ATL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stomp the Yard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tarnished Angels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Searchers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eve's Bayou

Eve’s Bayou (1997) is a gothic African American melodrama set in the bayous of Louisiana. Because I am not particularly familiar with that area, it is difficult for me to assess the realism of the film. It does have a certain Hallmark Hall of Fame sweetness, and at times this was an irritation. Most of the characters wear freshly starched and new clothes, and if there is poverty in the area, we never see it. All the characters are of a racially mixed heritage, though they live as African Americans, descended from the union of a former slave named Eve and a white landowner. The film makes this heritage clear through voiceover narration and through scenes showing characters of varying skin tones. The implications of the heritage do not have much importance in the film, other than to suggest that we are all racially intertwined.

This film has too many subjects and themes. It is about a marriage in crisis, the conflict between folk magic and modern medicine, folk magic and reason, a coming of age story for two young sisters, a rivalry between a brother and sister, adultery, possible incest, jealousy, guilt, and so on. The closing voiceover narration insists as well that the film is about the nature of truth, which changes according to the weather. This is a point the film makes very well through scenes in which characters think they see one thing but are later convinced they actually saw something else. The film doesn’t need the voiceover narration to insist on this theme or that the film is about the nature of memory. All of this is clear enough.

Gothicism abounds in this film, but it is mainly a matter of mood more than anything else. (In the distant past is the relationship between the original Eve and the plantation owner Monsieur Batiste, but the film doesn’t effectively establish this as an element that has some influence on the modern world, and it doesn’t suggest that this relationship is a primal horror to which all must react—so to call it Gothic doesn’t make sense). One of the adults in the film, Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) is a kind of seer. She describes herself as a counselor, but her clients come to her for spiritual and psychic readings. Every now and then she works a bit of magic. She believes she is cursed—all three of her husbands suffered premature deaths, and another conjure woman, a fortuneteller named Elzora smoothly played by Diahnn Carroll, tells her that she is cursed, and whether this is true or not she believes it. Her brother is a medical doctor, Louis Batiste (Samuel Jackson), the father of two daughters and a son.

The film is at its best when it focuses on the children and their perceptions of the adult world. The film tells its story from the viewpoint of Eve, the younger daughter, who has some of the same conjuring instincts as her aunt. She is a mischievous child who plays tricks on her siblings and who plays a more serious and ominous trick later in the film. She sees—literally envisions--the world through her own eyes as well as through the eyes of the adults who tell her their stories. In her mind the conflicting worlds of fantasy and reality, of magic and medicine, reality and imagination, come together in confusion and conflict. When Mozelle tells her stories, Eve imagines them so vividly that the characters of the story seem to act out events before her. In these scenes the film really comes to life.

The film’s real concern is with how the daughters learn about and become involved in the adult world. One of them has her first period. The other accidentally sees their father having sex with a woman other than their mother. Both hear their parents arguing loudly at night, and they react in various ways to the tensions of the house and marriage. We saw a similar tension in To Kill a Mockingbird, which shows the adult world through the eyes of the girl Scout and her brother. Their acquisition of adult knowledge comes mostly through the trial of a black man accused of raping a white girl. In Eve’s Bayou, adult knowledge comes through too many doors and windows—from the psychic aunt, their mother’s anguish over their father’s philandering, from general domestic discord, and from a strange sexual tension between the father and the older daughter. It is not enough that this film is about girls on the verge of adulthood, on the verge of losing their innocence and their faith in the world—it all must be complicated with an array of melodramatic twists and turns. In the end the film has to insist on its concern with how we always act out our heritage in one way or the other, with the nature of truth, with guilt and redemption—with the necessity of having to live with what we have made of our lives. It has to do this, I think, because the film over-complicates everything. Although the film has all the material elements needed for a detailed exploration of what it means to live out one’s heritage, these are never tied coherently together, and instead what we have is a melodrama.

The concern with magic and reason—with the brother Louis who is a doctor and the sister Mozelle who has conjuring abilities—gives the film much interest above and beyond the concern with the children. Yet this dimension is more a matter of spectacle, of sensation, than of substance. Nothing in the film truly hinges on magic. The film shows people talking about and trying to perform magic, but it doesn’t insist that magic and voodoo are real, only that people believe in them. When Eve decides she wants to kill her father, whom she believes tried to have incestuous relations with her older sister Cisely, she at first tries to do so by paying the fortuneteller Elzora to concoct a spell and by sticking pins in a doll. But she also tries to provoke jealousy in the husband of a woman with whom her father had an affair, as if to ensure that by relying on both magic and adult emotions that she will be able to achieve her goal.

The film shows us the undercurrent of belief in magic and voodoo among the people in the film without making this a film about these subjects. Instead they contribute to the general plot of daughters reacting to the circumstances in which they find themselves—their parent’s difficult marriage, their aunt’s belief that she is cursed, and the problems of the adult world which she tries to cure.

The acting in the film is more sincere and eager than it is good. The younger daughter, Eve (Jurnee Smollett), is earnest and entirely likeable, though she and many others in the film seem often to be going through scripted motions rather than acting. The film is genuinely entertaining and, finally, moving in those moments when the two girls become aware of the mistakes they have made and the consequences that have led to. What the unlikely and overwrought plot cannot achieve, the characters and their interactions make up for.

The addition of an incest element to the film seems gratuitous, especially since the film seems to back off from the theme after introducing it by suggesting that neither individual involved in the purported act of attempted incest is sure what happened or why. Apparently both bear some blame, and are to be absolved of blame by their loss of self-control, by their uncertainty as to what really happened, by their doubt that anything happened at all. The film wants to suggest incest as a reality in the world it portrays but is unwilling to engage the issue. We can extend this complaint to the film as a whole. Despite the grim and dark events that occur, despite the death of Louis Batiste, perhaps as the result of a partial misunderstanding by the two daughters, perhaps as a result of Eve’s plotting, despite the film’s strong argument that adulthood is a grim matrix of darkness and responsibility, the film comes to a strange sort of happy ending. Eve learns to live with what she has done. Cisely recovers from her depression. Even Mozelle gets another husband, though whether he falls victim to the curse we never know.

