21.   Faulkner in Film  

Southern viewers must naturally be interested in what Hollywood has done with America’s greatest 20th century writer, William Faulkner of Mississippi.


**Intruder in the Dust (1949).  Perhaps the most faithful of all Faulkner’s work on film, and a realistic portrayal of Southern life in the early 20th century.  An old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) and two boys, one white and one black, go to great lengths to save a cantankerous black man from a murder charge and lynching.


**The Reivers (1969).  A pretty good rendering of the disobedient Memphis escapades of a boy and his two feckless adult companions.  Realistic and a lesson in what happens when you disobey Grandfather’s instructions about the conduct of a gentleman.


**Tomorrow (1971).  In this bleak dramatisation of a Faulkner story, Robert Duvall makes one of his earliest and best performances. He is a poor farmer who takes in a dying woman and her baby and later faces the loss of the boy he has raised as his own son.


**William Faulkner’s “The Old Man” (1988).  A story from Faulkner’s book The Wild Palms.   “The Old Man” is the Mississippi River.  A convict is temporarily released to fight the raging floods in the 1920s.  In the process he finds love and redemption.


**Two Soldiers (2003).  A poor Mississippi farm boy goes to Memphis to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor. His little brother follows with the intention of joining the war. Based on a story about the little brother’s experiences and a testimony to Southern wartime patriotism.


(T) Today We Live (1933) is a big- star (Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Robert Young) film based on Faulkner’s story “Turnabout,” about England in World War I, but it rather misses the point–too much romance and not enough of  the tragedy of war. 


**The Road to Glory (1936) is not Southern in setting but is a truly epic treatment of French soldiers in World War I.  The screenplay is Faulkner’s work and thus part of Southern literature.


James Franco has recently (2013 and 2014) tried to put two of Faulkner’s most difficult works into film: (X) As I Lay Dying and (X) The Sound and The Fury.   For once I agree with the respectable critics in finding these attempts entirely unsatisfactory, for multiple reasons. You might call these two films at best comic book versions of Faulkner.  You would never know from them why these are great books or understand the depth of Faulkner’s vision.


I do not care for the 1950s Hollywood’s mangling of Faulkner in (X) The Sound and the Fury and (X) The Long Hot Summer.  The Hollywood renderings of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, I find mildly interesting but not very recommendable: (T) The Story of Temple Drake (1933) and (T ) Sanctuary (1961).


Faulkner, of course, spent a lot of his talent in Hollywood writing for the screen.  Like all Southerners, he needed the money. It is said that once when he had a block on a particular script, the studio head told him to go home and rest. So, he hitched up his horse trailer and headed back to Mississippi.  Were Hollywood able to deal honestly with itself, Faulkner’s portrayals of Southern California and Yankees in general would be a true learning experience.


Faulkner’s screenwriting made major contributions to the adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946) and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not (1944), a Humphrey Bogart vehicle. There are many other good films with Faulkner’s touch. During World War II Faulkner wrote the script for a biography of Charles de Gaulle, but production was forbidden by FDR.


WHAT COULD BE:  Imagine if we had a truly Southern film industry or even if Hollywood represented a true national culture (if the U.S. had a real culture). What could be done in transferring the stories of the great Southern writers to film!  Not to do so indicates an ignorance of the best part of genuine American culture.  Hollywood did alright with Tom Wolfe’s (T) The Right Stuff but made an unholy distorted mess out of his (X) Bonfire of the Vanities.   Some of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories have been made into half-hour TV dramas which I have not reviewed. The film attempt at her (X) Wise Blood 1979): skip the movie and just listen to O’Connor’s comments and reading in the Bonus material.


If there were an independent Southern movie industry, Faulkner’s War Between the States novel, The Unvanquished, would be a blockbuster rendering of Southern courage, sacrifice, and honour.  And his Go Down, Moses would be a marvelous exploration of a large segment of American life. How about George Garrett’s Elizabethan trilogy, Fred Chappell’s delightful I Am One of You Forever, Andrew Lytle’s Long Night, any of the works of Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Caroline Gordon, Walker Percy? The list could go on almost forever.  This would put U.S. film into the world-class category.  Instead we have an endless trashy inventory of prequels, sequels, comic book characters, absurd fantasies, obscenity, violence, and stupid, vulgar dehumanizing comedy illustrating the trivial lack of decency and dignity that characterises so much of American life.  

As you know, the folks who dominate the American movie industry regard the South, when they think of us at all, as the weirdest and most dangerous part of that unknown territory between the JFK runways and L.A. International. Besides, Yankees since the 17th century have regularly projected their sins, nightmares and forbidden fantasies onto Dixie.


The South makes up such a large part of the American past and present that it can hardly be ignored. A great deal of what the movies have churned out about us is the usual propagandistic hate and misrepresentation that we are all too familiar with from “news” and “entertainment.” Southerners are most often presented as murderous and stupid hayseeds. So far as American media is concerned that is the nature of the beast. 


Being well past my allotted three score and ten, I realise that I have spent too much time watching movies.  I can only hope that come judgment a merciful Lord will forgive my frivolous wasted hours.  My excuse is that cinema has been, in my time, a powerful influence on the ideas, attitudes, values, and behaviour of a great many people.  In earlier days that role was filled by the Bible and the classics. The 19th century was largely dominated by the novel, and for most of the 20th century it was the movies.  My chief interest in my wasted hours of diversion has been the strange career of Hollywood in its treatment of the South, America’s Internal Other.


By default a citizen of the United States, I can only feel shame at the condition American mainstream film has reached in the 21st century—pornography, nihilistic violence, imitativeness, moral depravity, and just plain triviality—an entirely post-Christian product.  The compulsively filthy language of urban Northerners is now standard everywhere. American film is no longer literature unless comic books qualify as literature.  Today’s movie industry is only surpassed in evil influence by its bastard offspring, television. