his well-being, into overlooking other aspects of the film. In a sense, by choosing characters that run counter to type or stereotype, the film is able to avoid specific commentary on race and economic disparities. It’s focused on individuals, not on their social and racial contexts. Tuohy never comes to any realization about the conditions of life in the projects—she knows something about the projects because she visits them twice in the film. She even threatens a drug dealer. She sees Oher as someone who needs help, and she responds to him on that basis. Oher’s passive vulnerability wins our sympathy, and as he begins responding to Tuohy’s efforts to help him, we like him all the better, but that’s because he’s trying to become the kind of person Tuohy wants him to be. When he becomes a member of her family, he does so primarily on her terms, not his.

I have no arguments with Christian charity. But in this film it operates on the premise that people like Oher are victims incapable of raising themselves up without the white folks’ help. Moreover, where the victims are raised up to is defined by the white folks too—eating well, living in a nice house, showing courtesy and manners, studying, attending college, acting like white folks. This is made all the more clear in how the film divides its characters into categories: the rich white people on the one side, the poor and drug-addicted black folks in the projects on the other side. In this film, solving the problems of the projects means getting people like Oher to live and be like their white benefactors. I am oversimplifying, but my point is that The Blind Side does not argue for social change. There is nothing radical or even moderately progressive about its solution to social problems. It argues the case of the Good Samaritan. Be good to people fallen by the wayside, but pay no attention to how they got there, to their ethnic or social origins.

Oher’s immense size automatically makes his high school football coach see him as a valuable addition to the team. He convinces the school admissions officer to admit Oher, despite his academic problems. (The football coach is played by Ray McKinnon, who played the title character in The Accountant, 2001, and in the recent film That Evening Sun, 2009). In fact, Oher is so shy and unaggressive that he bumbles around during practice and during games. Tuohy finally realizes that he’s afraid of hurting other people, so she persuades him to think of his team as his family, which he must defend. This does the job. The white lady shows the black kid how to play football and rise to his potential.

The Blind Side at moments seems almost aware of its disingenuousness. Tuohy and her husband as graduates of the University of Mississippi are archly fierce football fans. They want all their children, including Oher, to attend the school. Tuohy early on recognizes that Oher might qualify for a football scholarship to Ole Miss, and she does everything she can to help him qualify, which primarily means giving him pep talks and hiring a tutor (another arch Ole Miss fan) to help him with his studies. When an NCAA officer tells Oher that the Tuohy’s might have befriended him solely so that he could play football at Ole Miss, there is a genuine crisis. Oher wonders whether his new family loves him after all. And Tuohy questions her own motives. The film resolves the crisis in a way that seems satisfactory to the viewers, and to the characters, without wholly answering the question about motives. In real life, whatever that is, motives are always tangled, never pure and simple. In The Blind Side, what matters from the film’s point of view is the way in which racial and economic divides are bridged through the kindness and love of one family for a young man in need. If every wealthy family behaved like the Touhys, many problems in our nation might be solved, though we’d have a less diverse, more homogeneous nation as a result. And here we have another film suggesting that the way to success for a disadvantaged, minority character is through sports. The fact is that most families do not behave like the Tuohys, or cannot afford to, so what The Blind Side gives us is an isolated incident rather than a program for change. It makes us feel good without asking us to question how we live our lives.

[Old Smiley’s note:  A recent Slate article argues that the befriending of black athletes by white families is not as unusual as I’ve suggested.  See http://www.slate.com/id/2270482/.]

I’d Climb the Highest Mountain

I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (dir. Henry King, 1951) is a small and pious film. Nether adjective is meant to slight. Although one can always find reason to question the motives behind why a film of this type is made, the product itself is earnest enough. Based on a novel by the Georgia writer Corra Harris, the film chronicles the experience of Mary Elizabeth (Susan Hayward), a young woman who comes South to marry minister William Thompson (William Lundigan), assigned to a church in the North Georgia mountains. The house they move to is so isolated that the nearest neighbor is five miles away. The film was made largely where it was set, and numerous scenes show authentic mountain people (the film used numerous people from the region as extras) going about their daily business. Their faces are drawn and often haggard. Their children wear worn clothing and go bare footed (and often seem to have come straight out of Walker Evans photographs). They travel on horse and in buggies on washed out dirt roads. In many ways the use of setting and local inhabitants in the film is a major virtue. It rarely condescends. The only automobile in the area is driven by a rich woman from Atlanta who has a summer home in the mountains. She’s driven around by a chauffeur. The appearance of her car suggests that the film is set around 1920.

Through her own narration, we learn how Mary Elizabeth adjusts to marriage, to the rigors of life as a preacher’s wife, to the isolated mountains region where she lives. Most of all she has to adjust to her husband William. He has a lot of modern views, has a couple of wild streaks, rarely loses his temper, but is stubborn. He’s not afraid to argue with unbelievers or with the richest man in town, who makes donations to the church. (On occasion his virtuousness seems difficult to bear, even for his wife). As modern as William might be, she is even more so. When a local young man (Rory Calhoun) widely regarded as a ne’er-do-well falls in love with the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, both she and her husband take his side. In one prolonged episode, an unspecified pestilence strikes the area, and Mary Elizabeth and William assist the local medical doctor in caring for the ill.

In a certain way the film dramatizes an ongoing conflict between faith and reason, belief and disbelief. A Harvard-educated man and his family live nearby. He has taught his children that religion is false and raises them in a firm and unyielding way. He and William have several discussions about reason and faith. As the pestilence wears on, the local doctor questions why God would inflict such suffering. Even Mary Elizabeth seems to have doubts. William is an unwavering believer. He’s never swayed by arguments against the existence of God, by the pestilence, by personal tragedies. Gradually his piety wins over his wife, and gradually her willingness to break with traditions and even to break some rules in service of a good cause wins him over too.

There’s only a tenuous relationship between the film’s title and its subject. In addition to the title’s being a vague expression of religious faith, it also implies all the challenges Mary Elizabeth must face as she learns to live with her husband. In the end, she explains to him that she’s realized her destiny is to be a minister’s wife, to go with him wherever his calling takes him, quoting from the Book of Ruth, “Whither thou go’est, I will go, and whither thou lodge, I will lodge,” and so on.