Although every major and minor character is at least partially African American in Eve’s Bayou (no white characters appear), and although the film takes place in the context of a social milieu in which every character is the product of a heritage of interplay between blacks and whites, it is not a film that engages racial issues. Rather it works in the individual realms of the individual characters. Those aspects of their lives that might have racial significance—interest in voodoo, dialect, varied skin tones—are mainly incidental. The characters of Eve’s Bayou confront issues and challenges more fundamentally drawn from the general human condition.

Carmen Jones

Produced and directed by Otto Preminger in 1954, Carmen Jones was based on a 1943 Broadway musical that in turn was based on the Bizet opera Carmen. The cast is entirely African American; the setting has been moved to the United States and set during World War II, in or near an army training base and in Chicago. The first two-thirds of the film appear to take place in the American South, although the evidence for this is faint and subtle—one character says he does not want to return to working on a farm after the war, the setting is generally rural, with a few small towns. And the film is about African Americans—or at least it features an entirely African American cast.

One has to question why it was necessary to update Carmen. The film follows the plot of the opera loosely but relatively faithfully. The opera's matador becomes a prizefighter in the film. The military officer becomes a corporal in the army who has just been accepted to flight training school. Carmen in the film is much like Carmen from the opera—passionate, headstrong, flinging men this way and that once she is done with them. She works in a parachute factory rather than a tobacco warehouse. And the military officer is as much a foolish victim in the film as in the opera.

The film exchanges the setting of Spain for the setting of African America. Instead of passionate, impetuous Spaniards, we have impetuous, passionate African Americans.

The film doesn't explore any theme that could be identified as "Southern" or as "racial" or as "African American." Rather it takes a Bizet opera and updates it with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The characters sing in a light African American dialect, but for the most part they could be singing the same songs that Shirley Jones sings in Oklahoma, or she could be singing these songs herself. That is, the performers bring nothing of themselves to the music, other than their talent.

The film was a genuine attempt to highlight African American talent—Pearl Bailey, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and others. It is a genuine attempt to celebrate and appreciate African American culture. But the film insists on accomplishing these admirable goals using definitions and conventions entirely imposed and defined by white American and European culture—the American musical, the European opera. Maybe part of the point is that music and opera are supposed to be universal languages through which anyone can express the universal emotions of love and jealousy and passion. Little that we associate with African American culture finds its way into the film—there is some wild dancing, some jazzy singing, but one senses that these are all permitted and defined and constrained by the white filmmakers.

World War II had a tremendous consequence for African Americans. Their role in the war provided support and justification for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s--how can you deny rights to people who fought and sacrificed in a national war effort. Joe himself, as we are told, has been accepted into flight school—a landmark achievement for an African American in World War II. Yet by showing how he throws away this opportunity by giving up everything to chase after Carmen, the film seems to argue that blacks are, after all, too unreliable and irresponsible to fly planes in the war effort. Since the Broadway play premiered in 1943, one can understand why it showed no awareness of the significance of World War II for African American citizens, but no such excuse can be made for the 1954 film. Evidence of what the war meant was already available and apparent, but the film exists in a social vacuum as far as such issues go.

By limiting the world of the film entirely to African Americans, so that whites or other ethnic categories play no role, Preminger avoids all the sticky and complicated issues of race. The civil rights movement was about to burst forth in America in 1954, the year of the Brown vs. the Kansas Board of Education decision, and clearly much tension was in the air. Preminger avoids the tension by simply omitting any concern with relations between different races. His focus on a single group of people, allows him to appear to be taking sides with an oppressed group without really taking a stand. Thus he offends no significant portion of the audience and even receives praise for his liberal mindedness. During the 50s, such evasive stands of liberal broadmindedness were not uncommon in film.

The film certainly invokes its share of stereotypes and racial characteristics. Pearl Bailey sings at one point of tom-toms ("Beat Out dat Rhythm on a Drum"). Song lyrics are littered with "dese" and "dats." A woman speaks disdainfully of how a man smells. But the film's treatment of sexuality and moral license is a major way in which it makes racial assumptions. Are there any other Rogers and Hammerstein films in which a scene begins by showing a man in an under-shirt fastening his trousers—the clear statement here is that the man and a woman have just had sex—there's no doubt about it. In Chicago, Carmen and Joe share a one-room apartment in which the bed is the center of the room. Though they are not married, the clear implication is that the bed is the center of much activity. Dorothy Dandridge parades around in bra and underwear in one scene. Three women are enticed to accompany a group of men to Chicago in return for promises of diamonds, minks, and a good time. You wouldn't see such details in a predominantly white film, especially one with lyrics written by Oscar Hammerstein. The assumption here is that African Americans are passionate, sexually free, and open folks who don't see moral compunctions as a hindrance to sexual expression. Perhaps Preminger thought that using an all African American cast would allow him to present Carmen as he really thought it should be produced and at the same time pay tribute to African American talents and culture. In retrospect, certainly from the vantage point of 53 years later, the decision to make this film seems to have been a bad one.

This is supposed to be the way of black people, right—sexual libertinism. Sex between whites was verboten on screen in the 1950s. A predominantly white audience would be offended by open sexuality among white actors on screen, but by black actors it is more acceptable because that is what white audiences and filmmakers expect of blacks.

