From Nashville Scene (cover story), March 10, 2011. –- J.R.
In certain respects, the “Visions of the South” series of Southern movies
being launched in Nashville this week at The Belcourt deserves to be
applauded for its omissions as well as its inclusions. The most conspicuous
of these omissions is probably Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), which
Brenda Lee once aptly described as “a dialectic collage of unreality.”
(Altman, at least, proved better at handling Mississippi — in Thieves Like Us
the year before Nashville, and in Cookie’s Fortune a quarter of a century
later.)
We all know, of course, that Hollywood and even some of its maverick
celebrities have been guilty of fostering and/or perpetuating false images
of the South from the very beginning. A few other prominent and dubious
examples might include Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945), Martin Ritt’s
The Sound and the Fury (1959), Richard Brooks’ Sweet Bird of Youth (1962),
Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown (1967), John Frankenheimer’s I Walk the
Line (1970), and, surely the most bogus of all, Alan Parker’s Mississippi
Burning (1989), with its outlandish errors involving both Jim Crow and the
FBI, just to get started.
But don’t get me started. Part of what’s so satisfying about this film series
is that it helps us to forget about outrages of this kind. Speaking as a
native of Florence, Ala., I can only feel gratitude for the filmmakers who
have gone to the trouble of getting the South right. Admittedly, these
judgment calls are highly subjective, and I can’t expect everyone, including
every Southerner, to agree with them. In the case of Robert Mulligan’s To
Kill a Mockingbird (1962) — a film that was ultimately cut from the series —
it’s even possible that my misgivings about the Southern details, which
made me greatly prefer Harper Lee’s original novel at the time it came out,
might conceivably be revised if I revisited both of them today.
For Yankees and other so-called foreigners who imagine that Gone With the
Wind — or Mississippi Burning, for that matter — accurately and adequately
depict the South, part of the value of this discerning series is to illustrate
the maxim that no view of any region that’s as generic and as predigested
as theirs are can possibly do justice to it. From this standpoint, personal
takes on the South are far better than boilerplate versions, and it’s largely
the personal aspects of the movies in this series by such directors as Roger
Corman, Robert Duvall, John Ford, David Gordon Green, Monte Hellman,
Phil Karlson, Elia Kazan, Charles Laughton, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray,
Michael Roemer, and Jacques Tourneur that carry the most conviction, at
least for me. (Admittedly, Gone With the Wind reflects the personality of
David O. Selznick, but this is for the most part only in the same way that
the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in its heyday reflected the
personality of P.T. Barnum. By which I mean that the stamp of a
manufacturer is less personal than the shaping of an artist.)
For the record, the programmers couldn’t get every film they wanted; given
the scarcity of prints of many older films, this is hardly surprising. Among
these, the main absences I’m aware of are two features directed by black
filmmaker Spencer Williams, The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Go Down Death
(1944); John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979), a particular favorite of mine; and
Michael Apted’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (1981). And there are omissions in
the series that I regret. One is Stark Love (1927) — a silent picture from
Paramount, directed by one of D.W. Griffith’s best cameramen, Karl Brown
(a Southerner). Shot on location in the Unicoi Mountains of North Carolina,
it was a favorite of James Agee, though all prints appeared to have been
lost until film historian Kevin Brownlow discovered one in Prague in 1968.
(In fact, the Southern Appalachian International Film Festival in Bristol,
Tenn., managed to show this film in October 2009.)
Another is Intruder in the Dust (1949), an adaptation of William Faulkner’s
novel directed by another Southerner, Clarence Brown, for MGM and filmed
on location in Oxford, Miss. Along with Douglas Sirk’s excellent (but not
very Southern and studio-bound) The Tarnished Angels (1957), an adaptation
of Pylon, and Joseph Anthony’s Tomorrow (1972), derived from a short story
of the same title (and which is included in the Belcourt series), it stands as one
of the three most prestigious Faulkner movie adaptations. Perhaps it’s significant
that they’re all derived from relatively minor works.
Still, the bounty of what the programmers have managed to snare is substantial.
It seems appropriate that the director best represented here, Elia Kazan, who has
no less than three features in the series — Wild River (1960) at the beginning, and Baby Doll (1956) and A Face in the Crowd (1957) a week later — is one of the most attentive when it comes to regional accents. Kazan hired a “speech consultant,” Margaret Lamkin, for this purpose for his stage production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and he employed her again for Baby Doll, which Williams also wrote. His handling of both rural Arkansas and nearby Memphis in A Face in the Crowd and the Tennessee Valley in Wild River (one of his least known movies, but arguably his very best) seems equally attentive. (Based on a conversation I had recently with the Missouri Ozarks vocalist Marideth Sisco, who worked on the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone, it seems that Debra Granik, the director/co-writer of that wonderful feature, was comparably exacting about the regional accents in her own film. I can’t vouch for the treatment of Arkansas in Raymond St. Jacques’ 1973 “blaxploitation” flick Book of Numbers, a film I haven’t seen that’s showing in the Belcourt series, but it sure sounds intriguing.)
