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Wednesdays in July | 24 Movies

Sweltering summers cooled off by glasses of refreshing sweet tea. The locales are beautiful, and the demeanor is polite. But the beauty of the Southern United States is also distorted by a complicated history of racial tensions.  

While some films artistically and accurately depict the South, others are less accurate. 

Some films are able to reflect the visual beauty, like Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960), filmed on location in Tennessee. Others effectively depict the people by casting Southern actors, like White Lightning (1973). For racial tensions, writer Ralph Ellison applauded Intruder in the Dust (1949) as giving an authentic portrayal of a Black man. Other films offer caricatures of how they think Southerners talk and look — like Dan Aykroyd in Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Others make attempts at Southern Gothic stories with tales of turmoil and pain such as The Beguiled (1971) and Eve’s Bayou (1997). 

Race in the South

“As I began to watch the older pre-World War II movies and then the post-war black films that ran into the 1960s and 1970s, I noticed a significant change in the way African Americans were depicted,” director John Singleton wrote in the foreword for Donald Bogle’s book “Hollywood Black.” 

Gone with the Wind (1939) depicts Southern plantation life in the 1880s. The film details life in the South before, during and after the Civil War. However, while producer David O. Selznick made the film carefully, communicating with Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, film historian Donald Bogle notes that the way Selznick and scriptwriters handled the topic of slavery was largely by ignoring it. 

“The evasions about slavery were Gone with the Wind’s greatest dishonesty,” Bogle wrote in his book.

Actress Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for the film, the first Black actor to win an Oscar, for her role of Mammy. Her character displays great emotional depth, such as when Mammy tearfully tells Melanie Wilkes about how life has been since Scarlett and Rhett lost their daughter. Bogle and actress Ruby Dee applauded McDaniel in the part. 

“I sincerely hope that I will always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry,” McDaniel said in her Oscar acceptance speech, a moment she said was the highlight of her life.

After World War II, Black men and women returned home feeling they still were not free, and this began to be reflected in films, though still several years away from the Civil Rights Movement. Films with stories of racism were topics of the post-war “problem pictures.” One of these films included director Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust.

The film is an adaptation of William Faulkner’s 1948 novel, which follows Lucas Beauchamp, played by Juano Hernandez, a Black man accused of shooting a white man in the back in a small Southern town. Lucas is helped by a white teenager named Chick Mallison, played by Claude Jarman, Jr., to prove his innocence.

Historian Donald Bogle calls Hernandez’s character of Lucas “one of the strongest Black male characters you will see in Hollywood movies, up to that time.” Black author and critic Ralph Ellison championed Intruder in the Dust for its depiction of a Black man with courage, pride, independence and patience “that are usually attributed only to white men.”

A few years later, the film Storm Warning (1950) attempted to shine a light on the white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan. The topic is a unique — and rare — setting for a 1950s film noir and includes interesting elements, like the casting of Ginger Rogers and Doris Day playing sisters. However, the film never acknowledges race, and both people killed by the Klan are white.

“The film is fatally flawed by its refusal to acknowledge the real nature of the Klan. Incredibly, there is no mention of race or religion, the Klan is alleged to be a ‘private money-making racket,’” film historian Imogen Sara Smith wrote in her film noir book, “In Lonely Places.”

Starting in the late-1950s through the 1960s, better roles became available to Black actors like Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Cicely Tyson.

Shortly after being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for the film Sounder (1972), Tyson picked up a copy of Ernest J. Gaines’s 1971 novel, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” After reading it in one sitting, Tyson wanted to play the role that Gaines based on many women in his life, she wrote in her autobiography. 

The novel was adapted into a television movie that aired on CBS on Jan. 31, 1974. The film ran straight through for 110 minutes with no commercial breaks except at the beginning and end of the program. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman begins in 1962 with the 110th birthday of Jane Pittman, played by Tyson. With the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, young people in Jane’s life come to tell her that they are going to the courthouse to drink out of a “whites only” water fountain. The next day, a reporter arrives to interview Jane about her life. She tells him about her life as a slave, the emancipation of enslaved people and life following that. She shares her personal and political heartache, seeing that little has changed since the 1880s. 

