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.

Hounddog

Hounddog (2007; dir. Deborah Kampmeier) takes place in a rural Southern landscape from around 1960. The vegetation is lush and green, with forests and overgrown fields. Children swim in a river. We see, often close to each other, ramshackle shacks and shotgun-type houses where blacks and poor whites live, and much larger, decorous white houses with columns. Farmers work the fields. Black men work with horses and socialize among themselves. Early scenes evoke an idyllic Southern past of rural and natural childhood innocence. They define the South in a series of stereotypical images, focused on a young girl named Lewellen. Even as these images are set in place, the film undertakes to undermine and also reinforce them. A boy lets a girl look at his private parts. He indignantly explains about a bruise on his thigh that “My daddy don’t hit me.” The girl shows a bruise on her leg that she says her daddy caused. The opening image of the film is a garter snake crawling up the braches of a tree. In the background, gradually coming into focus, two children are walking. The idyllic natural paradise, the two innocents, the snake in the garden—all the elements needed for a drama about loss of innocence and entry into adulthood.

Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) lives with her grandmother who, though loving, is severe and puritanical and tends to believe the worst of her granddaughter. (Piper Laurie plays the grandmother, reprising almost exactly her role as the mother in Carrie, 1976). The girl’s father is an indifferent and slovenly farmer who is having a relationship with the sister of his departed wife, who is either dead or a runaway--we don’t know which. The girl is friends with a young boy her age named Buddy. They swim in the nearby creek and exchange kisses in an innocent, experimental way. She is also friends with a black man named Charles (Afemo Omilami). He cares for horses, is a folk doctor, and plays in a small band with friends.

Lewellen is an obsessive fan of Elvis Presley. She does a passable imitation of Elvis singing “Hound Dog.” She gyrates and slinks around like Elvis on stage. Her grandmother tells her that Elvis sings Satan’s music but is content to listen to him singing gospel songs.

Is this a coming of age film in which Lewellen learns about the difficult realities of life? Is this a film in which a young girl who idolizes a famous singer gets to meet him? Is it a racial drama? Is it about class differences? Is it about sexual abuse? At one moment or the other it might be any one of these, or all.

Hounddog lacks focus and coherence. Lewellen and her friendship with Buddy and Charles give the film the unity it has. Only late in the film, when something terrible happens, does a plot seem to materialize, and even then it not well prepared for by preceding events.

The flaws in Hounddog, beyond those of incoherence, stem from its reliance on stereotypes and poorly developed characters. Lewellen’s immediate family is poor white, and this means a hodgepodge fusion of religious fundamentalism, freewheeling sex and sexual abuse, drunkenness, and general cussedness. The black man that Lewellen is friends with loves the blues, has a deep knowledge of folk medicine (he treats snake bites with serum he has cooked up on his own), and is possessed of a natural wisdom that enables him to advise her on her life.

Lewellen’s life is a continuing misery. Her grandmother is suspicious of her and wants to control all aspects of her life. Her father comes and goes, abuses the woman he briefly lives with, and after he is struck by lightning becomes simple-minded to an astounding extent (when Lewellen cuts her hair, he cuts his so that they will look alike—when he finds her missing from the house, he wanders out into the town, stark naked, looking for her). Her friendship with Buddy is an important part of her life, but he betrays her in a cruel way. Her aunt—her mother’s sister--abandons her, after promising never to leave.

For the most part the music of Elvis is incidental in the film. The girl’s love of Presley’s music is childlike and obsessive. It does give Charles the chance to explain to her that Elvis in singing “Hound Dog” is really singing a song written by and originally sung by Big Mama Thornton; he implies that it is possible for a white person to sing the blues, but this idea goes nowhere until the last scenes of the film. One night, while she is walking alone down a dirt road, a pink Cadillac driven by Elvis Presley passes her—he waves at her. Does she imagine this moment? Are we supposed to believe it real? It seems gratuitous.

Buddy wants to prove his love to Lewellen and promises to get her a ticket to a concert nearby where Elvis is performing. She holds him to the promise and refuses to talk to him until he finds her a ticket. He finds an older boy who says he will give her a ticket if she will sing “Hound Dog” and dance like Elvis for him. When he insists that she take off her clothes and dance naked, she agrees. He rapes her. A film that seemed to be for its first hour about the difficulties of a poor white girl’s life suddenly darkens and takes a severe turn, and never really catches up with itself.

Snakes and crab apples are important and obvious motifs. They signify loss of innocence. But snakes also signify the danger that is looming unseen in the tall grass that Lewellen’s grandmother warns her about—poisonous snakes lurk in the grass, she says. The thick grass and the snakes hidden there signify the dark and ominous dangers of adult life that Lewellen has encountered. She is so traumatized by the rape that she can barely speak, and lies unconscious on her bed. Snakes crawl through her window, slithering over and around her, until Charles somehow senses what is going on and comes into her house and rescues her. Snakes, he tells her, represent the inner life in her that needs to wake up and come out.

There is much in this film that makes little sense. It’s not impossible that a 12-year old girl would agree to sing and dance naked in front of an older boy she has never met—a boy who lurks menacingly in the dark shadows of a barn and whose face she can’t even see--but it’s certainly unlikely, and the film does not present Lewellen as the kind of imbecile who would agree to do something so stupid just for a concert ticket. Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of 12-year old girls, or underestimate the strength of Lewellen’s desire to attend an Elvis Presley concert. Maybe the point here is that Lewellen is far more innocent and naïve than she seems. It is unlikely that in the rural South of 1960 a black man could enter the house and bedroom of a young white girl and carry her away unchallenged. Or that Elvis Presley would be driving a pink Cadillac down a dirt road.

When Charles coaxes Lewellen into singing the blues, bringing her inner self out, the song she sings is “Hound Dog.” Not the Elvis Presley version but the Big Mama Thornton version. I suppose this signifies that through hurt and suffering Lewellen truly discovers the source of the blues, which she sings on the basis of lived experience rather than of a commercial recording she might have heard on the radio. This scene in which Lewellen learns to sing the blues is presented almost as a kind of ritual—Charles and the other black men sit and watch, as if they know what is going on, as if they’re party to the cultic knowledge driving the scene. But it’s a poor way of resolving Lewellen’s problems and of bringing the film to some sort of point. Those wise old black men always know how to rescue the white folks. The underlying racism here is clear.

What’s worse, with all its straining for realism, Hounddog inexplicably seems obliged to provide a happy ending. The soror ex machina it resorts to is the unconvincing stuff of fairy tales.

Here we have another film in which black characters rescue white characters. This is the second such film Dakota Fanning has appeared in—The Secret Life of Bees was the other. With all of its problems, that film was more coherent and featured better acting than Hounddog. Fanning pretty much plays the same character she played in Secret Life, with various details and circumstances altered to fit the needs of the plot.

Hounddog recalls works by Erskine Caldwell as well as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.

Brewster McCloud

Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970) in ways is a precursor to Nashville (1975). It takes place in Houston and much of the action occurs in or near the Astrodome, at the time of the film a symbol of the city’s yearning towards cosmopolitan trendiness and economic power. The Astrodome is a symbol of the commercialization of sports and of late capitalistic excess. It occupies in the film something of the same role and function as the faux Parthenon in Nashville, where the Parthenon represents the city’s aspirations for prominence and culture beyond its reach. Brewster McCloud is notable for its weirdness, its peculiar lack of focus, and its seeming incoherence. It puzzled audiences and reviewers, who were prepared for something else following on the success of Mash (1970).

What this film has in common with the aforementioned examples is its contention that corporate America, capitalism, and commercialism in general are hostile to individual initiative, personal conscience, and the creative spirit.

Like Nashville, Brewster McCloud is set in the American South, or at the least on its western margins. The events in both films take place in cities associated at the time with the notion that the South, especially the urban South, would become the commercial and economic heart of the United States. Subsequent developments intervened. A long period of recession in the oil industry denied this hope to Houston, while Nashville fell behind the burgeoning economic engines of Atlanta, Birmingham, and Charlotte, though it remains today a healthy metropolitan area.

The Astrodome in Brewster McCloud is also a symbol of modern America. It’s the home of the city’s professional baseball and football teams. It’s adorned with commercial advertisements for various well known products. Altman drives home the symbolism of the Astrodome in a number of ways. Early in the film Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz, sings the national anthem in accompaniment with an all African-American high school band. She berates the band when it doesn’t play precisely as she wants it to, and finally the band members simply ignore her. The Astrodome is also where Brewster McCloud lives and where he works on the machine that he hopes will allow him to fly away. The name of the dome suggests the American space program, whose headquarters is in Houston—this link to Brewster’s aspirations is hardly coincidental. In the final scene, Brewster launches his flying apparatus into flight and, pursued by police and security guards, flies in circles around the interior of the stadium. When he cannot find a way out, he grows tired, falls to the ground, and is killed.

Brewster’s aspiration to fly connects him to Icarus who in Greek mythology flies too close to the sun and dies when his wax-fashioned wings melt as a result. His desire to fly and to leave the corrupting commercial world of contemporary America behind connects him to creativity, self-expression, and freedom. (Brewster’s death echoes Brueghel’s “Landscape and The Fall of Icarus.”) The woman who protects and counsels him (the film implies she is an angel; she is played by Sally Kellerman, who portrayed Hot Lips O’Houlihan in Mash) warns him against losing his innocence. He must remain pure and chaste. Ultimately, an agent of contemporary American commercialism, a tour guide in the Astrodome, played by Shelley Duvall, seduces him, and he loses his innocence and the protection of Kellerman as a result.

Much of the humor and satire in Brewster McCloud is broad and slapstick. Although there are elements of this clumsy and broadly drawn humor in Mash, the screenplay kept the film in focus, at least until the football game in the final scenes. Altman rewrote much of the original screenplay for Brewster McCloud, and according to many accounts there is much improvisation in the film.

For Altman, contemporary America is chaos, car chases, bureaucratic corruption, greed, commercialism, loud marching bands, and a compulsive conformist pressure against individual expression. These are the forces that foil Brewster’s aerial ambitions and bring him crashing fatally to the ground.

A subplot in the film involves a serial killer who leaves his victims covered with bird droppings. The victims turn out to be people who threaten Brewster’s plans to build a flying machine, who are cruel to birds, or who are simply offensive. One example is Margaret Hamilton’s character, Daphne Heap, who keeps a large outdoor cage of birds in the backyard. Another is the landlord Abraham Wright, who collects rent on substandard retirement homes and berates the tenants when they fall short in their payments. Wright (Stacy Keach) is a Scrooge-like old man with long stringy white hair. Confined to a wheelchair, he is pushed and chauffeured around town by Brewster. It’s unclear how he is killed, but his death shortly follows his outburst of anger over “Bird shit! Bird shit on my car!”

Birds are a central motif in the film. License plates of the major characters include the names of birds. Scenes of a professor (Rene Auberjonois) lecturing on birds are sprinkled throughout the film. The professor’s behavior becomes increasingly eccentric and extreme, until, finally, in late scenes he is behaving like a bird. Sally Kellerman’s character apparently has wings. She sometimes caws like a bird. And, of course, Brewster himself wants to take flight.

In response to the serial murders, the Houston police bring in a Los Angeles detective, Lieutenant Frank Shafft (Michael Murphy) to assist their investigations. As competent as he seems, at least in comparison to the locals, he’s no more able to find the killer. Car chases that go on for too long are one result—when Shafft accidentally drives his cruiser into a lake, he shoots himself. The incompetence of the police are another dimension of the governmental and economic institutions that conspire to oppress the individual.

Brewster’s role as the killer (he confesses it to Shelley Duvall, who tells the police) subverts any allegory we might want to find in the film. The notion of a carefree spirit who wants to fly away from the sordid limitations of the world and is also a murderer doesn’t make sense. No one actually tries to prevent Brewster from building his machine. It’s the fact that he is living illegally in the Astrodome, and that he will try to fly his machine in the Astrodome, that cause him problems. He is a trespasser there after all. His role as a murderer might have remained undetected had he not confessed to Duvall after they slept together. The obstacles that prevent him from finding freedom and achieving his dream are the obstacles that affect all humanity—our mortal human coils, the obligations and considerations of living in an imperfect human world. As flawed and corrupt as almost all the characters in the film are, they are not ultimately the anomalies. Brewster is.

The problem Altman explores here is the division between life and art, life and the ideal. It’s the division that Keats explores in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” Brewster wants to achieve the ideal, his dream of flight, but to do so he has to murder and otherwise deceive and dissemble and live an existence that involves no physical interaction with the rest of humanity. Life and art in this instance cancel one another out.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

This film is rich with tormented people. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967; dir. John Huston) is based on the novel by Carson McCullers, for whom the South was a place of repression, prejudice, and private angst. What filmmakers have picked up on in her fiction, Huston foremost among them, is repression. Huston’s film earnestly endeavors to ensure that no one miss its presence.