This brings us to some of the more archaic aspects of this film. Shortly after the death of a neighborhood boy by drowning, Mary Elizabeth goes into labor and delivers a stillborn son. She is, understandably, grief stricken. She rouses from unconsciousness to insist that her husband baptize the child because she doesn’t want to believe he isn’t alive somewhere. For months she says she is in mourning, hardly aware of where she is. She then says that she commits “the gravest sin a woman can commit against her husband: I ceased to care how I looked.” Only the visit of a wealthy woman from Atlanta, who says she wants William to explain “some Biblical questions,” brings her out of her stupor. As Mary puts it, she was “rudely awakened” by the sight of this woman. After the second visit, Mary warns the Atlanta woman to go back to her own husband and to leave William alone. She goes to the local store and buys expensive fabric to make a dress that will win William’s notice. Later she confesses to him that this wasteful act inspired all the women in the church to spend money on expensive fabric rather than donate to the local mission. So it takes jealousy, envy, and self-indulgence to rescue this woman from grief—no spiritual or emotional or philosophical coming to terms with tragedy, not the passage of time, but jealousy, and at the cost of the local mission to boot!

The poorly hidden subtexts of this film (reinforced by the quotation from Ruth above) are that woman is shallow and fickle and that marriage is a sacred institution to be revered above all others, and that a woman must accept her subordinate place within it—to follow her husband’s will, to play a subservient role. Although we are told that William’s stubbornness is a weakness he must struggle to overcome, it is Mary who does most of the struggling. Her litany of mistakes and small sins are all what we would expect from a female character in a 1950s melodrama or comedy about marriage—a woman who does not closely cleave to her expected role as wife (and, in this case, minister’s wife)—must be brought back into the fold. Mary Elizabeth is a North Georgia version of Lucy Ricardo, always getting into trouble, always in need of gentle correction. Her husband is invariably smarter and more perceptive than she—when she confesses (on several occasions) that she has lied to him, he tells her that he knew she had lied all along—all of this in the lightest and most flirtatious of marital banter.

One wonders about the domestic life of the screenwriter, Lamar Trotti, an Atlanta native. Was he trying to deliver a message to someone at home? Or was he just speaking for the culture at large? In 1951 marriage was a revered institution, a pillar of the social structure, and this film, through frequent demonstrations of piety and good heartedness, makes the dramatic moment for Mary Elizabeth not her recognition of the value and goodness of the community where she has come to live but instead her willing and happy acceptance of her role as obedient wife of the church minister.

The Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910) by Corra Harris is often described as semi-autobiographical, but it doesn’t reveal the less-than-satisfactory nature of her marriage to her own husband, a philandering and alcoholic Methodist minister whose adultery cost him his position and led to his ultimate suicide, and to her public shame and humiliation. The marriage of William and Mary Elizabeth is sometimes faced with minor challenges, but not of the sort Harris faced in her own life.

Thunder Road

In the 1950s and early 60s young America was obsessed with cars. Consider Rebel without a Cause (1955), the car songs of Jan and Dean and of the Beach Boys and others. Thunder Road, released in 1958, played directly into this obsession. If you saw the trailer, you would think that cars are all it is about. In reality, although cars and wild races along dangerous mountain roads occupy much of the film, there are other concerns. Thunder Road invokes for me the film Lonely Are the Brave (1962), a modern-day Wild West fable based on the Edward Abbey novel The Last Cowboy. That film traces the struggles of a cowboy (played memorably by Kirk Douglas) who wants to live only on his own terms to escape pursuing law enforcement officials and other pressures of the modern world. He’s struggling to retain his individualism, his identity as a solitary soul in a world that increasingly demands conformity and corporate buy-in-signified by the fences that enclose much of the land through which he passes.

In Thunder Road (1958; dir. Arthur Ripley) this struggle of tradition and the modern, of the way of life in an isolated mountain valley set against the great world outside, of the individual against the demands of the federal government and a corporate criminal syndicate, is expressed in the venerable practices of moonshine and bootlegging.

Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) is the bootlegger who drives illegal whiskey all over the southeast, from Tennessee and North Carolina to Kentucky. Much of his driving is back and forth between the mountain home where he lives and Memphis, Tennessee. These are polar opposites—Memphis is the big city, with all the temptations the word suggests, while home in the mountains is family and tradition and basic human values. In Memphis Doolin carries on an affair with a night club singer (Keely Smith) while at home he tries to fend off the attentions of Roxanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight), who truly loves him.

The central struggle is between Doolin and a corporate hoodlum, Carol Kogan, who is trying to threaten and intimidate all the moonshiners in the area to sell out to him. It’s also with the federal government. Gene Barry plays Troy Barrett, a Treasury Agent on the lookout for illegal moonshiners. Barrett sets out to capture Doolin, who is breaking the law by running whiskey. But Barrett also comes to sympathize with Doolin and wants to save him from Kogan and his henchmen. Kogan begins ambushing and killing moonshiners who won’t sell out to him. Doolin isn’t threatened, so Kogan sets his sights on eliminating him.

In the value system of this film, Barrett is only trying to enforce the law. Doolin is the emblem of American individualism. Kogan epitomizes criminal and corporate greed.

Thunder Road does an admirable job of portraying mountain people in their own contexts. We see what appear to be authentic cabins and farms, mountain farmers dressed in overalls and smoking pipes and talking to one another around a fire. They have their own dignity and are not presented as inbred degenerates. If there are stereotypes here, at least they are not intentionally offensive. The fact that many (if not most) of the mountain men make illegal whiskey is a sign of their adherence to the old ways of life, and of their resistance to the forces of the federal government that wants to regulate and tax the whiskey they make and sell. Apparently, the moonshiners and the feds play by a certain sets of rules that both sides understand. It is Kogan who introduces a new dynamic, who bullies and kills and is essentially nothing more than a ruthless mobster.

As Doolin, Robert Mitchum (who wrote wrote the story on which the film is based, and who coproduced with the director) plays a figure fundamental to 20^th-century American cinema and literature—the loner who strikes out against all odds to resist the efforts of governments and corporations to control him. We’ve seen characters like Doolin in Godard’s Breathless (1960), in Easy Rider (1969) and Cool Hand Luke (1967) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and in numerous other literary and cinematic works. He’s an existential hero of the modern age. He doesn’t particularly like what he does, but it’s what he knows, and he’s good at it and intends on getting better and on not being caught until his number comes up—he knows it will. Doolin repeatedly insists that he doesn’t want his younger brother Robin, who keeps his car in repair, from getting involved in bootlegging, and he goes out of his way to prevent him from doing so. In fact, when he learns that Kogan has set his brother up to be ambushed and killed, he calls Kogan up to promise him that he will kill him. This seals Doolin’s fate.