Carmen Jones occupies the same territory as Porgy and Bess (1959), The Green Pastures (1936), and Cabin in the Sky (1943), which use all-black casts to celebrate (and satirize and ridicule) black culture without really seeking to explore or understand it. It's tempting to view these films as Margaret-Mead type anthropological explorations of primitive culture. In celebrating the free passions of African Americans in 1954, Carmen Jones is really trying to make its mostly white audience happy for their more upright whiteness.

In general the African Americans in the film provide a vehicle for updating a story of love and passion in a way that wouldn't have been possible for a film populated mainly by whites. I wonder how comfortable Dandridge and Belafonte and Bailey felt in these roles. For the most part the scenes and dancing are competent and entertaining but executed with little excitement or passion—an irony in a film based on an opera about love and passion.

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Nothing but a Man

Nothing but a Man is remarkable and unusual. Released in 1964, filmed in black and white, set in an unidentified part of the American South, it focuses on a black man named Duff Anderson. He works on a railroad gang laying rails. Nothing but a Man attempts to show what life is for a young black man in the small-town South in the 1960s. Ivan Dixon portrays Duff. He was a relative unknown when the film was made, and his role in this film was the outstanding role of his career.

A number of actors in this film later became significant figures in the American entertainment industry, primarily Yaphet Kotto, who plays Duff’s friend Jocko, and Esther Rolle, who appears briefly in a church service. Abby Lincoln, already known by the time of this film for her beauty, her acting, and her jazz singing, plays Josie Dawson, a young schoolteacher to whom Duff is attracted.

This film is low key and seemingly objective. It displays Duff’s life and problems without preaching about them. It has the style of a documentary, following Duff as he works on the rail line, sits in a bar, attends a church service, and flirts with a young woman selling food outside the church. Her name is Josie and she turns out to be the preacher’s daughter. When Duff asks her to go out with him, she agrees.

The schoolteacher is one of a number of challenges Duff faces in the film. She is part of a respectable middle-class black family in the small Southern town. Her father and mother disapprove of her friendship with a manual laborer. She has gone to college and is a teacher. He lays rails for the railroad. The differences in social class between Josie and Duff pose a problem that he feels more than she does. While she has a stable job, he works as a laborer, and after he quits his job to settle down with Josie, stable employment is an issue for him throughout the film.

Josie as a character stands between Duff and her father the minister, Reverend Dawson. She speaks critically of her father on several occasions, blaming him for not standing up against the whites at crucial moments. Reverend Dawson himself tells Duff that it is difficult to know how to talk to white people—he apparently sees relations with white people as a matter of diplomacy and negotiation. He may have his own welfare and respectability in mind, but he also cares about the welfare of the black community as a whole—that welfare depends on peaceful relations with the whites, and in the community where Duff lives peaceful relations mean a subservient role for African Americans.

Duff contrasts with Reverend Dawson and other black men in the film as well. He is an individual who wants to live by his own terms. He is not comfortable being deferential to whites. He is also not religious, and this distances him from Josie’s father. When he gets a job at a mill, he is bothered by the failure of other black workers to stand up for themselves. He tells them they should not accept mistreatment from the whites. They tell him that they have families to worry about, that they can’t afford to make their employers angry. After one of them tells the white employees that Duff is trying to make trouble, Duff loses his job.

Duff is not insolent or disrespectful or aggressive towards white people. He is simply himself. He isn’t particularly talkative, and his silences are taken for rudeness. He refuses to be subservient and deferential. He refuses to joke around with white men who try to talk down to him. His refusal to play the game causes problems.

After he loses the job at the mill, he tries unsuccessfully to find other work. He considers picking cotton, but refuses to accept the low wage of $2.50 a day. When his father-in-law helps him get a job at a service station owned by a white man, he loses the job after a carload of white boys threaten to burn the station down if the owner doesn’t fire him—when one of them makes a lewd joke about his wife, Duff tells him to watch how he talks, and this leads to trouble. Duff feels that employment that allows him to earn a decent living wage is a key to his hopes for a successful life. It is certainly a key factor in the growing tension between Duff and Josie. He becomes increasingly worried about how he is going to care for her and the baby that is on the way.

A complicating factor is Duff’s conflicted relationship with his father, whom he goes to visit at two important moments in the film—once when he is thinking about asking Josie to marry him and again when he has left Josie to look for work in another city. Duff’s father is a bitter broken man, afflicted by alcoholism, chronic unemployment, depression, and high blood pressure. He hardly recognizes his son during the first visit, and although there are tentative efforts at friendly talk, he ultimately tells his son to leave. In the second visit, he is so drunk that he can hardly stand, and he suffers a stroke, dying in Duff’s car on the way to the hospital. We can infer that Duff’s father was afflicted by the same problems that Duff has encountered—difficulty in finding work, unhappiness with the narrow set of roles and behaviors allowed him in a predominantly white society, chafing at an environment of disrespect and oppression. Duff knows that his father represents one possible future for him.

The father-son issue is further complicated when Duff reveals to Josie that he has a son. He sends the boy’s mother money each month but goes for two years without seeing the boy. When he finally does visit, he discovers that the mother has left town and left the child in a neighbor’s care. He rebuffs Josie’s suggestions that he bring the boy home to live with them. He is therefore replicating the same pattern of absent fatherhood that his own father followed.

Nothing but a Man displays all the reasons why Duff might feel beaten down and why he might turn out like his father—drunk, bitter, estranged. Finally, it is his father’s death that convinces him not to follow the same path. His love for Josie and his desire not to follow that path lead him to return to Josie with his son in tow, intent on the struggle to make a life with her and to hold his head up, to be a black man in a white world, as difficult as that might be. The implication, as the film ends, is that he will try to set an example and stand up against the whites in the town where he and Josie live.