The film is set in a Southern town with a military base. Because McCullers grew up in Columbus, GA, we can assume that the base she had in mind was Fort Benning, but the film offers no clue as to exactly where it might be set, other than in a Southern town. The military in this film is an agent of control and masculinity, though the conflicts it shows have little to do with the military. Instead they have to do with sexual roles and sexual identity. A central motif is the horse, a symbol of masculine sexual power. Lenora Penderton (Elizabeth Tailor) can control the stallion she rides, but when her husband, Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando), tries to ride it, he loses control and the horse runs away with him. He beats it violently in retaliation. This is a general representation of their marriage. Lenora refers to her husband as “prissy.” He tells her that she “disgusts” him, in response to which she languorously removes her clothing and slinks away naked up the stairs to her bedroom, aware that he won’t follow. (This is the best scene in the film, and the only time when the Elizabeth Tailor mystique is evident). They sleep in separate bedrooms. He threatens her but never carries through. In the Penderton marriage, gender roles seem reversed. She enjoys riding her stallion, drinking hard, and playing cards with the man next door (with whom she’s also sleeping). He, on the other hand, practices martial gestures before the mirror. He becomes increasingly fascinated with a private who tends to his wife’s horse, and who also sneaks into her bedroom at night to hold her undergarments and to stare at her while she sleeps.

In the U. S. Army of 1967, there is no ambiguity about gender role expectations. Men are supposed to be men. Yet the film offers examples of men who don’t fit that conventional role: Major Penderton is one. Another is Capt. Murray Weincheck, a relatively minor character, but his interests are described in such a way as to imply that he is homosexual, or at least far outside the desired military definition of what is masculine: he loves art and music, he holds receptions at his home, he values a collection of silver spoons, and so on. It’s so obvious that he doesn’t fit the military mold that other officers talk about him. (Weincheck’s name suggests that he may be Jewish: is that also a reason why he doesn’t fit the Army mold?). Finally his commanding officer advises him that he has no future in the military, and he decides to leave the army. The private who is so fascinating to Weldon is another ambiguous individual. On the one hand he is a peeping tom who lurks outside the Penderton house at night and spies on Lenora while she sleeps. On the other hand, the Pendertons see him riding a horse naked, and Major Penderton sees him sunbathing in the nude. The film implies without stating outright that the private is aware of the major’s interest in him, but leaves ambiguous what his reaction might be.

The U. S. Army also brings with it a clear set of social standards, priorities, and protocols. Officers and military men do not socialize with one another, for one. Officers and their families do socialize. However, wives are expected to remain faithful to their husbands, and there is no room for unconventional sexual relationships. This is a context for the film, but not one that it explores deeply. Instead it focuses on the characters—the Penderton marriage; the affair between Lenora and Colonel Langdon; Major Penderton’s attraction to the private; the Langdon marriage; the character of Alison Langdon, who cut off her nipples with gardening shears after her baby’s death; her friendship with Anacleto, a Filipino homosexual who is her personal confidant and servant. One might also expect that the Southern setting could reinforce the atmosphere of repression that permeates the film, but for the most part this doesn’t happen. Several characters, including Leonora and her husband, have Southern accents, but their backgrounds and upbringings for the most part do not seem factors in what transpires. The environment of the South has little to do with what happens in the film, though perhaps we are supposed to see in the forces of repression, puritanism, prejudice, and rigid social boundaries a connection.

An example of what happens when a character openly rebels against a social role is evident when Alison Langdon decides to leave her husband. She knows he is having an affair with Leonora. He decides she is having a nervous breakdown and has her committed to a mental institution. Does he to this to avoid the shame and embarrassment he’ll suffer when she leaves him and when his affair with Lenora becomes publically known? She dies of a heart attack soon after he leaves her at the mental institution.

As a film Reflections in a Golden Eye is confused: it doesn’t know what to make of the homosexuals it portrays. Do they suffer from repression in a world that narrowly defines what male and female mean? Or are they agents of perversion, worthy of ridicule or worse? With characters such as Major Penderton and Captain Weincheck, the film might seem to lead towards the former alternative—these are men whose normal inclinations are suffocated and hidden by the lives and roles they live--but in the character Anacleto, a mincing homosexual stereotype, the film also leans in the latter direction. It is Colonel Langdon who embodies the conventional American male in this film, and it is towards him that Lenora gravitates as an alternative to her weak and ambiguous husband. However much sympathy for Major Penderton and Captain Weincheck the film might show, however much discernment it might have about the rigid gender definitions forced on them, all the fundamental signs and indications suggest that this film views them as a perversion that underlies the veneer of military and Southern society more than they are victims of repression.

The film ends in an outburst of violence that doesn’t seem earned. Major Penderton sees the private entering his wife’s bedroom. He finds him gazing at Lenora as she sleeps and shoots him. This moment might represent the cathartic reassertion of Penderton’s masculine self, roused by jealousy to defend his wife and his sexual turf. Or it might be simple jealousy that the man to whom he was attracted instead was attracted to a woman. Or it might be a release of anger and passion in response to the repressive forces at work in the film. Lenora screams in horror, repeatedly, over what has happened, and these screams bring the film to its conclusion. The incoherence of this final moment is a fitting expression of the film’s overall incoherence.

Reflections in a Golden Eye appeared in the same decade as a number of films dramatizing in Freudian terms the powers of repression. Examples: The Haunting (1963), based on the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, concerns domestic repression, while The Children’s Hour (1961), based on a 1934 Lillian Hellman play, concerns alleged and repressed lesbianism. Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), based on the D. H. Lawrence novel, and The Sergeant (1968), deal more directly with male bonding and male love than does Reflections in a Golden Eye.

Ballast

In Ballast (2008; dir. Lance Hammer) a small group of African Americans in the rural Mississippi delta react to an unexpected suicide. To one character the dead man was a brother and business partner, for another he was an ex-husband, for a third he was a father. The film has a documentary quality. The actors are not professionals, and their acting style is flat, emotionless, and repressed, as if they have been encouraged to underplay their roles. The film title alludes metaphorically (I am guessing) to the heavy emotional and personal baggage these characters carry. Certainly one point of the film is to show that life for African Americans in the rural South is as difficult as it would be in big cities. Some problems from big cities have infiltrated their lives. The boy James (JimMyron Ross) is flirting with crime and drug use—he steals his Uncle Lawrence’s pistol and repeatedly robs him at gunpoint. He keeps a motor bike hidden in the bushes near the house where he lives with his mother—did he steal it, does she know he has it? When James cannot pay back a small debt he owes two local drug dealers, and then shoots at them with his pistol, they run the car his mother is driving off the road, drag him from the car, and beat him.