One issue I have with Thunder Road is the unlikely romance Doolin carries on with the Memphis nightclub singer. It’s not only the improbability that a sophisticated big-city singer would be attracted to a mountain moonshiner, but also the improbability that such a woman would ever interest Doolin. Yet he professes his love to her, and we are supposed to believe he means it. I suppose his romance with her is a sign that he is more sophisticated than he lets on, a confirmation of his stated desire to leave moonshining behind for a better life outside the mountains. It’s also the film’s way of trying to make Doolin exceptional and therefore worthy of our attention—would a less savory moonshiner be as interesting as Doolin? Thus the film hedges its bets.

Special effects are also a weakness. The film is convincing in its shots of moonshiners barreling at breakneck speeds down mountain roads, pursued either by the revenuers or Kogan’s gang or both. But when the camera moves inside the car with Doolin, the background behind him is clearly on a screen, moving past the car in a studio. It’s not believable. This problem does not merely reflect the limited technology available when the film was made, but also its low budget.

Robert Mitchum’s portrayal of Doolin makes this film an iconic landmark.

Divine Secrets of the Sister Ya-Ya Hood

Based on a novel by Rebecca Wells, Callie Khouri’s 2002 film Divine Secrets of the Sister Ya-Ya Hood uses with prodigious thoroughness stereotypes and characters drawn from the South. One wonders what connection the novel, and the film, have to Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), which traced the experiences of eight close friends in the years after their graduation from college. Ya-Ya Hood takes as its premise the convention that women, especially but not exclusively Southern women, can share a close bond of friendship that supports them in difficult times and shields them against the extremities of the outer world. This is a theme in Steel Magnolias (1989) and in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), of course, and in fact Eudora Welty dramatizes the idea in her story “Lily Daws and the Three Ladies” as does Greg Johnson in “Crazy Ladies.”

The four women who are the main characters in this film are true Southern eccentrics (the purported protagonist, Sidda, daughter of one of the sisterhood members, is really just an excuse for the sisterhood members to tell their stories, their secrets). In their early adolescence they formed a secret sisterhood and vowed to remain faithful to each other throughout their lives. The sisterhood is a bond of commonality that supports its members through bad marriages, motherhood, nervous breakdowns, and crisis. In the film three members of the sisterhood decide to repair the relationship of Sidda and her mother Vivi, the fourth sisterhood member. The two have had a difficult relationship. Sidda is a New York dramatist whose plays seem to dramatize her childhood experiences. An interview with Sidda in Time identifies her mother as a source of childhood trauma. Vivi is enraged and cuts her daughter off. Sidda is about to marry an Irishman she lives with in New York, but she has been putting off the marriage for years, and when Sidda is kidnapped, drugged, and put on a plane to Louisiana by three members of the sisterhood, she seems ready to take the opportunity to delay the marriage again.

The basic premise of the movie revolves around the rift between Vivi and Sidda, the difficult times in Vivi’s life which her daughter either doesn’t know about or has repressed (she tells the interviewer that she had an uneventful childhood that gave her nothing to write about), and the importance of sisterhood. Once Sidda comes to understand the difficulties her mother faced (the death of the man she loved, her marriage to a man who loved her but was cold and emotionally repressed, her difficulties with alcoholism, her physical abuse of her children, and her nervous breakdown) then she can comprehend her own relationship with her mother and feel free to go ahead and commit to the Irishman. At least this seems to be the logic of the film.

The Southern environment makes Southern women into eccentrics: this also is an underlying premise. They marry men who have been repressed themselves and who are repressive. The sisterhood gives its members power over the men. Vivi’s husband is a case in point. He married Vivi because he loved her and despite the fact she didn’t love him, because he thought “he had enough love for both of them,” but his frequent absence during the marriage creates problems that lead to Sidda’s breakdown. It is the repressiveness of the Southern environment that makes these characters eccentric, and their eccentricity is what makes them interesting. Or is the film saying that the Southern environment tolerates eccentricity and individuality?

African-American characters are prominent. A black woman is a servant to some of the women (she is in effect an initiated member of the sisterhood). Black characters play music, and at the end there is a birthday party for Vivi where a Dixieland band performs. All the characters intermingle and the implication is that interdependency extends between the races as well as between genders. This is not inaccurate, of course.

One of the best scenes in the film occurs when the four sisterhood girls are taken by their maid to Atlanta for the premier of Gone with the Wind. The girls are enthralled, but the maid is not, and she thinks of the place as hellish. At the breakfast table the young son of the family that is hosting the girls refers to the maid as a “nigger” and the ya-ya hood girls throw food at him. The moment is significant for the irony of this trip for young white girls chaperoned by a black women to the Gone with the Wind premier, by the treatment of the maid at the table, and the snobbishness of their host family. Racial equality and tolerance were not part of the 1930s American South. In this sense the film presents the sisterhood members as exceptions to prevailing racial codes.

Many aspects of the film do not depend on the South for meaning and authenticity. The friendship of the sisterhood women has little to do with their Southernness. The experience of young women whose loved ones go off to World War II is not inherently Southern either. The film strives to portray a universality to the experiences of the women that is not limited by the regional setting.

Ultimately, the characters in this film are stereotypes, comic and even comic book figures. The notion that Sidda must return to her Southern home to face the past (aka Quentin Compson) is a platitudinous plot device. It reminds us of the main character in The Prince of Tides (1991).

This film takes place largely in the rural South, although there is not much evidence of a city or town nearby.

Sandra Bullock as Sidda does not speak with a Southern accent. Her prospective marriage to an Irishman is evidence of her desire to move outside her Southern heritage, but her willingness in the end to have the wedding at her mother’s home indicates her acceptance of or at least acquiescence to that heritage, especially when in the final scene she is initiated into the sisterhood.