Nothing Bu a Man at moments is slow and awkward, and there are occasional pauses and plodding moments, a few melodramatic moments. But for the most part it is extremely effective in portraying the limiting forces that Duff faces, and that ultimately he refuses to allow to defeat him. Some might find the end of the film too optimistic, an obligatory happy ending. Instead, the conclusion strikes a necessary note of determination and resolve. Facing the problems he faces—of class divisions, broken family histories and difficult parental relationships, the constrictions of a society that refuses to accept him on his own terms—he is presented both as the representative American black man and as the example of hope and resolve that will lead black America forward. But the film is not a call to arms, by any means, but rather a call for understanding and compassion not just of the man of the film’s title but of the society and the forces that oppress and hold him down.

The film makes excellent use of setting—landscapes, cityscapes—to depict the world in which Duff lives. It begins with images of Duff and colleagues driving spikes as they lay new railroad tracks. Several panoramas of junkyards superimposed against the skylines of a large city, further superimposed against Duff’s face, help explain the forces that oppose him. The film never names the part of the South in which it is set. Characters mention the North, and it is clear that the action is taking place somewhere in the South. But the cinematography focuses us on the locations and the places where the characters work and live—the school where Josie works, the cotton field where Duff briefly considers picking cotton, the mill and the gas station and the pharmacy. It therefore evokes a vivid sense of place without specifying where the place is. The film’s “place” is, ultimately, a generic South whose name does not matter. For a low budget black and white film, the cinematography in Nothing but a Man is impressive and highly effective. So too is the low-key soundtrack, drawn from 60s era Motown—it tells us what the characters are listening to, gives us a sense of their emotional states of mind and their musical interests, locates the film in a particular time frame, but it does not dominate the film nor does it, as is the case with some later films about African Americans (Hustle and Flow is an example), in any way become a substitute for the problems the characters grapple with.

The setting of Nothing but a Man emphasizes the world of the industrial white man—of finance, industry, technology—that excludes and oppresses and ultimately challenges Duff to be the “man” that the movie shows him struggling to be.

Infamous

Infamous is more a study of Truman Capote and his relationship with the two men who murdered the Clutter family than of his writing of In Cold Blood. The film Capote focused more narrowly on the character of the author and his deepening involvement in the writing of the book. It argued that Capote exploited the two murderers, and others, so that he could produce the book—the notion was that he ruthlessly used other people’s lives, and deaths, to feather his own fame and success as an author. Both films suggest that the experience of writing In Cold Blood transformed Capote and damaged him as well. Capote suggested a gradual corruptive transformation in the writer, while Infamous offers another explanation.

Infamous followed Capote by a year, though both films were made around the same time. This is unusual, to have two films made more or less simultaneously, on the same subject, with many of the same characters. The two films complement one another rather than cove the same precise territory. Capote offers a sometimes cold and clinical analysis of the author, while Infamous is more humane and compassionate in its treatment. It also seems to be more speculative.

Infamous begins and ends with Capote writing down the title of his novel Answered Prayers, which he was beginning to write before he learned of the Clutter murders, and which he struggled to finish through the remainder of his life after the publication of In Cold Blood. The title carries a certain irony—irony that Capote’s chance reading of the short newspaper article on the murders led to his discovery of the subject for his greatest work, irony that he never finished the book called Answered Prayers—not finishing the book was the price he paid for In Cold Blood.

Infamous begins by showing us the social gadfly Truman Capote and his circle of women friends in New York—Diana Vreeland, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and others. We see how he loves hearing the details of their private lives and how he gleefully violates their confidences by passing on their secrets to others. He feeds on their love affairs and disappointments. He charms and insinuates himself into their lives. He begs them for news about scandals. Later, as he gathers information about the Clutter murders, he shares his discoveries with these same women—in a sense, another kind of gossip.

This same kind of charm ultimately enables Capote to win his way into the graces of the Dewey family and other residents of the small Kansas town with his gossipy stories about Humphey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Jones, John Huston, and other actors.

Infamous hypothesizes that Perry Smith and Capote developed a close relationship, that Smith fell in love with Capote, who may have Capote reciprocated, at least emotionally. The film thereby sidesteps (though not entirely) the idea that Capote exploited Smith and Hitchcock in the writing of In Cold Blood. Capote is torn in Infamous by his realization that his great work cannot be published until the murderers are executed and by the fact that when the book is published, it will be at the price of Perry’s death. Both films show Capote distancing himself from the murderers, refusing to answer their calls and letters, though Infamous implies this is because he felt helpless rather than because he had finished with them, or at least finished with Perry.

The film emphasizes how Capote and Perry Miller felt of abandoned by their parents, especially their fathers. This draws them together. Similarly, Harper Lee and Capote are connected by their efforts to finish novels—Lee has already finished To Kill a Mockingbird by the time the film begins, and she is struggling to write another novel—one she never finished—throughout the film. She talks about how writing takes a lot out of a writer, quoting Frank Sinatra on how every time Judy Garland sang a part of her died. She suggests that the same can be true for writers and that when Smith and Hickock were executed, Capote in a sense died with them. There is an implication in some abstract sense that Lee’s inability to finish her book, which at one point she tells Capote “won’t come together,” is connected to Capote’s failure to finish Answered Prayers, or at least in some sense explained by it. It is Lee in Infamous, as it was Lee in Capote, who tries to reason with Capote about the difference between fact and fiction and who confronts him with the suggestion that he might be toying with the lives of his subjects. In Capote it is this exploitation that leads to Capote’s corruption—his purported indifference to the lives of the people he writes about; in Infamous this blurring of truth and fiction leads Capote to involve himself in the life of one of the murderers to such an extent that he becomes, in a sense, his own victim.

Capote tells his editor that he wants to write an article about the town where the murders occurred so that he can examine the loss of trust in a small town—a topic that ties him to the small town of the South where he lived and grew up.