Depression is a major issue for both Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.) and his dead brother’s ex-wife Marlee (Tarra Riggs). Lawrence tries to kill himself after his brother dies, and Marlee loses her job when she misses work to take care of problems involving her son James. But the main problem these characters confront is not related to race or economic status—it is the death of an individual who was important in their lives.

The film focuses a lot of James. On the one hand he plays the loving son to his mother, and she has no idea at first of the life he is leading outside their home. On the other he is increasingly veering towards crime and self-destructive behavior. The opening scene of the film in which James frightens a large flock of birds into flight and then stands in awe as they swoop and circle in the sky above him reminds me of the use that David Gordon Greene makes of his characters in the 2000 film George Washington. However, Greene may have had less interest in the social and economic contexts of his characters’ lives than writer and director Lance Hammer has in his characters—James is not an integer in an art drama. Hammer instead portrays him as a young man whose life is in danger and on the verge of careening in any number of directions. At the film’s beginning, with his mother frequently absent from their home because of work, and his father’s death, James clearly seems headed towards the same adolescent fates of lawlessness and dissolution that many other adolescents like him have suffered.

James’ situation may be the factor that ultimately draws Lawrence and Marlee together in an uneasy alliance. (Hammer told an interviewer that the film is “about a child being saved .”[i]) The film reveals little about their lives prior to the film, but we do know that Marlee had filed a restraining order against her ex-husband before his suicide. She can barely stand to talk to Lawrence, whom she blames along with her dead ex-husband for her miserable life (in which she includes her son James). Gradually they begin to recognize the importance of working together to address all the problems they are encountering.

I find Lawrence the most interesting character in the film. He is so affected by grief and depression after his brother’s death than he can barely move. He tries to kill himself. A white neighbor tries to help him and rouse him from his depression. (This is the only white character in the film, and he appears in only a few scenes). Lawrence allows his nephew to rob him without resisting, yet at the same time speaks with the boy in a restrained but friendly manner. Nothing seems to matter to him: he stops working at the store that he and his brother operated and sits at home on his sofa watching television or staring blankly out the window. When Marlee moves into one of the houses he and his brother owned, he can barely respond to her threats to sell the houses and the store from under him.

There are numerous complications in the characters of this film. It is difficult to pigeonhole them. Lawrence, for example, seems to be intelligent and fairly well educated. He explains to his nephew how twin brothers are conceived, and how they are genetically identical yet become separate individuals. The fact that he is a genetic match to his dead brother is a point he emphasizes several times in the film. He and Marlee decide to work together to home school James. Finally he agrees to work with her in running the store. On occasion the film clearly moves into exaggerated melodrama, but mostly the complications serve to make these characters and their lives real. An example is the conflicting motives that drive Lawrence towards a partnership with Marlee. He doesn’t want to lose the houses and the business that provide him with a livelihood (although he tells Marlee that the idea doesn’t bother him). He seems to feel genuine concern about his nephew’s welfare. He also is attracted to Marlee and seems to feel that he can step into his dead brother’s shoes in more ways than one (when Marlee realizes he believes this, she is enraged). Through all these complications these characters have to make their way.

There is no happy resolution to the problems these characters face. But there is no unhappy resolution either. Late in the film Lawrence discovers that James has stolen the ammunition of the gun with which he tried to kill himself once before, and which he seems to be ready to use again for the same purpose. But he discovers that James has dumped the ammunition in a ditch in a field—the film doesn’t make clear why, but one reason may be that the boy did not want his uncle to use those bullets to kill himself. That is, James shows his need for his uncle, and his mother, by doing away with the bullets that could have ended the uneasy alliance they have managed to build.

The setting of the film reflects the depressed, difficult lives of these characters. The weather is mostly cloudy, is often rainy, and colors as a result are muted and washed out. Characters live in cinder block houses or trailers and drive beaten up old cars. The store that Lawrence and Marlee run together is so realistic in its appearance that one suspects it actually exists.

The issues this film explores are not, finally, issues of race. They are fundamental human issues that everyone must face, sooner or later: grief, loss, isolation, depression, confusion, purposelessness. It is only incidental, in this sense, that the characters in Ballast are African American. However, their race and the economic and cultural conditions of their lives clearly do determine, complicate, and constrain how they deal with these challenges.

Ballast premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, where it won awards for Best Director and Best Cinematography. It was picked up for distribution by the Independent Film Channel. Hammer later took back the film to distribute on his own.

See the Roger Ebert review: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081029/REVIEWS/810309995

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[i] Ioncinema interview, http://www.ioncinema.com/news/id/3128.

The Road

Although it’s clear that The Road (2009; dir. John Hillcoat) takes place in the southeastern United States, beginning in the Appalachians and moving towards the Atlantic coastline, geography and place matter only incidentally. Civilization has come to an end through some unspecified disaster. It’s not culture, or the wealth of centuries of human achievement, that the two main characters are struggling to preserve. They’re struggling to preserve their own lives, struggling in a sense—at least the father is—with the idea that their lives are worth preserving. The few remaining members of the human race are organized in savage bands, killing and cannibalizing the stragglers they encounter. The father and his young son try to avoid discovery by these bands. They keep heading south, towards the coast, towards some rescue that we know, that at least the father knows, is not there.

As dark as this film may be, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy on which it’s based is even darker and more brutal. The film preserves a few of the darkest moments from McCarthy’s story, for instance the departure of the man’s wife, the mother of his child, who has decided that there’s no purpose to their continuing struggles to survive. She knows that if they’re caught, which she believes will inevitably happen, she and the boy will be raped, that they’ll all be killed and eaten. She wanders off into the woods to kill herself. Another instance is when the man and boy discover people held captive in the dark basement of an abandoned house. The people are naked and filthy and faded in color, so that they hardly appear to be human. They’re livestock awaiting slaughter as food for their captors. Mostly the film focuses on the lonely trek of the father and son towards the southern coastline.

The film lacks the rich, stark language of the novel. In its place the film uses vivid images of a devastated landscape, of ravaged, incinerated cities, of empty human skeletons. While the man and the boy in the novel have a kind of generic, anonymous quality, so that we can imagine them as we will, the film personalizes the two through the actors who portray them: Viggo Mortensen is the father and the mostly unknown Kodi Smit-McPhee is his son. Charlize Theron portrays the mother, primarily through a series of brief flashbacks. None of these characters are given names. Although the woman’s character is somewhat more prominent in the film than the novel, her role is essentially the same. All three actors are excellent in their roles, for the most part evading sentimentality or bitterness, though it is bitterness that drives the mother to suicide.