A Face in the Crowd was scripted and based on a story by Budd Schulberg,
who had also recently written On the Waterfront for Kazan — and wasn’t
quite as attentive to Southern types as Kazan was. (Kazan’s very first film,
an 18-minute documentary short made in 1937, was called The People of
the Cumberland.) But it’s no surprise that the Memphis of A Face in the
Crowd is more plausible as well as less mythological than the one in Jim
Jarmusch’s Mystery Train — a Tennessee fantasy that might be said to
contain several virtues in spite of its lack of local verisimilitude.
There are many other favorites of mine in the series, and it seems
significant that over half of the films selected are period movies. This
is even true technically of Phil Karlson’s exceptionally seedy docudrama
The Phenix City Story (1955), filmed on location and set in the very recent
past. For my money, this is probably the best commercial movie ever set in
Alabama; its only possible competitor would be Nothing But a Man (see below),
which comes just before the series’ end. And the silent 1925 classic of black
pioneer Oscar Micheaux, Body and Soul, starring the great Paul Robeson, will
be shown closing night with a commissioned score (by Roy “Futureman” Wooten
and arranger Gil Fray, performed live by Futureman & the Black Mozart Ensemble).
Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown (1950) isn’t exactly generically Southern,
despite a local Klan that figures pivotally in the plot, and in some ways its
setting seems closer to a town one would find in a Western. (In fact, at
least one French critic has classified this film as a Western.) Tourneur,
best known today for his film noir Out of the Past and some horror
pictures (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man,
and Curse of the Demon), has been a relatively late discovery of
mine, but I’ve come to regard him as a major and underrated figure.
Stars in My Crown was his favorite among his own features, and
it’s my favorite as well — a beautiful and nuanced piece of period
Americana that performs the difficult task of depicting good people
convincingly, and without any trace of sentimentality.
The same could be said for Lillian Gish’s matriarchal character in
Charles Laughton’s only feature as a director, The Night of the
Hunter (1955), set during the Depression. Here is another film
that I don’t normally regard as Southern, but this is undoubtedly
because my Deep South background tends, quite unfairly, to
minimize or overlook the Southern aspects of such “fringe” states
as West Virginia, where Davis Grubb, the author of the novel, came
from. And one might similarly and pedantically question the Southern
credentials of Roger Corman’s The Intruder (1961) by virtue of the fact
that it was shot in Missouri, even though this didn’t by any means free
Corman and his co-workers from having to contend with local prejudice
while they were shooting it. This quickie is a fairly faithful — and, as I
recall, fairly suspenseful — low-budget adaptation of Charles Beaumont’s
contemporary novel about a rabble-rousing bigot (William Shatner) who
enters a small Southern town to stir up trouble shortly before its local
high school becomes integrated.
At the opposite extreme from The Intruder are two period idylls about
small-town America. John Ford’s Steamboat ‘Round the Bend (1935)
and The Sun Shines Bright (1953) are arguably, along with the earlier
Judge Priest (a sort of prequel to The Sun Shines Bright), the best films
he ever made about the postwar Old South. Steamboat ‘Round the Bend
unfolds on the Mississippi River in the late 19th century, while The Sun
Shines Bright is set in a small town in Kentucky in the early 20th. Yet
both films, like so many other major works of Ford, reek of memories
and reverberations from the Civil War.
Anthony Mann’s 1958 adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre
— like Ford’s earlier (1941) and less satisfying version of Tobacco Road,
Caldwell’s other famous novel dating from the Depression — is full of
conflicted sentiments about its Georgia cracker characters, seeing them
alternately as sympathetic victims and as hopelessly retarded hillbillies.
But Robert Ryan’s standout performance as the crazed Ty Ty helps to
encompass the seeming contradictions. The no less lurid Baby Doll,
shot in rural Mississippi two years earlier, outraged many of the
Southerners who saw it. The movie was widely banned in the South in
1956 — ostensibly for its handling of sex (which seems rather odd
today, given the reticence and ambiguity about sex in the plot), but
perhaps more indirectly because of the unflattering portrait it gave
of Southern yokels.
Far more ambiguous is The Apostle (1997), a neglected gem that
was written as well as directed by its star, Robert Duvall. Refusing
to buy into the Elmer Gantry stereotype, which suggests that every
fundamentalist preacher who shows signs of being a scoundrel is
also a hypocrite, Duvall throws us into a subculture of devout belief
without the sort of moral signposts that many city slickers have
grown to depend on defensively and as a matter of automatic reflex.
Sonny, Duvall’s troubled and troubling preacher, may be a warped
creature who lies to himself, but on the basis of everything we see
and hear, he believes deeply in saving souls. And by making all the
church services interracial, Duvall complicates our responses still
further, especially if one stereotypes most white fundamentalists
as racists, as many glib Yankees are prone to do.
Wind Across the Everglades (1958) is a kind of litmus test for
auteurists. This philosophical adventure story, set in turn-of-
the-century Florida, was director Nicholas Ray’s penultimate
Hollywood assignment, though he was fired before the end
of shooting and barred from the final editing by screenwriter
Budd Schulberg, who produced the film with his brother Stuart.
(In his introduction to the published screenplay, Schulberg barely
mentions Ray at all.) An ecological parable, it pits an earnest
schoolteacher-turned-game warden (Christopher Plummer) against
a savage poacher of wild birds (Burl Ives) heading a grungy gang in the
swamps. Ray’s masterful use of color and mystical sense of equality
between the antagonists (also evident in Rebel Without a Cause and
Bitter Victory) are made all the more piquant h ere by his feeling for
folklore and outlaw ethics as well as his cadenced mise en scène. The
result is somewhat choppy — one gets a sense of subplots being
truncated — yet the film builds to a powerful encounter between Plummer
and Ives, and Ray’s personal touches are unmistakable. (There’s even an
upside-down point-of-view shot that’s similar to the ones in Ray’s Rebel
and Hot Blood.) The performances are quite striking, especially Chana
Eden’s as the female lead — not to mention cameos by Gypsy Rose Lee,
author MacKinlay Kantor and Peter Falk (in his film debut).
Inevitably, there are a few films in the Southern series that I don’t much
care for — Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965), Reflections in a
Golden Eye (1967), Deliverance (1972) and Stay Hungry (1976) —
but I can remember only the second of these well enough to offer any
comments. John Huston’s adaptation of Carson McCullers’ tortured
novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye concerns an army major at a
peacetime camp in Georgia who’s a repressed homosexual (Marlon
Brando), his adulterous wife (Elizabeth Taylor) and various other
unhappy characters and gothic traumas. Originally shot (by Aldo
Tonti) in gold-tinted hues that suggested caterpillar guts — a
gimmicky effect that was widely applauded at the time for artistic
originality, though its aesthetic function was dubious — the film
now circulates in more conventional color. Either you like this movie
a lot or you run screaming for the exit; I personally find it fairly
rough going.
With the possible exception of Iguana (1988), which is almost
completely unknown, Cockfighter (1974) is probably the most
underrated and unjustly neglected work by Monte Hellman (Two-
Lane Blacktop). Shot by the great cinematographer Nestor
Almendros on location in Georgia (partly — and climactically —
in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, Milledgeville, which seems
entirely appropriate), it wryly follows the absurdist progress of
a man who trains fighting cocks (Warren Oates in one of his best
performances) and who takes a vow of silence after his hubris nearly
puts him out of the game, though he continues to narrate the story
off screen. Produced by Roger Corman as an exploitation item for the
drive-ins, this performed so badly in that capacity that it was recut and
retitled more than once (as Wild Drifter, Gamblin’ Man, and Born to
Kill, the title it appears under in the Belcourt series). But as a dark
comedy and a closet art movie, it delivers and lingers. Among the
supporting players here are Richard B. Shull, Harry Dean Stanton,
Millie Perkins, Troy Donahue, and screenwriter Charles Willeford,
the author of the source novel.
The series nearly concludes with two features set in Alabama —
Bob Rafelson’s 1976 Stay Hungry, co-starring Jeff Bridges, Sally
Field, and in his first major role (if one discounts the 1969
Hercules in New York), Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Nothing
But a Man (1964). The latter was directed by the able Michael
Roemer (who made the even more neglected The Plot Against
Harry five years later) from a script written in collaboration with
Robert M. Young, who served as cinematographer and went on to
his own directorial career. It’s a sincere, intelligent and effectively
acted independent feature — actually shot in New Jersey, although
it doesn’t look it — about a black worker (Ivan Dixon) and his wife
(Abbey Lincoln) struggling against prejudice and trying to make a
life for themselves in Alabama, further distinguished by a supporting
cast that includes Gloria Foster, Julius Harris, Martin Priest and
Yaphet Kotto.
In George Washington (2000), to be shown before the two Alabama
films, the writer-director David Gordon Green sometimes comes
across as a gifted poet who hasn’t yet mastered prose. His characters
and images are memorable, but his story about working-class kids,
most of them black, in a small town in North Carolina is elusive and
occasionally puzzling. Working with nonprofessional actors who
improvise some of their dialogue, Green seems at certain junctures
to be brandishing strangeness like a crown. But the lyricism of his
‘Scope framings, junkyard settings and extremely vulnerable teenage
characters registers loud and clear even when some of his ideas
come across as amorphous or self-conscious.
Though George Washington isn’t especially violent, particularly
by contemporary standards, it arguably has more to say about the
desperation behind the Columbine High School killings than any
number of editorials. You have to bring a lot of yourself to this film
if you want it to give something back, but the rewards are
considerable. And indeed, I think the same could be said for this
film series as a whole.