Infamous makes good use of Kansas as a setting. There are numerous shots of people standing in relief against the Kansas sky, especially at sunset, and the film therefore gives a sense of what it is that Capote is learning about the town and the people who live in it. It’s surprising that a man as openly gap and effeminate as Capote—the film suggests that he reveled in his effeminacy, laughing when townspeople mistake him for a “strange woman.”

There is a documentary frame to the film, where a series of interviews apparently conducted after Capote’s death with the various people he knew—Vreeland, Lee, Alvin Dewey, and others—talk about him and the experience of writing In Cold Blood.

The actor who plays Capote is excellent. He captures the exuberance of the young and wild Capote, though at times he seems more of an caricature than an accurate portrait. I preferred the acting of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, whose study of the writer was less mannered and more insightful, but the main character in Infamous was nonetheless excellent, as was Daniel Craige as Perry Smith.

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

Director Kevin Willmott’s faux documentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) considers what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. A parody in ways of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, complete with a wise, avuncular Shelby Foote-type commentator, the film uses actual and fabricated film clips, interviews, photographs, and narratives to tell its story. Historical figures such as Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Harriet Tubman, Walt Whitman are interspersed with figures invented for the documentary. (The actual footage is taken out of context, understandably). The film is presented as a BBC documentary about Confederate history, suppressed in America until the public demands to see it. It is periodically interrupted by commercials that make the effect of a documentary shown on American television more convincing.

According to the documentary, the tide turned for the South in the Civil War when Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin successfully negotiates with the British and French governments to bring their armies into the war on the Confederate side. As a result, the South wins the Battle of Gettysburg, takes Washington, sacks and burns Northern cities such as Boston and New York, and wins the war. Lincoln flees for his life with the assistance of Harriet Tubman, but they are captured before they can enter Canada. Lincoln is imprisoned and later exiled to Canada while Tubman is hanged. Jefferson Davis becomes the revered senior leader and conscience of the nation.

According to the scenario in this film, the Confederate victory leads the new government to mandate the institution of slavery throughout the United States. Northerners who do not purchase slaves are required to pay high taxes. Anyone who has black blood is legislatively declared a slave. Chinese workers in the West are enslaved by their employers, with government approval. Congress declares that America is a Christian nation, and non-Christians are expelled, except for a small number of Jewish Americans allowed to live on a “reservation” in Long Island. The Confederate America becomes a nation built on racial purity and white supremacy, and the notion many Southerners held before the Civil War that slavery was a benign and civilizing institution becomes widely accepted.

According to Willmott, American history would have developed in ways that are both different from and parallel to actual history. The Confederate States seek to expand into the South American continent. They win the war against Native Americans, who are essentially wiped out. American leaders and Adolf Hitler become allies, and the American nation does not enter the Second World War against Germany as a result. There is a war with Japan. Instead of a Cold War with the Soviet Union (hardly mentioned in the film), hostilities develop with Canada, where many former slaves and abolitionists settle. The C.S.A. erects a “cotton curtain” to prevent border crossing between Canada and the Confederacy, and abolitionist terrorist groups in Canada carry out attacks on the C.S.A. states.

In the 1950s and 1960s, sentiment arises in favor of emancipation, and when John F. Kennedy is elected as a Republican President in 1961, he seems likely to emancipate slaves, but he is assassinated. After a period of unrest and upheaval, most advocates for emancipation and for social change are imprisoned or exiled, and the Confederate nation settles back into stability and complacency.

As this summary suggests, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America offers a detailed and imaginative series of speculations as to what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. Some of the speculations seem likely and reasonable; others do not. One of Wilmott’s major objectives is to argue that although there would have been major differences in American history, many of the same developments would have occurred as well. A brief set of messages shown at the end of the film make clear that many of the products featured in the commercials that occur throughout the film—products with racist brand names like “Sambo”—are in fact the actual brand names of products sold in the United States until well into the 20^th century. Some names still in use, Willmott notes—Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemimah—are camouflaged slave names. His point is that racism, concepts of racial supremacy and racial difference, are engrained in American culture.

In an interview included on the DVD of this film, Willmott states that one of his purposes in the film was to show how history would not have changed. He says that the South was “allowed not to change” after the end of the war—that the rest of the nation changed around it. Such a notion is at the least debatable and in fact is perversely wrongheaded.

Virtually all the actors in the film are unknown. This enhances the authenticity. The film employs a number of well done commercials and interviews—one is an interview with an elderly Lincoln in 1905 (it stretches one’s credulity to believe that Lincoln would have lived to the age of 96 and still been able to speak coherently). Another is a recreation of a D. W. Griffith short feature about the hunt for Lincoln following his flight from Washington. A parody of the Fox television show “Cops” is called “Runaway” and follows Confederate police as they seek to capture escaped slaves.

The low-budget nature of the film also imposes limitations. Many of the episodes or scenes in the film come across as Saturday Night Live sketches, played for laughs (largely based on racist jokes), and the film becomes repetitious and redundant in its continued insistence on the pervasive role of slavery and racism in American society under the C.S.A.

In fact, the film’s emphasis on slavery and racism—as crucial as these issues are in any version of American history—is myopic. According to Willmott, had the C.S.A. won the war and replaced the United States government, it would have devoted all its energies and resources in subsequent years to defending slavery, much as the American South did prior to the Civil War. In Willmott’s version of history, slavery becomes the main product that America markets to the rest of the world. This speculative view is at least plausible, but it also has its flaws. It does not allow for the possibility of progress, change, evolution. Would the C.S.A. never have abolished slavery, especially after the advent of industrial farming equipment made the functions of field slaves unnecessary? The film actually denies the economic context of slavery, insisting instead that in the C.S.A. slavery was an institution necessary to the concept of racial purity. Slavery was a complex phenomenon. It can’t be oversimplified or reduced down to a few platitudes. Would social movements that succeeded in abolishing slavery never have arisen?