The difficulty with a film such as The Road, based on a well known and widely read novel, is that those viewers who have read the novel can never view the film on its own terms. They must always see it in the context of its source, almost as a kind of appendage. This is not to suggest that the film should not have been made—it should have been—nor that readers should avoid the novel if they plan to see the film. It is simply to acknowledge a matter of fact—the inseparable link between the two forms. Although some may disagree, it seems to me inescapable that if one sees The Road and finds it successful or at least interesting one will necessarily seek out and read the novel on which it is based.

Admirers of McCarthy argue about whether there is cause for optimism when the novel ends and the boy, his father having died, is taken in by a family—the only other family in the story. The world is still dead, or at least dying, and there is little hope of its recovery, unless one takes the novel’s final paragraph, a vivid description of a trout swimming motionless in a stream, as a foreshadowing of the future rather than a memory of the past. There is no such moment in the film, unless one counts the small beetle—still alive--that the boy discovers late in the film. In the film the boy is also rescued by a family—a man, a woman, and their two children. The man agrees that he is carrying the fire—that he and his family are the “good guys.” The boy wants to be assured. Carrying the fire, being the good guys, these are the terms the boy’s father uses when he talks to his son about keeping moral values alive—values of virtue, of civility—even though he makes clear to the boy that he will resort to almost anything to protect his son, even though the boy is the only way these values retain any meaning for him. The man’s struggle not to abandon those values is a central theme of the novel and film.

The film version of The Road offers no more hope for long-term optimism about the boy’s survival or the fate of the human race than the book does. But because the film ends with the glimmer of a smile on the boy’s face as he agrees to join the family that is offering him protection, and because the viewer—this writer at least—will seize on any evidence that allows him to avoid complete nihilistic despair, the film in a small and muted way offers faint hope.

The film is a reading of McCarthy’s novel. In general it preserves the major events, themes, and emphases of its source. The changes that Joe Penhall’s screenplay makes to McCarthy’s story are for the most part not major and do it no disservice. There are differences. The language of the novel has a vivid intensity that the film lacks. The novel gives special emphasis to garbage—garbage is all that is left of human civilization. McCarthy makes this most clear when the father (who may have been a teacher) finds the rotting books of what was once a library and realizes that the sodden pages are all that remains of the great monuments of human achievements. Garbage is the novel’s metaphor for environmental and self-destructive human recklessness.  The film offers many scenes of ruined buildings and garbage and smoking cities but doesn’t make as much of them.

Robert Duvall makes a brief appearance as a wandering old man whom the father and son briefly encounter on the road. The boy insists that they share food with the old man. Duvall’s brief appearance is the best moment in this generally remarkable, deeply sad, and melancholic film.

Storm Warning

Storm Warning attempts to take a strong moral view of the Ku Klux Klan, but it does so in such a timid way that the Klan and what it represents is hardly recognizable.  Released in 1951 and featuring Ronald Reagan in the lead roles, with the support of Ginger Rogers and a young Doris Day, Storm Warning is a film noir of sorts.  It presents the Klan as a group of community hoodlums who for relatively hazy reasons occasionally attack people identified as enemies of the community.  Most often these turn out to be enemies of the Klan.  In an early scene a reporter who has been investigating the Klan, and who has been jailed on trumped up drunk and disorderly charges, is hauled out of jail, beaten, and shot to death.  Ginger Rogers, who has come to town to visit her sister (Doris Day) witnesses the murder, and this becomes a key event in the film.

Storm Warning views the Klan as a dangerous vigilante group that threatens law and order in the town.  The men who belong to the Klan, most of them upstanding local citizens, have joined either because they believe government is too weak to maintain order, or because they've been pressured.

The film barely hints at the racist bigotry at the Klan's heart.  Even though the Klan in 1951 was well known for its Southern origins and activities, the film camouflages its setting.  We know that the film is set somewhere in the South, as opposed to the North, because folks keep speaking with disparagement of the way things are done up North.  No one speaks with any accent.  No cultural or regional markers connect the small town in which the film is set in any way with any sort of distinctive place.  It could as easily have taken place in Southern Los Angeles, or Southern Idaho, as somewhere in the American South.

Why?  In 1951 the McCarthy hearings were going full tilt.  Communists (so Americans were urged to believe) were threatening the woof and warp of American society.  In some sense does the film's portrayal of the Klan as a menace to social order make a veiled commentary on the commie danger?  What the film does seek to do is take a stand against hooliganism and vigilantism.  But it portrays the Klan members as hooded thugs, not as white supremacists. 

Explaining himself to Ginger Rogers' character, the leader of the Klan explains that his group exists to ensure that the streets will be safe for people like her.  Why would she be in danger to begin with?  She walks the streets of the small town at night in complete safety.  But what the leader is implying (and one has to lean over backwards to get the implication) is that the Klan ensures that white woman such as she will be safe from black men.  This is the closest the film comes to any open acknowledgment that the Klan has a connection to black people and civil rights.  It's a moment easily missed.

My colleague John Inscoe notes the similarity of aspects of the film's plot to A Streetcar Named Desire.  The film was released in the same year as Storm Warning, so any influence would have come from the published play or Elia Kazan's Broadway production.  In both works an older sister comes to visit her younger sister, who is married to a working class young man suspicious of the older woman.  Both works feature a subtle sexual tension between the man and the unmarried sister; in both works the younger sister is loyal to her husband despite all his faults.

Ronald Reagan is more than serviceable in his role as a young district attorney.  He's determined and ethical and not easily cowed.  He has integrity, and even when his legal career and (possibly) his political future are threatened (the Klan leader is one of the most powerful men in town), he stands tall.  What he lacks is heroic stature of the sort we see in Gary Cooper in High Noon or Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.  Reagan’s character is devoted to doing his job and doing it well but has no philosophical vision, ultimately. He views the Klan as a bunch of lawbreakers and is eager to take it down.