The false or absent Southern accents in the film signify that the filmmakers wanted a Southern setting to flavor events but that they were not particularly interested in accurate portrayals of that setting. In fact, I would say the same of the Rebecca Wells novel, which mines the Southern stereotypes for all the comic effect they are worth and creates a mythic world of eccentricity, friendship in the face of suffering, good feelings, and reconciliation that has only loose connection with the outside world.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call--New Orleans

The disorder and destruction in Post-Katrina New Orleans mirrors a similar state of being in the main character of Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call--New Orleans (2008). I found the title of this film awkward the first time I heard it. Why “Port of Call”? The film has nothing to do with shipping or sailing or travel. The title seems a contrivance, an effort to suggest something more artful and exotic than what the film really offers. It should offer more. I felt the entire film was a contrivance, and not in a positive sense. The first fictional film directed by Herzog in years (he has been making documentaries in the meantime), Bad Lieutenant is a loose remake of a 1992 film set in New York. Herzog has a great eye for settings—I think in particular of his 1992 documentary Lessons in Darkness on the first U. S. invasion of Iraq, and his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. That perceptive eye is sometimes in evidence here, especially in views of the New Orleans skyline and of devastated streets left vacant by the post-Katrina floods.

But for the most part the film is a hyperbolic and excessive mess. Nicolas Cage plays Terence McDonagh, a detective already inclined towards questionable behavior when we first meet him. In an early scene he and his partner (Val Kilmer) are taunting a prisoner in a city jail cell about to be submerged by rising flood waters from the hurricane. They laugh at the prisoner, a young Hispanic man, who is terrified. Finally Cage jumps in the water to release him from the cell, but he injures his back and is left permanently in pain. He is promoted and honored for his heroism, and a year later he is seeking relief from his pain through various forms of legal and illegal drug use, and his life seems a darkening shambles. He’s faced with gambling debts (and mobsters who threaten him for failure to pay what he owes), he loses his temper with two citizens whose relatives are influential with the police captain, he pressures a football player to throw a game he has bet on, he blackmails arrest victims for sex, he’s suspended from duty, he promises to fix speeding tickets, he makes a deal with a local drug lord (Big Fate, played by Xzibit) in hopes of making enough money to pay his debts, the list could go on.

McDonagh’s difficulties finally reach the point where it seems impossible to conceive that he will find a way out. I found myself overcome with suspense as to when and how he would meet his fate. Amazingly, he doesn’t.

The one possibly redeeming trait in McDonagh’s character is his interest in solving the murder of five Senegalese illegal immigrants. Children are among the dead. McDonagh is horrified and enraged at the crime. But it’s difficult to sort out his desire to solve the crime with his numerous small and major acts of corruption. He does solve the murders and brings about the arrest of the murderers. His success could be the result of crafty thinking and planning, or it could simply be the result of good luck.

Some scenes in this film make no sense. In one McDonagh hallucinates and listens in hilarity as various lizards, including an iguana, sing. The iguana shows up in another scene. McDonagh’s colleagues never figure out that he is addicted to drugs, many of which he is stealing from the police stock room. He often looks drugged out, and his behavior is often very unusual. (Maybe they do know and don’t care—maybe that is Herzog’s point—it’s OK for the white detective to do drugs, just not the blacks and Hispanics and the young). McDonagh’s father, struggling with alcoholism, lives with his drunken younger wife in what appears to be a broken down Southern mansion—exactly how does he manage to afford living there? Near the end of the film, McDonagh is sitting with Big Fate when the mobster and two henchman show up to demand that he pay his gambling debt. Big Fate and his henchmen (everyone in this film has henchmen) shoot the mobsters to death. In a scene just a few moments later, McDonagh leads his police colleagues in a raid on Big Fate’s home—he is arrested. Yet the drug lord never reveals that McDonagh had conspired with him. Are we to believe that McDonagh’s plotting was all the result of a conscious plan? Does Big Fate never give a second thought to why this white detective wants to help him sell drugs and make money? McDonagh does convince Big Fate to smoke crack from his pipe—this allows detectives to use DNA on the pipe to connect him with the murders—a solution that in the context of everything else in the film seems too gratuitous and forced.

In the penultimate scene, all McDonagh’s problems have vanished. He’s given another commendation and promotion by the police department. He has married the woman he loves, who is pregnant and sober (she was a drug addict prostitute throughout most of the film), and they live in a handsome New Orleans home. Everything is wonderful. (I was reminded of the final scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet). And in the closing scene we see that, as much as McDonagh has turned his life around, he is still the same corrupt lieutenant as in the beginning.

One of Herzog’s points in this film is to show that the American legal system, the American system of values and its commitment to democratic ideals, the entire concept of the American Dream (which McDonagh has incredibly attained at the end of the film) are hollow and corrupt. The devastated New Orleans landscape, especially the poverty-stricken areas whose inhabitants suffered horribly during Katrina and its aftermath, is his embodiment of the discrimination and corruption that he sees underlying the system. The oppressed and powerless—African Americans, Hispanics, the young—are victimized by those in power. Herzog has frequently shown his disdain for America in his films. It is entirely appropriate for him to dramatize and illustrate his opinions. But one wishes he could have done so in a better film.

Many reviewers of this film liked it more than I did. Did they show too much deference to Herzog? Perhaps they were reacting to the performance by Cage. His McDonagh is wild and remarkable, reckless and self-destructive. He held my attention.

Easy Rider

“This used to be a helluva country,” says Jack Nicholson’s character George Hanson at a critical moment in the 1969 film Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper). Later, the character Wyatt (Captain America, played by Peter Fonda) announces in response to Bill’s joy over their newly acquired wealth that “We blew it.” The plural pronoun “We” refers to more than simply these two biker dudes, who bought and sold drugs to fund their cross-country ride. “We” also refers to “we” Americans, to the nation and the American Dream.

This film is so much a product of its time that it seems more revelatory today than it did 41 years ago when it was first released. It clearly sets out the polarities into which, from one simplistic way of thinking, the counter culture and the nation as a whole divided ideas, ways of thinking, and people in the 1960s: young vs. old, those in power vs. those without power, the rich vs. the poor, white skinned vs. dark skinned, individuals vs. group think.

The most important scene in the film takes place shortly before George is clubbed to death in his sleeping bag by hostile local citizens of the small Southern town they’ve just passed through. The alcoholic lawyer George is wondering what has happened to the country. Billy, who thinks on a fairly impetuous and superficial level, believes that the reason he and Wyatt have been refused hotel rooms and experienced other forms of discrimination is because of their long hair:

George: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.

Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That's what it's all about.

George: Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what's it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Billy: Well, it don't make 'em runnin' scared.

George: No, it makes 'em dangerous.

Scenes in this film range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from profound to shallow. But this particular exchange is a key to the underlying themes and symbols in Easy Rider, and one of the most important scenes in American films from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It’s a statement about profound economic, social, economic, and philosophical divides, an explanation of how in a certain way the American idolatry of the individual is really veneration of conformity. Individuals who do not conform to the requisite social and cultural expectations are cast out and held in contempt.

The American South in Easy Rider epitomizes the failure, from the film’s point of view, of the American experiment and the American Dream.

In a small Louisiana town, the three riders enter a small restaurant. They are ogled with admiration and interest by a booth full of Southern high school girls on the one hand, and eyed with contempt and hatred by another booth full of older Southern white men. “I don’t think they’ll make it to the parish line,” a gaggle-toothed man in a Cat hat leers as they watch Billy, Wyatt, and George. The South from this film’s viewpoint provides a ready vehicle for illustrating and exploring the failure of democracy and the egalitarian spirit.

Certainly one might complain about the one-sided and stereotypical view the film gives of the South. But though there are many other rooms in the Southern mansion, the room the film portrays is undeniably part of the larger structure.

The film makes clear that, no matter how cool and trendy they might appear to be, Wyatt and Billy have been a part of the American marketplace. Though Billy seems impervious to this realization, it hits Wyatt hard in the later scenes of the film, especially after the murder of George.

A number of scenes focus on people on the social and cultural margins. These especially include scenes featuring black people in the American South. Other scenes focus on images of power and affluence: a small-town courthouse, for instance, and white-columned Southern mansions. There are numerous images of waste, refuse, junked cars and machinery, abandoned houses. This is how the film construes America: a nation of waste, loss, disappointment. The film may be simplistic in its view of things, but at least it makes its view clear.

Ghosts of Mississippi

There are no moral ambiguities in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996; dir. Rob Reiner). Given that this film is about the 1994 trial of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of civil rights worker Medger Evers, perhaps there shouldn’t be. But their absence does indicate the level on which this film functions. It begins with a montage of shots alternating between brutal scenes of struggle from the civil rights movement and images of African American achievement. The montage is followed by a message stating that “This is a true story.” As with any film based on fact, what we really have here is a version, an interpretation, of the true story. But because the story is “true” and because the screenwriters thought it important to stick with the facts, basically, there are some scenes, some information, some moments that detract from the dramatic focus on de la Beckwith and the young Mississippi assistant district attorney Bobby DeLaughter who succeeds in putting him on trial and convicting him.

De la Beckwith as played by James Wood is cold, frightening, and crazy. There is no drama associated with him. He’s the evil racist perpetrator, and the film makes little effort to understand him or how he became what he became. He is what he is, and the film implies that in various ways he holds beliefs and values that much of the rest of the white South held in 1963 and continued to hold, perhaps, in 1994. The white racist South, and the oppressed African American South, is the film’s historical context.

Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie Evers is the ever vigilant and long suffering widow who never gives up on her hope that one day her husband’s killer (who was freed after all-white juries in two 1964 trials could not reach a verdict) will be convicted. Goldberg can be a good actress, and she performs well in this film that makes few demands on her.

The dramatic center of the film is Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin). He embodies the moderate white Southerner of the 20^th century who holds in contempt the racism of people such as De La Beckwith but who finds it easier not to stir up trouble and to live with the status quo. DeLaughter in the film struggles against the idea of opening a case that has been closed for twenty-five years. His guilty conscience gnaws at him. He reviews the evidence, talks to some witnesses, visits the home where Evers was killed, thinks about his three children (Evers had three children as well), and finds enough new information to reopen the case. As a result, his wife leaves him, he receives bomb threats, some of his former friends insult him, and the political career he hoped to have is ruined. The key moment in the film comes when leaders in the local black community accuse him and his boss Ed Peters (Ed Nelson) of being racists who want to prevent a new trial. Peters decides to assign the case to another lawyer, an African American woman. DeLaughter appeals for support to Myrlie Edwards, but she hangs up on him, only to appear in the court house a couple of days later with key evidence that ensures both that the trial can take place and that DeLaughter can stay on the case. He sacrifices a great deal personally in pursuing the case. His character is the most interesting aspect of the film—both as a white Southern moderate moved to act, and as a man compelled to sacrifice his marriage and his place in the legal and social community by his obsession with the case. But the film does not explore this potential beyond the issue of DeLaughter’s moral commitment.

This film succeeds as a dramatization of an important event in American civil rights history. It falls short as a film because of its overzealous earnestness, its lack of depth or nuance, its simplistic definition of the issues, the Hollywood characterizations, the stark binaries in its portrayal of the late-20^th century South, the predictable ways in which the plot develops (more predictable than even a film based on fact should allow).

Ghosts of Mississippi ends with DeLaughter’s successful conviction of De La Beckwith, who died in jail in 2001. Outside the courthouse, a mixed crowd of blacks and whites celebrate—underlining the film’s assertion that many people in Mississippi disapproved of De La Beckwith and people like him. But the film doesn’t suggest that the victory led to improved race relations in Mississippi, though in some small sense it should and must have, though DeLaughter’s passion for prosecuting the case is evidence of that improvement.

Filmed in 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi doesn’t touch on DeLaughter’s later financial difficulties, his unsuccessful career in politics, or his bribery trial in 2009.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

This 1927 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows how a director can skew the perspective of a source narrative to reflect his own interests and loyalties. According to the essay that accompanied the DVD, the director Harry A. Pollard considered Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel as Northern propaganda and did not want to show the South in a negative light. He therefore made most of the Southern slave owners in his film gentle and enlightened masters. The evil characters are of indeterminate geographical origin (Simon Legree) or are lower-class scoundrels.

Pollard’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly portrays slavery as an evil institution: slave families are split up and sold, bad owners whip and abuse their slaves, the existence of light-skinned slave women implies sexual exploitation and abuse, and the slave master Simon Legree is abusive to slaves in every possible way. Although enlightened owners may treat their slaves in a kindly way, if they die or go bankrupt less benevolent owners can buy the slaves and change their lives dramatically.

In its portrayal of slavery’s victims, Uncle Tom’s Cabin invokes numerous racist stereotypes; it presents most slaves as simple, easily misguided, susceptible to temptation, and unintelligent. With one exception, the most sympathetically portrayed slaves are so light-skinned that they are hardly recognizable as of African descent. The exception is Uncle Tom, played by a black actor named James B. Lowe. His love of his family and his fidelity to his white masters, and his love especially of Eva, makes him a paragon of virtue—where virtue is construed as fidelity to the white owners.

At the center of the film are Eliza and her husband George. Both are light-skinned. Eliza is raised as a daughter by her owners. George is “rented” from his owner as some sort of engineer. They are virtuous and highly intelligent and possess all the civilized values and behaviors of their white masters. In fact, what the film praises about them is how much they are like whites. Moreover, they are played by white actors made up to faintly resemble light-skinned slaves. (Eliza, played by Margarita Fischer, the director’s wife, is described as “yellow skinned” by a man who has been hired to track down and bring her back after she has run away). The DVD essay explains that the use of white actors was intended to make the portrayal of slaves in love more palatable to the mostly white audiences.

Almost as soon as George and Eliza marry, his owner shows up and takes George away. When bankruptcy threatens Eliza’s owner, who has treated her as a daughter, he agrees to sell her young son along with loyal Uncle Tom. George spends the entire film searching for Eliza and their son. Eliza for much of the film is searching for their son too (he is lured away from her by a slave dealer and sold to another slave owner). She also must resist the lecherous advances of Simon Legree.

Contrasted against the virtuous and light-skinned George and Eliza are darker-skinned slaves who are shown as ignorant and unenlightened, though usually good natured.

The film frequently shows slave children in various comical and stereotypical situations, their wide white eyes prominently displayed. In one scene a group of slave children runs after a horse-drawn cart full of watermelons. They steal a melon and ravenously devour it in the middle of the road.

The film’s real racial attitudes are most clearly represented in the character of Topsy, an adolescent slave girl attached to Aunt Ophelia and friend to the saintly Eva. Topsy (portrayed in blackface by nineteen-year-old white actress Mona Ray) is mischievous and uncontrollable. She constantly dances around, plays tricks on Aunt Ophelia, bats her eyes, steals, and otherwise acts like a clown. The white actress’ portrayal of Topsy is remarkable in that it doesn’t even approximate the racist stereotype it is apparently trying to represent. It’s just weird. When Eva asks Topsy why she is so bad, Topsy responds that she is bad because she is black and no one can love a black person. Eva responds that she loves Topsy, and this brings about a major change in Topsy’s personality. When Eva dies, Topsy is grief-stricken because she says there is no one left to love her. Aunt Ophelia, affected by Eva’s death and Topsy’s grief, responds that she will love Topsy. This is a genuinely moving moment in the film. Yet it is also a perfect expression of the film’s racial iconography: the virtuous and civilized white girl whose purity redeems the benighted and unrestrained slave. In general, this film argues that whites must care for the incapable blacks who suffer the consequences of slavery.

A Face in the Crowd

We first encounter A Face in the Crowd (1956; dir. Elia Kazan) as what seems to be a film about the discovery and rise of a country music star whose sharp satiric humor and music might win him a place on the stage of the Grand Old Opry. In that sense, the film is about the rise and fall of an American hero, another tale of the American Dream.

The main character Lonesome Rhodes exploits the hillbilly image by suggesting in his music and his rambling radio and television monologues that down-home values—which include family and religious values—as well as his natural-born suspicion of government, bureaucrats, the wealthy, and the educated—give him a common ground for talking to and representing the interests of the common individual. On his Memphis television program, he develops this kinship by championing the cause of a poor black woman with eight children whose house has burned down. On his first show he invites his audience to send in contributions, no more than fifty cents, to help her buy a house to replace the one she’s lost. This championing of the downtrodden immediately cements Lonesome’s audience—which is mainly working class. It also wins him an African American audience. By the next week, his fans have contributed more than $18,000. On another broadcast he expresses sympathy for the hard work of housewives and mothers, suggesting that their men don’t appreciate them. This also brings him an audience of devoted women admirers, who are also attracted to his wild vigor and implied sexuality. His rugged good looks and his singing attract still another audience, mainly of younger women.

It’s easy to overlook the fact that Lonesome’s championing of the black woman would have been highly controversial in Memphis, TN, of 1957. Walter Matthau’s character says as much. Rhodes readily expresses his indifference to any social or cultural barriers or rules that tell him how to act or what to think. He’s a self-styled populist, and his populism helps him to win millions of listeners.

Gradually, however, A Face in the Crowd morphs into an exploration of the rise of the media, specifically of television, in American popular culture. It examines the power of the American media to shape and control public opinion. The film was made when the American television industry was still seeking to discover what its role might be in American culture. Budd Schulberg’s screenplay gives expression to the fear that media celebrities might use the new industry to gain control of public opinion, to sway the public mind and shape national events. The rise of such media stars in the 1950s as Billy Graham, the evangelist, and of Elvis Presley, whose songs and gyrations provokes audiences to Dionysian frenzy, provided some evidence that there was good cause for concern. This was a concern that had already been seen in other films, especially in Richard Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949) and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1940), where a newspaper magnate uses the media, including the newspaper chains he owns, to wield economic and political power.

Several historical factors inform this focus on media, politics, and public opinion. The 20th century was a period of demagoguery, when leaders on both sides of the Atlantic rose to fame and power on the basis of a populist political message and a dynamic media image. Father Coughlan, Marcus Garvey, Huey Long, George Wallace, and many others were American examples. Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin (in different ways) were examples from Europe. The film responds to the very real fear of the takeover of the American government by such a figure. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, fear of undue communist influence in the American government and right-wing political zealotry resulted in the rise of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who held hearings seeking to identity communist infiltrators in various corners of American government and culture, and whose reckless behavior destroyed numerous reputations and led to a low point in government.

Ultimately, although American politics now depend heavily on the media, things did not turn out in precisely the way that Schulberg prophesied. On the other hand, he was not that far off the mark. Candidates who look handsome and personable on screen tend to do better in the polls than those who don’t. There are exceptions, of course. John McCain, not the most photogenic fellow, did win the Republican nomination for president in 2008, even though he was running against the swarmily handsome Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts. Barack Obama clearly profited from his dynamic speaking style and eager appearance, both of which came across effectively on the television screen. However, it’s doubtful he changed his entire personality, as Rhodes attempts to convince Senator Fuller to do in the film to attract voters.

A Face in the Crowd is also a hillbilly film, exploiting in the role of “Lonesome Rhodes” the comic stand-up career of Andy Griffith in the 1950s. Griffith, not a trained actor, plays the role of the self-styled and very self-aware hillbilly hick to the hilt. Even from his first appearance in the film, where he’s sleeping off a drunken spree in a small-town jail, he’s shown as a calculating fellow whose primary concern is “me, myself, and I.”

Patricia Neal plays a young radio producer who from the start is hoodwinked by Lonesome’s charm, down-home wit, and singing. Even at the end of the film, she’s still swayed by his influence, even after she knows he is a duplicitous manipulator of herself and of everyone else.

The film never really shimmers, in that sense that creates mystery and ambiguity and uncertainty and that makes a film or literary work memorable. Some might argue for shimmer in the final scene, where Rhodes bellows in desperate agony after Marcia. Yet up to this point the film has spent so much time pinning Rhodes down, making clear that we have no doubts about him or the forces that make him who he is, that the shimmer hardly matters.

A Face in the Crowd may have been an important influence on Robert Altman’s film Nashville, where an unseen candidate uses blaring loudspeakers, radio and television announcements, and rallies with country music singers to promote his populist political message. An important scene early in Altman’s film comes when the singer Barbara Jean arrives at the Nashville Airport to be greeted by throngs of adoring fans, high school hands, and baton twirlers. This seen is specifically reminiscent of the one in Face where Lonesome Rhodes judges a baton twirling contest.

The Accountant

This short, forty-minute film (2001; dir. Ray McKinnon) features three male actors. Two of them portray brothers—the O’Dell brothers. One of the brothers stayed on the family farm, trying unsuccessfully to make a go of it. The other went to town to find his way—he’s dressed in a suit while his brother wears farm clothes. They’ve hired a financial consultant—an accountant—to assess the financial health of the farm. He drives up in an old jalopy, wears brogans and a severe, old fashioned suit. He has a ghastly nose and an ashen pallor. The first thing he asks is for a beer—not imported beer, which he scorns, but PBR. He drinks can after can, throwing each one down as he finishes. Then he asks for bourbon. He doesn’t use a calculator—he counts on his fingers and stamps his foot on the floor as he adds up the figures (“A man who won’t add his own numbers ain’t much of a man in my book.) He says that everything is in the numbers and can read the minute details of a man’s life in the numbers—the financial records--he leaves behind: “You can tell a lot about a person’s comins’ and goins’ if you know how to interpret the numbers.”

The accountant determines that the family farm is $277,452 in arrears and offers advice on how to save it: burn it down for insurance money. Make sure the dog and livestock die in the fire to avoid suspicion. Consider forfeiting a leg or two in an accident, again for insurance money. Consider murder.

As desperate as these measures are, the accountant’s goal is to save the family farm. That’s important above everything else—save the farm so that it can be passed down to the farmer’s two young sons. The message of this film is decidedly old school: pro-farm, anti-capitalism, anti-North, pro-agrarian. The accountant lectures his clients on how they’ve been victimized by “Hollywood, Wallstreet, Boston Market,” by “caricatures and stereotypes” of the South in such shows as “The Beverley Hillbillies” and “Dukes of Hazzard,” so that Southerners don’t even know what it means to be Southern anymore—one day, he warns, “one day your grandchildren will be eatin’ cornbread that’s sweet and drinkin’ ice tea that ain’t, and they’ll think that’s a Southern tradition.” When one of the brothers suggests that maybe they can sell the handwritten family logbook (passed down through five generations--“it's a tragedy”) as a book or a film, that maybe Billy Bob Thornton could make it into a movie, the accountant scoffs that Billy Bob’s not real, it’s just a Southern name like Jethro or Ellymae, and that he’s from the same state as Bill Clinton.

Donald Davidson could have written this script.

This film is a fable about the plight of the small-time farmer, the ravages of capitalism, the disappearance of Southern traditions and values. These are all well and good, and heartfelt in this film, but they’re not much more than platitudes—the film doesn’t give itself time to let them be anything else. In a longer film these pointed editorial lessons would weigh the story down. But The Accountant is just the right length.

This off-beat, whacky, droll, sad film is highly entertaining. Ray McKinnon as the accountant is an amazing character. The accountant may be the devil, or he may be the Lord, or he may be just a number cruncher. He does come up with a way to save the family farm, though it’s not what either of the brothers might have wanted.

Raintree County

The decade of the 1950s marks Raintree County (1957; dir. Edward Dmytryk) in numerous ways. The title song by Johnny Mathis, Johnny Greene’s sappy score, the concerns with madness, the blandly sanitized themes of race, the contrived and banal sentimentality, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Taylor and Clift were fine actors, but Raintree County is not high on their lists of achievements.

Much of this film takes place in Indiana, where the eponymous county supposedly exists. The title refers to a mythical tree that grows somewhere in the swamp near Raintree. Early in the film, John Wickliff Shawnessey (Clift), just out of high school, stumbles into the swamp in search of the tree. He falls in the water and gets soaked. His friends make fun of him. The tree symbolizes his youthful idealism, the ideals and goals that he never quite achieves in his life.

There is so much about this film that is bad that I could waste pages on it. It’s a turgid, sloppy, illogical mess. The plot is shapeless. The film seems to have been shot largely on a set, with some exceptions, and it lacks the attention to authentic detail that gave Gone with the Wind and Jezebel whatever realism they may have had. But I am interested primarily in how the film portrays the Civil War, and in the character of Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor).

The film is set just before the Civil War, towards which occasional faint allusions lead us. The war becomes an overt issue after John marries Susanna, a Southerner from New Orleans, and brings her back to Raintree to live with him. He announces to Susanna his sympathies with abolitionism (this never came up before the marriage) by asking if she has ever heard of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as if that novel neatly encapsulates the issue. After listening to campaign speeches by supporters of Lincoln, John decides that Susanna must free her two house slaves. He tells her that if she does not do so he will not return to the house. (This conflict between them is introduced rather suddenly, as if nothing led up to it or prepared us for it. The relationship between John and Susanna waxes hot and cold throughout the film, and there are often no reasons for the shifts in mood). Susanna does free the slaves, but at a party she is giving for John several of her Southern friends humiliate her by drunkenly mocking slaves. One of them blackens his face with ashes from the fireplace and in a racist and demeaning way ridicules black people.

The film presents the fraught relationship of Susanna and John as representative of the larger national conflict between North and South. But Susanna is full of dark passions, madness, and a mysterious past, while John behaves as if he is a kind of half-wit. He’s a moon-eyed aspiring poet. The equation doesn’t work. John somehow overlooks the beautiful and adoring Nell Gaither (Eva Marie Saint) and is seduced (willingly) by Susanna in a forest glade. She then leaves for New Orleans. But she later returns claiming to be pregnant, and John marries her. Throughout the long (it seemed long to me—everything in the film seems long) marriage, John is frequently tempted with Nell, who still loves him, but he remains faithful to Susanna. Nell is the saintly angel who remains chaste and faithful to John, even through his marriage to Susanna, while Susanna plays the whore. She is not literally a whore, but she is cursed with madness, a family inheritance, as well as with darker secrets. She deceives John into marrying her because she says she loves him too much to risk losing him. She at least on one occasion spends the entire day in a nearby town for suspicious reasons, and ultimately, at the height of the War, runs away to Louisiana with their son.

Susanna, whose parents died mysteriously in a plantation house fire, suffers from madness that is said to run in her family. But madness may actually be a metaphor that hides the possible secret that her mother may have been a black woman. One of the first pronouncements that Susanna makes in the film, an especially harsh one, is that anyone with a drop of black blood is by definition a black person. Yet she also speaks with extreme fondness of the woman who raised her, the woman with whom she often shared a bedroom and whom she describes as “a great lady.” This woman was black. She seems awfully confused about this great lady. We later learn that her father had fallen in love with this woman in the Caribbean, and that he had brought her back to Louisiana. It is implied that he was with her the night of the fire, and Susanna explains to John that she heard firecrackers going off in their bedroom. The implication is that Susanna’s mother killed her husband and the woman and then burned down the house. The larger implication is that Susanna is the product of her father’s love for the woman, and that her madness is the result of guilt, anguish, confusion, who knows what, over the questions of her paternity, of the possibility that she is part black, of the cause of the fire.

The curse that Susanna suffers, then (if I am right in these assumptions), is the curse of slavery, of racism, the selfsame curse that marks and condemns the South. Unfortunately, the film hints at Susanna’s parentage so faintly and euphemistically that it can do little to explore these possibilities.

In an odd scene early in the film, when John has gone South with Susanna to visit members of her family, the young couple stands on the porch of a ruined plantation house. The porch and columns are all that remain. This is the house where Susanna lived with her parents before they died in the fire. She at first tells John that she can’t remember anything about the fire because she was only three years old when it happened, but he later learns that she was actually nine and ultimately discovers that she knows more than she has been willing to reveal. In fact, the ruined plantation porch with columns closely resembles a photograph made by Eudora Welty in 1935 of the ruined Windsor Plantation. I wonder whether the filmmakers were aware of the ruins or of Welty’s photograph.

Prom Night in Mississippi

Prom Night in Mississippi (2009; dir. Paul Saltzman) is about the first integrated senior prom held at the only high school in Charleston, Mississippi, in 2008. The documentary does not blame or ridicule the community for taking time to catch up with the rest of the nation. In a modest way that avoids big claims, it shows how change and history don’t come to all parts of the nation at the same moment, and that what might have been dramatic and earth-shaking for one place three decades ago can be equally monumental in another place today.

By mostly relying on interviews with students and a few parents and school teachers and administrators, director Saltzman records the planning of the first integrated senior prom. The actor Morgan Freeman, a native of the town, was distressed that after so many years separate prom events continued to be held. He offered in 1998 to pay for a single, integrated event but the school declined. In 2007 he makes the offer again and is accepted. He appears briefly at the beginning and end of the film, which shows him making a visit to the high school to offer to sponsor an integrated prom.

The film suggests, and Freeman believes, that while the students want a single prom event, tradition, the school board, and a group of parents have forced separate events. The parents who opposed the single prom declined to be interviewed. Among the remaining parents, there is a range of views. The students express a range of views as well. Most claim not to be racists, though some agree that they don’t socialize with people of the other race either because they were raised not to do so or because the opportunity has never presented itself.

Freeman explains early in the film that he wanted the prom to serve as a catalyst for bringing students of different races together and getting them to socialize. All the black students, and many of the white students, express to Freeman their openness to the idea. But the film shows a lot of ambiguity in their attitudes, more among the white students than the black. Many of the white students worry about what their parents think about their black friends. One girl speaks of being physically threatened by her step-father. While all the students comfortably occupy the same gymnasium for the dance, for the most part the white and black students socialize separately. The film doesn’t show how other students react to the one mixed-race couple that attends the dance. As the end of the prom approaches, students seem to loosen up, there is more mixing and milling around, and we see a few white and black students (white males and black females) dancing together, and a more general willingness by most people in attendance to enjoy one another.

The film dramatizes how difficult social integration was, and can still be, and how it is difficult to make good on even the best of intentions. Even the most outspoken white boy in the film, who talks about his black friends and his disagreement with the racism of his elders, admits that he has never dated a black girl because he has never wanted to. Another white boy, who asked that his face be obscured and who uses a false name, implies that his parents would disown him if they knew he socialized with members of the black race. Those parents who disagree with the integrated prom organize a separate dance for white students only: many of the white students attend both events.

The father of the white girl who dates a black student describes himself as a “red neck” but claims that he is not prejudiced--he simply believes the two races shouldn’t socialize and talks about the different ways he has tried to keep his daughter from being with her black boyfriend. He admits that he cannot control what she does when she is not at home. In the end, however, he says that he will stick by her no matter what.

These are the true roots of racial progress, the father who through love of his own daughter comes to accept something fundamentally opposed to his upbringing.