To prepare for the role, Tyson visited a nursing home to speak with women aged 90 to 105 to see how they spoke and moved. She based most of her portrayal on a woman named Pearl Williams, Tyson wrote in her autobiography. Makeup artists Stan Winston and Rick Baker aged Tyson to 110 years old with extensive makeup that took six hours to apply. The television production won nine Emmys, including two for Cicely Tyson: Best Actress in a Drama and Actress of the Year. 

Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic is often depicted by odd, disturbing stories set against the backdrop of the South. Sometimes, these stories are set against the decaying grandeur of the past, with plantations in disrepair. An example is in Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1965). In the film, Henry Thomas, played by Steve McQueen, visits the woman who raised him after he is released from jail. The woman lives in an old plantation home that resembles a haunted house. 

Others tell stories of religion in the South and the corruption of evangelism. The year after Elmer Gantry (1960) was released, Angel Baby (1961) tells a similar story. 

In the film, Jenny, played by Salome Jens, could not speak until she attended a prayer meeting led by Paul Strand, played by Tennessee born - George Hamilton. Through prayer, Jenny finds her voice and shares the Lord’s word. While Jenny has a pure heart, business owners who begin to manage her career do not. Angel Baby also marked the film debut of Burt Reynolds.

Alternatively, John Huston’s bizarre Wise Blood (1979) focuses on evangelism of a different kind. Based on Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 book and filmed in Macon, Ga., the character Hazel Motes (played by Brad Dourif) is disillusioned by Christianity and becomes an atheist evangelist, denying the teaching and divinity of Jesus. Dourif, who grew up in the South, called the film obscure, weird and gothic in a 2002 Criterion interview.

“Every thoughtful person should see Wise Blood once if only to experience a profound and original depression,” writer Andrew Sarris wrote in a Feb. 1980 issue of The Village Voice.

Other Southern gothic stories focus on turmoil rather than oddities. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), set in Mississippi — the characters Brick (played by Paul Newman) and Maggie (played by Elizabeth Taylor) are at odds because they aren’t sexually active. Brick remembers a friend who committed suicide (though Tennessee Williams’s homosexual themes were scrubbed from the film version). Maggie knows their marital issues will prevent them from earning any family inheritance. Against the strife of the plotline, Elizabeth Taylor experienced real-life tragedy when her husband of one year, Michael Todd, was killed in a plane crash two weeks into filming. She later said acting in the film saved her life, according to Taylor’s biographer. 

In Claudelle Inglish (1961), grief and turmoil lead the title character, played by Diane McBain, down a wayward back. Claudelle and her parents are poor Georgia sharecroppers. She believes she has found love, but when her boyfriend joins the U.S. Army, he quickly finds another girlfriend. Claudelle copes by sleeping with men in town. 

The pain in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968) is the loneliness felt by several of the characters: A man who is both deaf and mute, Mr. Singer, played by Alan Arkin; a teenager, Mick, played by Sondra Locke, who loves music and longs for piano lessons but her family is too poor; and Dr. Copeland, played by Percy Rodrigues, is a Black physician who is ill, and also feels disconnected from his daughter, played by Cicely Tyson. The heartbreaking film is based on a 1940 novel by Carson McCullers and was filmed on location in Selma, Ala.  

Southern Outlaws

In the South, making bootleg moonshine became popular because of the high government taxes on whiskey. It was a substantial business between 1915 and 1933, according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia. 

The process of making moonshine and “running” the illegal alcohol into the night — and usually fleeing the law — became a popular topic in films, such as Thunder Road (1958), White Lightning and Fireball 500 (1966), which connects the history of moonshine running and NASCAR racing. 

The filming location of Thunder Road was Asheville, N.C., where liquor sales had just become legal right before production began, according to Robert Mitchum’s biographer. Mitchum spearheaded the production as the film’s star, co-writer, co-songwriter and co-producer. Several locals were cast, including Frances Koon, who played Mitchum’s mother. Though the filming was largely a disaster, according to Mitchum’s biographer, the film is still often revisited and discussed in North Carolina. 

Several films detail prison escapes, and one popular film narrative is the Southern prisoner finding ways to escape, such as in The Defiant Ones (1958), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Down By Law (1986). 

More than a prison escape film, The Defiant Ones is a commentary on race relations. It’s also the film that made Sidney Poitier a star and allowed Hollywood to consider Tony Curtis as a serious actor. When a van carrying prisoners wrecks, John Jackson (Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Poitier) escape while chained together.  

Initially hating one another, Jackson and Cullen gradually form a bond as they work together to further themselves from the search party. Though set in the South, the film was shot in California on a closed set to avoid controversy. And there was controversy when the film was released. While critically acclaimed, Montgomery, Ala. theater manager A.B. Covey canceled a one-week film run when the White Citizens Council approached him saying the film was “pro-integration, anti-south and communist-inspired,” according to Poitier’s biographer.  

Some members of the Black press also criticized the film. James Baldwin saw the movie twice and scoffed at the train scene. “Get back on the train, you fool!” Baldwin wrote.

Poitier later said accepting the role was a political decision, hoping it would pave the way for his peers to get better roles. The Defiant Ones also marked the first time a Black man was nominated for Best Actor. 

While Cool Hand Luke focuses on the brutality of working in a prison chain gang, Down By Law has a more “buddy film”-like feel as a trio escapes together. Director Jim Jarmusch compared Down By Law to being a fairytale because of the optimistic journey.

Southern Tensions

Tensions can rise when it’s hot as blazes outside, as it often is in the South.  

Some plotlines would accuse an innocent person of a crime to both heighten tensions with race relations and post-Civil War attitudes. These films include To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

In To Kill a Mockingbird, a Black man, Tom Robinson, played by Brock Peters, is accused of raping a white girl. While questioning him in the trial, it’s apparent that it would have been impossible for Robinson to do so, and he’s the scapegoat for a white man’s crime. 

When a teenage girl is killed in a small southern town in They Won’t Forget, it’s the New York college professor, played by Edward Norris, who is accused. This harkens back to North and South tensions. 

While Virgil Tibbs, played by Sidney Poitier, isn’t tried for murder, he’s the first suspect rounded up moments after a murder victim is found in In the Heat of the Night. As a Philadelphia homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs stays on to help investigate the case but continues to face harassment in the small Mississippi town. In one scene, a white man is angry about being questioned by a Black man and slaps Tibbs across the face, to which Tibbs immediately slaps him back. 

“Tibbs is everything that Black male characters of Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s could not be,” Bogle wrote. 

Small Town Corruption 

Corruption and greed can be homegrown anywhere in the United States, but the locale is the South in All the King’s Men (1949), The Phenix City Story (1955) and A Face in the Crowd (1957). 

The Phenix City Story is shot with a documentary style because, alarmingly, it is based on actual events in Phenix City, Ala. Dubbed Sin City, U.S.A., in the film and real life, the town was known for gambling, prostitution, drugs and racketeering syndicates. The law couldn’t stop the crime, as many officials were on the payroll. This hard-hitting and sometimes horrifying noir exposes all of this. 

In All the King’s Men and A Face in the Crowd, public figures rise to fame and were inspired by real-life individuals. 

Based on Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning book All the King’s Men, the story follows a small-town hick, Willie Stark (played by Broderick Crawford), who has political aspirations. Reporter Jack Burden (played by John Ireland) earnestly helps Willie, though his campaign partner Sadie Burke (Mercedes McCambridge) works against Willie. Willie loses his first campaign due to corruption. He eventually runs for governor again and wins by participating in dirty politics. The character of Willie Stark is based on Huey Long, governor of Louisiana, who served a term as senator until his 1935 assassination.  

A Face in the Crowd follows a performer Lonesome Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith, who eventually gets political aspirations. With his “Shucks, I’m just a country boy” shtick, Rhodes works his way from a small-town radio show to national television in New York City. The character is said to be inspired by a mixture of several entertainers, including Arthur Godfrey and Tennessee Ernie Ford. 

Because the story is based in the South, director Elia Kazan shifted from casting Jackie Gleason to North Carolina-born actor Andy Griffith for the role.  

While it is easy to caricaturize the South or want to ignore films set in this area due to the outdated and offensive attitudes conveyed in when some of these films were produced, it is important to take a look at the breadth of this cinema as it’s a key part in understanding America as a whole.