One point Willmott seems to be making is that although the Civil War in real American history did abolish slavery, race and issues of racial purity continued to play a crucial role in the national culture. In the DVD interview, he notes that Hurricane Katrina revealed the fact that poverty-stricken people are “invisible” in our culture. He suggests, with good reason, that the nation depends on the invisibility of the poor and on economic disparities that empower some and not others. But his film does not reflect these nuances.

To a certain extent, Willmott’s film also assumes that world history would have developed only in response to the power of the C.S.A. Communism does not arise in the film, and the C.S.A. has no apparent adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, Wilmott’s documentary comes across as a one-note effort. It makes some good and undeniably valid points. But it is also frequently shallow and superficial. Willmott receives plaudits for the originality of his efforts in this film, but not for the accuracy or acuity of his cultural and historical commentaries, though some of them do hit the mark.

Philip Roth’s The Plot against America gives a far more credible (up to a point) alternative history of America based on the idea that Charles Lindbergh runs for president, defeats Roosevelt, and institutes changes that take America to the far right—the nation does not enter WWII and adopts measures that seem aimed towards interning Jews and other minorities. Finally, even Roth cannot carry this speculative scenario through to a conclusion and instead has Lindberg disappear while flying his plane, so that sanity and order are restored to the American nation through what amounts to a deus ex machina device.

Early in the 1960s, the Saturday Evening Post featured a story entitled “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” by MacKinlay Cantor. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America reminded me of Cantor's story, though Willmott’s film is more inventive and creative in its portrayal of alternative history. It also has a sense of humor and wit, though as suggested above these extend only so far before they become repetitive. My recollection is that in the Saturday Evening Post alternative history the Confederate nation does finally abolish slavery.

4 Little Girls

Spike Lee filmed the HBO documentary 4 Little Girls thirty-four years after the event that it chronicles—the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four young girls getting ready for Sunday morning church service died. Their names were Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins. They ranged from eleven to fifteen years in age. The film is basically a series of interviews with members of the families of the girls, leaders of the local and southern Civil Rights movement, and white leaders of the town, including the attorney who defended the accused bomber Robert Edward Chambliss in the 1974 trial and the district attorney, Bill Baxley, who successfully prosecuted him in 1977. 4 Little Girls presents the events in chronological order. It first describes the girls themselves, mainly through the words and memories of their parents and close relatives. It presents a general overview of the racial environment in Birmingham in the 1950s and early 1960s and the development of the local civil rights movement, whose activities centered in the bombed church. The film’s focus gradually widens, but it never wavers from the primary subject of the girls.

Lee pursues the telling o this story in a highly objective manner. He interviews one subject after another, often filming them at close range, so that their faces fill the screen as they talk. Their expressions and tones of voice, the glistening tears that often gather in the family members’ eyes, are effective in conveying the emotions and the grief that more than three decades later continue to well up. Although clearly there are historical and political dimensions to the bombing of the church, dimensions that link the event to the larger context of the civil rights movement in the South and the rest of the United States, Lee does not make this context the focus of the film. Instead he focuses on the family members, the surviving parents, the brothers and sisters, the friends, who knew the dead girls and grieved most deeply for them. As a result 4 Little Girls is above all about a personal and private tragedy that took on wider significance because of the time and place in which it occurred.

The style and method of Four Little Girls is similar to that of When the Levees Break: A Tragedy in Four Acts, Lee's 2006 HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans residents.

Lee’s artful editing, his deft use of a subtle and sometimes hardly apparent musical score, his willingness to let people talk, his careful selection of photographs, newsreel footage, and interview subjects enable him to create a fascinating and emotionally powerful documentary that brings the history alive by never allowing polemic, propaganda, or political agendas to overwhelm the personal and private dimensions of the story. There are a few moments of awkwardness in the film, the main ones being scenes in which an elderly and frail George Wallace attempts to prove his progressive racial views by arguing that he provided free school books for poor black children and that his best friend, Ed, is a black man. Ed, who was apparently a hired companion for the frail Wallace, is summoned on camera twice by Wallace, and the result is embarrassing both for Wallace (who is incapable of seeming anything other than foolish) and for the film. Lee apparently wants to present Wallace both as one of the fundamental forces behind the racist environment that led to the church bombing and also as an aging relic of an old dispensation soon to pass from the scene. The scene seems to take advantage of Wallace's age and frailty, and it should have been omitted or at least significantly abridged. It is similar to Michael Moore’s similarly exploitative interview with a slightly addled Charleton Heston in the film Bowling for Columbine (2002).

Other scenes are more artful, and as a whole the film is skillfully and artfully made. It is far more artful and effective than any film Michael Moore ever made.

The film illustrates the importance of the family and the church as the sustaining center of African American life in Birmingham, as the heart of the civil rights movement, and therefore as the logical target of the bombers. Lee devotes significant time to interviews with the mothers of the dead girls, and with the father of Denise McNair, and these scenes drive home the sad and painful impact of the murders. Mr. McNair narrates an especially poignant scene in which he remembers having to explain to his daughter during the 1950s why she cannot eat at the lunch counter of a segregated Birmingham department store. The eyes of the mothers who still grieve over their daughters, dead more than thirty years, say as much as any number of other scenes in the film.

Contrasted against the family members are the religious and movement leaders—Fred Shuttlesworth, Andrew Young, Martin Luther King—whose decisions inadvertently pulled the girls and their families into martyrdom and history. Lee is careful not to pass judgment in an overt fashion. Often the words of the people he interviews accomplish this. And of course images, photographs, film clips that Lee places on screen while interviewees talk do this too. When the attorney for the bomber talks about how Birmingham in the 1950s was a nice place to live, Lee projects images of lynched black men and of Klansmen on the screen to suggest a different story.

Above and beyond being a film about victims of a tragic incident from the civil rights movement, this film is about the intersection of private lives with a regional and national history. It is about how all of us participate in the making of history and how, sometimes, we pay for participation with our lives, or with the lives of those closest to us.

Is the title of the film a play on the title of the surrealistic play by Picasso, Four Little Girls, written during the 1940s? This is the kind of allusion that Lee would make.

Wise Blood: Novel and Film

Flannery O’Connor’s short novel Wise Blood, the first of two short novels completed during her lifetime, was published in 1952. It was the first major work of her short career. The novel is set in the latter half of the 1940s. at a time when the American South was entering a period of major change. GIs, returned from the Second World War, were taking advantage of the G. I. Bill and entering institutions of higher education. When the graduated, they would enter the work force and contribute to major expansion of the regional and national economy. Institutions of higher education would never be the same and began a period of expansion that continues today. Eisenhower’s interstate road act (1956) formally initiated a period of road building that had been ongoing for some time and that would connect the South with the rest of the nation. Faster and safer airplanes would connect it with the rest of the world. The continued growth of radio and the new industry of television began a leveling process that began to chisel away at many aspects of the distinctive southern character: dialect, lifestyle, isolation. David Halberstam’s book The Fifties discusses the crucial changes that occurred nationally in the 1950s and that contributed significantly to the national character. Some of the changes mentioned here were going on before the novel was published and continued afterwards. The Eisenhower Act is evidence of a trend in road-building that was in evidence when Wise Blood appeared.

One of the major changes that continued and intensified in this area (a trend that had begun decades before but that now accelerated) was urban growth. Southern cities offered excitement, connections with other people and other parts of the nation, and jobs. As agriculture increasingly relied on mechanization, therefore requiring a smaller work force, people who decades before would have lived out their lives without ever entering a large city now moved there. A major population shift began to occur.

Socially, culturally, demographically, these changes heralded the birth of the modern South. I mark 1945 and the end of World War II as the starting date for that new era. For Flannery O’Connor, the changes were symptoms of a shift away from spirituality towards secularism. This shift from the traditional to the modern, from a way of life where matters of the spirit were important, to a way of life where for many people religion had lost its importance, if it continued to be evident at all, occasioned struggles and conflicts that became the central focus of O’Connor’s fiction. They are at the heart of the novel Wise Blood. These changes are hardly specific and limited to the American South. They began with the Renaissance and represent a marked distinction between the medieval world and the modern. It is this difference that O’Connor was most interested in.

When Hazel Motes returns from four years of service in the military, presumably service in the Second World War (he was wounded, apparently, but does not want to reveal where on his body), he discovers an altered and transformed world. The small town near where he grew up has almost disappeared. Everyone has moved to the city. The house where he grew up is a broken down shack. His mother had died before he left for military service, and now all that remains of her is the chiffarobe on which he leaves his note threatening that anyone who takes the chiffarobe will be “hunted down and killed.” It’s evident in both the film and the novel that his family has been gone from the house a long time. One can imagine their leaving almost as soon as Hazel left for military service. He did not stay in touch, nor did they with him, and therefore he has no idea what happened or where they have gone. His world has wholly vanished. In the novel, O’Connor tells us that Hazel sleeps the night through on the kitchen room floor. In the film, Huston shows Hazel gazing at the family cemetery where his grandfather, the preacher, lies buried—the preacher whose memory haunts him throughout the film. Whatever it is that happened to Hazel in the war, along with the disappearance of the world of his family and his childhood, clearly contributes to the new religion he goes to spread in Taulkinham.

O’Connor intensifies the atmosphere of change in the novel with descriptions of commercialism and technology (the potato peeler salesman, the movie theaters), sexual looseness, false prophets, and images of apes, monkeys, mummies, and zoo animals. Why the references to animals and monkeys? One of the concerns of the novel is the question of the nature of man without a spiritual existence. The soul, O’Connor might argue, is what distinguishes the human world from the animal world. When Enoch Emery enters the zoo and looks suspiciously at various animals, especially the chimpanzee, he is looking in a sense at reflections of himself. In the modern world, governed by science, belief in scientific theories such as evolution, which argue for the interconnections of the animal and human worlds, these images have a specific meaning. Enoch’s fascination with the mummy, which actually once was (presumably) a human being, builds this theme. His donning of the gorilla costume at the end of the novel is its culmination.

John Huston’s adaptation moves the time of the story from the late 1940s to around 1970. Rather than returning from the Second World War, Hazel is returning from Vietnam. Thus, we can if we wish see him as a wounded war veteran (shades of Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country) But Huston is faithful, or largely so, to the text of the novel. Just as in the novel, with a slightly altered sequence of events, Hazel comes home, visits his abandoned family homestead, and recognizes that the world where he once lived has disappeared. Because of his insistence on fidelity to O’Connor’s text, the themes of change in the novel remain in the film, though in fact the South of the film has already largely undergone the changes that had been underway when the novel was published in 1952. By modernizing the story, Huston forfeits a certain degree of authenticity. In the film, it is not so much the changed world that Hazel must cope with as it is the modern city, and all the evils and temptations that it offers. Hazel goes to the big city because there is nowhere else for him to go, but also to preach the new religion, the Church of Christ without Christ. By re-dating the story, Huston forfeits some of the logic and sense that lay behind O’Connor’s portraitures of Hazel and Enoch and of the other characters as well. In the long run, this does not much affect the film, which succeeds in large part because of Huston’s skill as a director and his insistence on presenting in the film the tone, characters, and themes of O’Connor’s novel, pretty much using the same terms with which she presented them. trying to cope and adjust to his life back from the war.

Huston succeeds in modernizing most aspects of the novel, but there are a few exceptions. Mrs. Leora Watts charges $4.00 for a night of pleasure in her bed. Even given that it is Leora, $4 seems a small charge for 1970. Also, the car that Hazel buys (in the novel, we are told that it is an Essex, an automobile that was manufactured in America between 1918 and 1932) looks as if it could have been a jalopy in 1952, not to mention 1970.

O’Connor presents in Wise Blood three different but related avenues to belief in the modern world. Huston’s film preserves these, but because it leaves out details, especially about Enoch Emery and Onnie Jay Holy, the distinctions are blurred. In Huston’s film, Hazel Motes is clearly the main character, with Enoch as a kind of sidekick who moves in and out of the film, disappearing permanently in the gorilla costume towards the end. In the novel, O’Connor parallels Hazel and Enoch. Although not of equal importance (Hazel is, because of his nature, the ultimate focus of the story) they are of more nearly equal importance.

Huston’s film obscures the religious themes in the novel without removing them. One can recognize O’Connor’s themes and concerns in his film because he has been so careful in adopting the novel. Yet the differences between Hazel and Enoch are much clearer, and more thoroughly outlined and explained in the novel than in the film. Huston’s characters in Wise Blood are country folk come to the city in search of whatever adventure or opportunity might be there, but they are also deeply in search of meaning, a way of understanding and explaining the world that has changed unexpectedly on them. For O’Connor, in addition to that theme, there is the additional theme of the nature of faith and belief in the modern world. She presents that theme far more clearly in her novel than Huston does in his film, because Huston has chosen a slightly different emphasis.

Why is Huston’s film a successful adaptation? First, it’s clear that the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald understood and appreciated the novel. He made a few major changes, such as changing the action of the film from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, downplaying the character of Enoch and leaving out several scenes such as one at the swimming pool near the zoo, but for the most part he retained the important characters, setting, themes, images, and moods. Fitzgerald has written screenplays for only a few films. In addition to Wise Blood, he contributed to the screenplay for The Passion of the Christ, a 1998 television version of Moby Dick , and a 1994 television version of Heart of Darkness. His involvement in The Passion evinces a willingness to deal with close to the bone religious content, and that willingness is I think a key to the success he had with O’Connor’s novel.  She was a religious novelist, and her novel Wise Blood is dealing with concerns about the state of religious faith in the modern world. Fitzgerald does not veer away from that subject matter, although he and Huston do seem to simplify and perhaps to obscure some of the themes O’Connor was exploring. Huston himself was a lapsed Irish Catholic. He brought that background to bear in his adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead. He may have been able to view O’Connor’s novel through the same theological lens that she did, or at least he may have been able to understand her perspective. In the film, Huston plays the role of Hazel Mote’s grandfather. He comports himself well in that minor role, which he fills with an apparent relish.

The script is a minimalist kind of effort. It follows O’Connor’s own dialogue fairly closely, though some lines are altered or moved from one character in the novel to another in the film. But for the most part it is O’Connor’s dialogue that the film employs.

The film’s setting is well chosen. Much of the film was shot in Macon, Georgia, and if you visit that city even today you can recognize areas that the film portrayed. The setting provides much local color of a sort that is suited for the story—movie theatres, crosswalks, churched, run-down boarding houses.

I have always had to give thought to the question of whether the musical tune that Huston chose for his theme is appropriate—“The Tennessee Waltz.” There is a sentimentality to the tune that threatens at a few moments to infest the film, but instead it has the effect of encouraging the viewer to see Hazel with a bit more empathy and sympathy the viewer would otherwise feel. On one occasion bluegrass music turns a scene with Enoch Emery almost into slapstick comedy—this is when he is stealing the mummy from the “Mvsevm.” The film makes Enoch out to be more of a clown than the novel does, and it does not fully investigate the nature of his obsession with the money. In general, however, the “Tennessee Waltz” theme invests the film’s treatment of its characters with a sympathy and humanism that one might be tempted to argue is missing in O’Connor’s novels. O’Connor was very effective at portraying characters but not especially willing to show them any sympathy. Witness the fate of the family at the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or even of Hazel Motes’ fate at the end of her novel.

Huston himself excelled as a director of literary adaptations. One of my favorite by him is the 19657 version of Moby Dick. The film is marred by poor special effects, but it has a genuine intelligence in its treatment of the story, and a respect for the story itself. Huston apparently felt the story was worth telling because it was a good story, and his treatment of Melville’s novel, as well as of O’Connor’s, reflects that respect. Another successful adaptation is his 1986 film The Dead, adapted from the story by James Joyce, the last story in his book Dubliners.

Huston in the film uses mostly minor actors, some of them amateurs. Harry Dean Stanton and Ned Beatty are the major names in the film, though Dourif was emerging as a known actor after his rolls in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings. None of these three was an acting phenomenon, a celebrity, so there is no actor in the film whose celebrity overwhelms the acting and the story. The part of Onnie Jay Holy is the kind of role at which Beatty excels. Dourif was not a major actor at the time of the film. In particular the roles of Sabbath Lily and of the boarding house keeper (played by Atlanta actress Mary Nell Santacroce) were excellent. (The film strips away the deceit and underhandedness of the boarding house keeper in the novel. The film’s house lady is more sympathetic, less devious than her counterpart in the novel). The casting allowed the actors in this film to inhabit their roles in a transparent way, so that they became the roles they played—they were not celebrities playing their roles. This is an argument in favor of casting unknowns or little knowns in film roles—so that their public personae do not run away with their parts.

Wise Blood is an excellent novel. It improves with each reading. By sticking close to the text of the novel, the movie was able to exploit and appropriate its strengths. The film is distinctive for the same reasons as the novel. It effectively projects O’Connor’s vision of the modern South, even though it is set two decades later than her novel. Wise Blood is one of a number of remarkable films made during the 1970s, one of the two great decades in American cinema, the other being the 1930s.

The fact that this film is not available on DVD is most unfortunate!