Storm Warning would like to be a drama of conscience.  Its focus is Ginger Rogers, who witnesses a murder and who, when it comes time to provide the courtroom testimony that will implicate the Klan (and her brother in law), suffers a failure of courage.  Again, the McCarthy hearings come to mind.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991, dir. Simon Callow) is not a rewarding film. Although it has been some time since I read the Carson McCullers story on which it is based, my recollection is that the story is a plaintive tale of lost love and retribution. The film is actually an adaptation of Edward Albee’s dramatic treatment of the McCullers story. The tone is plaintive and mournful. The film left me cold. It proceeds in robotic fashion to trace the life of a woman, Miss Amelia (Vanessa Redgrave), disappointed in life and in love. We first see her as a face peering out the front door of an abandoned building. The film then backtracks to earlier years, when men would stop on the porch of her general store on the way home from work to buy and drink the moonshine she made at her still. The woman’s face is hard and emotionless, and her hair is cut short, like a man’s. One day a little man, a midget (Cork Hubbard), walks into town claiming to be her cousin Lyman. He entrances her, and he convinces her to open up a café where the townspeople—who never appear to be anything other than bored and lifeless—can come at night to dine and converse. (Who cooks the food? I don’t think the film ever shows anyone cooking. We see people eating only). Lyman learns that Amelia was once married, but she refuses to say anything about her husband when he asks. He becomes fascinated with the notion of her former husband, whose name was Marvin Macy. Just coincidentally, about that time, Macy (Keith Carradine) walks into town, recently released from prison. Another flashback shows us that Marvin had loved Amelia years before, that to win her hand he abandoned his carousing ways and combed his hair. He proposed to her, she accepted, and they married. But soon after they go upstairs for the wedding night, she throws him downstairs and will have nothing to do with him any longer. We can only speculate as to why. Years later, when he returns to town, nothing has improved between them. He is still bitter over how she rejected him. The resolution of the film focuses on the conflict between Amelia and Marvin and Lyman. The conflict climaxes in a brutal fistfight.

The film’s setting is notable for its bleakness. Life in the small Southern town (apparently during the Depression) is so bleak and monotonous that all the men can do is work and drink. I was reminded of the desolate town in the Clint Eastwood film High Plains Drifter (1973). In such a place, the arrival of a stranger, any stranger, is a break from the routine. The arrival of Cousin Lyman, a strange little man who talks incessantly and performs comic routines on a more or less continuous basis, offers relief from their deadening existence.

The still that Amelia operates is on the far side of a swamp. She has to wade through the swamp in hip boots to reach the still, which sits next to a tall rock outcrop. I am unaware of any such geological formations in the Deep South—tall rock walls next to swamps—but maybe some exist.

This film comments not so much on the South—though it does suggest that people in the South are dull and violent individuals who lead uninteresting, benighted lives—as on the nature of gender identification and sexual rivalry. Amelia and Marvin may love each other but they are so incompatible that they cannot bear—or at least Amelia cannot bear—the thought of being touched by the other. Amelia is fascinated with Lyman, who is infatuated with Marvin, who loves Amelia, who loves him in turn but wants nothing to do with him. She’s hurt when Lyman rejects her for Marvin, hurt further by the fistfight in which Marvin beats her senseless while the entire population of the town watches in transfixed fascination.

I may simply have missed the point. Cousin Lyman is certainly the most fascinating figure in the film. Vanessa Redgrave never elevates Amelia to a level that allows us to feel much sympathy or even interest. Keith Carradine seems simply bitter. Rod Steiger as the town preacher seems lost and out of place. The film suggests that life is hard, that people who love one another also make each other miserable, that we are entrapped within socially imposed definitions of gender, that we are simply entrapped in general. It fails to explore these propositions in coherent ways.

The Beverly Hillbillies

A one-note bad joke notable for a fundamental lack of enthusiasm and imagination, The Beverly Hillbillies (1993, dir. Penelope Spheeris) does not improve on the 1960s television series of the same name. Rather, it simply tries to do it over. With Cloris Leachman as Granny and Lily Tomlin as Jane Hathaway, one might think that the film at least had acting in its favor, but all we get from them are earnest pasteboard parodies of roles that weren’t much more than parodies of stereotypes to begin with.

Stereotypes are what The Beverly Hillbillies is about. A Tennessee mountain man, Jed Clampett (Jim Varney) accidentally discovers oil on his land. He becomes an instant billionaire. His cousin Pearl convinces him that paradise is in Beverly Hills, so he moves his family to California, where he hopes to find a new wife to raise his daughter up proper. In Beverly Hills the greedy banker Millburn Drysdale and his secretary Jane Hathaway take the Clampetts under their avid wings. Shady characters plot to steal Jed’s fortune. This was a standard plot of the television series—efforts to bilk Jed out of his fortune, along with such other plots as Jed’s search for a husband for Elly Mae or Jethro’s aspirations to be a brain surgeon or a double-naught spy.

In the television series and the film, hillbillies are simple mountain folk full of virtue, homilies, good intentions, and friendliness. They are always relatively simple-minded (though not stupid) and naïve. Beverly Hills is full of malice and corruption and false, hollow pretensions. Somehow the Clampetts resist temptation and evil of Hollywood life and remain unblemished and wealthy. Like the television series, the film views the hillbillies as a cartoon stereotype—there is no concern with even remotely authentic details, only the broad and careless brushstrokes that identify the stereotype—a hound dog, Granny in her rocking chair, Jed’s ragged hat, Elly Mae’s cut off jeans, banjos, shotguns, moonshine, and so on.

With all its mindless silliness the television series is more satisfying than this film. With an array of minor characters such as Millburn Drysdale’s dithering and embarrassed wife Margaret and their son Sonny, along with all the eccentric relatives who visit the Clampetts, the show was usually entertaining, especially when Jethro or Granny was the center of attention. In the film, Mrs. Drysdale becomes a bland yuppie matron with a poodle, while Sonny is renamed Morgan. In the television show, Sonny Drysdale, played brilliantly by Louis Nye, was one of my favorite characters.

The television show was always making fun and satirizing, contrasting the pretensions of the rich against the earnest good-heartedness of the Clampetts. It carried on the tradition of slapstick social satire of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and many others. The film simply imitates the television show, without much vigor or success.

Mississippi

The 1935 romantic musical comedy Mississippi (dir. Wesley Ruggles, A. Edward Sutherland) is primarily a vehicle for singer Bing Crosby and comedian W. C. Fields, who play lead roles. Rodgers and Hart provided most of the music, though Stephen Foster’s “Swanee” River is a recurrent theme. This film could have been a Broadway musical, but I don’t believe it was.

Fields plays Commodore Jackson, captain of a riverboat headed to an engagement party to provide entertainment. Tom Grayson (Crosby) is engaged to Elvira, whose younger sister Lucy is secretly in love with Tom. An old beau of Elvira’s arrives during the party and is angered when he learns that she is engaged to another man. Tom refuses his challenge to a duel, and Elvira and her father order Tom to leave the plantation—they are dishonored and humiliated by his cowardice. Tom leaves, but before he goes Lucy declares her love. Tom becomes a singer for the river boat and, after he kills a man in a fight, Fields builds a reputation around him as the “Singing Killer.” Lucy and Tom are briefly reunited, but when she learns that he is the “Singing Killer” reputed to have murdered her cousin, she leaves him. Tom hears she is engaged and goes to her plantation to confront her family and win her back. The movie ends with their embrace on board the riverboat.

Fields as the riverboat captain incorporates his own blowhard persona with that of the Mike Fink tradition of swashbuckling river boatmen from 19^th century Southern humor and Mark Twain. He often tells of his exploits killing Indians with a Bowie knife or a revolver. Several scenes are devoted to the Fields shtick, where he does a typical Fields routine. The opening scene is a good example. He offers comic relief, though the tone of the film hardly calls for comic relief. Whereas Crosby’s character is at the center off the film, Fields’ character, who takes up much screen time, is not essential to the basic romantic plot.

Crosby is the romantic relief, the straight man to Fields. I was amused that while others in the film may recognize Fields for the charlatan he is Crosby’s character never seems to see through him and in fact helps rescue him from at least one tight spot where in a poker game he manages to deal straight aces to every player involved.

The film reminds me of a typical Elvis Presley movie whose plot is designed to allow as many opportunities for singing by the lead actor as possible. Though there is more of a plot in this film, the kinship between Elvis and cinematic forebear is clear enough.

As with Jezebel (1938), affairs of honor are important. Grayson, raised by Quakers in Philadelphia, doesn’t understand the Southern code of honor and is at heart a relaxed, peaceful man. He declines a challenge at the Rumford plantation house because he says he doesn’t understand the point of killing a man who has done him no wrong and whom he doesn’t even know. Although the film seems to support his rejection and doesn’t suggest that he is a coward, Tom still must develop the physical prowess and self-assurance that will enable him to win over Lucy and her family at the end of the film. He kills a man who is trying to hill him on the riverboat, acquires a reputation as a killer (concocted by Fields), defends Fields from angry gamblers, and in fact becomes the kind of man he was initially accused of not being. This is an irony in the film, though I don’t think the film intends it to be.

The patriarch of the plantation is General Rumford, the old blowhard who strictly defends the Southern code of honor.

Elvira Rumford is the Southern belle who hopes her engagement to Tom will not make her former beaus forget her. She rejects Tom as soon as it becomes clear that he will not answer the challenge. Her attitude towards firmer beaus suggests Julie Marsden from Jezebel and Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind (1939). The film implies deceptiveness in her manner, a lack of integrity.

The plantation is a place of elegance and beauty. The film seems unaware of basic facts about 19^th century Southern plantation life; for example, a young woman wouldn’t be allowed to be in the presence of a suitor without another person, a chaperone, nearby. There is pretence of Southern accent among the characters, but for the most part they act like characters out of any 1930s romantic comedy movie. Crosby certainly embodies his usual persona, hand in pocket, care what may, relaxed and ready for whatever happens.

We never hear the word “slave” in Mississippi, but slaves are present throughout, always in servile roles, usually comic ones. A trunk full of young black children sing at several points in the film. Everyone listens appreciatively—there is no racist talk, though Fields calls them pickaninnies. In one scene Tom and Lucy are talking and a house servant standing nearby nods with understanding, as if he overhears what is passing between them. When Lucy receives a proposal, one of the slaves sends a written message (in dialect, but still readable) to Tom telling him that he had better come. For the most part, the African Americans are treated as stereotypes, but not as caricatures, with the exception of one bug-eyed character who is driving a carriage and who shuffles and drawls like Step-n-fetchit. No plot line depends on the presence or treatment of slaves. The film offers no social commentary, overt or implied, on their condition.

As in Jezebel, a Northerner’s ignorance about Southern codes of conduct leads to difficulty, though in Jezebel people talk about the Northerners while in Mississippi their ignorance becomes a key element in the plot.

The film brims over with Southern types: loudmouth, braggart riverboat captains, bug-eyes slaves, evil gamblers, men ready to take offence at any insult implied or overt. The presence of the frontier is often in evidence in this film. Fields’ lies suggest its presence in the recent past, and the violence that pervades the film suggests the Southern frontier as portrayed by Twain and other humorists of the 19^th century.

The film is based on Booth Tarkington story “Magnolia.”

Sweet Bird of Youth

Because I have not read or seen Tennessee Williams’ 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth (I’ll read it soon), I cannot judge the Richard Brooks 1962 film adaptation by comparison. I doubt that much if any dialogue in the film was written by Williams. If I am wrong, then the play must be a presentiment of his long decline. The film invokes so many Southern stereotypes and conventions that it would be difficult to list them all. It is a panoply of every perverted manifestation of what would pass for sin and corruption in the 1950s that Brooks or Williams could possibly conceive of. The film is highly mannered and melodramatic. Paul Newman in the role of the main character Chance Wayne plays a one-dimensional, one-note gigolo who believes that sooner or later, primarily on the basis of sex and his good looks, he will break into the Hollywood big time. The love of his life is a woman named Heavenly Finley (Shirley Knight), the daughter of the local political boss—a former governor who swaggers with all the subtlety of Orson Welles in a B-grade wine commercial.

In a Williams play one looks for nuanced psychological insight into human character. We don’t find that here. Newman’s character is engaged in a long and protracted decline. His companion at the start of the film is an aging Hollywood actress, Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page), who he hopes, in return for his service as a driver and in other capacities, will get him a screen test. She is an egotistical, narcissistic diva hooked on drugs and alcohol and her dream of a comeback. Boss Finley (Ed Begley—he has the best role in the film) doesn’t want his daughter to waste her life on Newman, so he connives in one way or the other to keep them apart. When Newman leaves town and Heavenly discovers she is pregnant with his baby, Boss Finley finds a doctor who will perform an abortion and who also agrees to marry her. Boss Finley’s son Tom (Rip Torn) is the head of the “Finley Youth Brigade” (or some such name), a quasi-vigilante group on the same level as the Hitler Youth. Heavenly herself has apparently resorted to self-destructive promiscuity out of despair over her father’s insistence that she stay away from Chance.

Boss Finley is a Southern demagogue in the vein of Huey Long, but he is mainly one protracted cartoon stereotype. He professes outrage at accusations he is corrupt, yet he doesn’t hesitate to strong arm, manhandle, and intimidate to get his way. He demands that his daughter appear with him at a televised rally so that she can deny rumors of her profligate behavior. The result is that Finley’s political rival (apparently a professor from a local university) appears at the rally to announce via loudspeaker that Finley arranged to have his daughter marry the doctor who performed an abortion on her. (For some reason, he doesn’t mention Boss Finley’s long-term affair with a floozy named Miss Lucy).

Several comic scenes focus on Boss Finley’s political cronies and their willingness to tell him whatever he wants to hear and believe. The film suggests that Southern demagogues thrive on the basis of gullible and unthinking mobs who respond to populist slogans and platitudes. Interestingly, the film highlights Boss Finley’s use of media such as radio and television to spread his political message—carrying forward on the points made in Robert Rosen’s 1949 adaptation of All the King’s Men and the Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd (1957, based on the Budd Schulberg screenplay). Chance Wayne tries to contact various Hollywood gossip mongers such as Walter Winchell to promote his faltering career.

A basic theme is the search for happiness and satisfaction—for success. Chance Wayne was moving towards a successful career in acting when Boss Finley managed to get him sent to Korea. There he discovers that he is a coward and returns home in disgrace. Alexandra Del Lago, once a film star famous for her beauty, has been in decline for fifteen years—she longs for a comeback. Boss Finley’s career depends on his popularity with voters. Heavenly believes happiness means her relationship with Chance. All of these characters struggle to recover the success and happiness they believe once lay within their grasps. In contrast are the teeming anonymous crowds that Del Lago and Finley depend on for their fame and power, and whom Chance Wayne hopes to convince of his talent. The film portrays these crowds as populated with leering Hogarthian mosters attracted to sex and beauty, demagogic promises and moralistic platitudes, and impervious to reason and ideals, those qualities of an enlightened and educated electorate on which democracies depend for their survival. This film’s view of American democracy, of the American South, is dim indeed.

Based on descriptions I have read, the film substantially changes events in the play. In the play, Heavenly contracts a venereal disease from her relationship with Chance and has a hysterectomy as a result, while in the film she becomes pregnant and has an abortion. In the play Boss Finley’s thugs castrate Chance, while in the film they merely break his nose. The play has a decidedly unhappy ending in which Chance and Heavenly do not reconcile, while in the film they drive away together in a Cadillac—even so, it is impossible to imagine they will have much of a life.

Belizaire the Cajun

Belizaire the Cajun (dir. Glen Pitre; 1986) is set in Cajun country of Louisiana, 1859. A message at the beginning of the film tells us that although the Cajuns have been living peacefully in Louisiana for decades, vigilante groups of white landowners have organized to threaten and drive them out of the area. They are given two weeks to leave, after which they’ll be hanged. Belizaire (Armande Assante) is a Cajun healer. He’s a popular man of all trades. He holds no particular grudge with anyone. He’s a respected community leader, on the one hand, and a kind of trickster on the other.

Aside from the efforts of local white residents to expel the Cajuns, a major subplot involves Alida Thibodeaux, a Cajun woman married to Matthew Perry, the son of a local landowner. Although Perry takes part in the vigilante actions, he does so half-heartedly and often tries to discourage other participants from their actions. His sympathies are clearly torn, the result of his marriage to Alida. She herself is torn between loyalty to her husband and children (and to the financial support he provides) and to her Cajun heritage. Belizaire is a former romantic interest of Alida, and he often visits her on the farm, usually with the excuse of providing medical treatment. She is kind to him but not receptive to his advances. She and Matthew are not legally married, although they have three children with a fourth on the way. She claims this doesn’t matter, that they are married in the eyes of God. Matthew’s brother-in-law, Willoughby, dislikes Matthew and is especially disapproving of his sometimes soft approach to the Cajuns. He clearly has his ambitious sights set on old man Perry’s farm and fortune. When Matthew is found dead, the local sheriff casts about for a suspect. Belizaire is arrested for the crime and condemned to hang.

The film pays particular attention to characters caught in the margins between the “white” and Cajun cultures. The sheriff in particular is obliged to uphold the law, and he willingly does so. He protects the Cajuns when he can against vigilantism, but sometimes that means his having to agree that some families can be driven out and others allowed to stay. He makes a deal with the vigilante leader that he will find someone to blame for Matthew Perry’s murder if the leader will agree to end the vigilante action. He even allows the leader to choose who that person will be. He serves both sides of the fence, and it’s tempting sometimes to see him as contemptible and other times to see him as doing the best he can in difficult circumstances. After Matthews’s death, the marginal status of Alida and her children is a major point of concern, one of importance to Belizaire. The failure to formalize Matthew’s marriage to Alida places future support for her and their children in jeopardy—Willoughby vows to see that Alida and her “bastards” receive no part of the Perry fortune.

Even though the film takes place in 1859, it does not mention the American Civil War about to take place. The effect is to emphasize the singular uniqueness of Louisiana Cajun culture, which stands apart from the culture of the rest of the United States. In ways the film seems to have been made on a restricted budget, but it is carefully made nonetheless. The costumes and behavior of the characters don’t always strike me as authentic or historically true to the times and culture of the people portrayed, but then again I don’t know what those times and people were precisely like. The Cajuns are shown as family oriented, fun-loving people who want only to be left alone. They don’t seek out conflict with the local whites, though they don’t miss opportunities that arise to “acquire” stray livestock that come their way. The film engages in a certain sentimentalizing idealization of the Cajuns, and a vilification of the worst elements of white culture.

Armand Assante is the center of this film. Especially in the final scene, when he is about to be hanged, he is quite impressive. He doles out various medicines and herbal remedies to the crowd assembled to watch the hanging—most of them are there in his support. The scene dramatizes the importance of his role in the community, his concern for the people he has served, and, of course, his desire to live.

There is an anecdotal quality to this film. It never overstates nor oversteps its own importance. While it dramatizes the marginalized status of the Cajuns in mid-19^th century Louisiana, it is not stridently committed to presenting their point of view and instead seems content merely to make note of their presence and the significance of their culture. Through the character of Belizaire, who so fervently wishes not to be hanged, though he accepts that fate willingly as a means of bringing vigilante action against his people to an end, the film seems to make a similar argument for the survival and recognition of Cajun culture. The film is worth viewing as a kind of contrast to the portrayal of Cajun culture in such a film as Southern Comfort (1983).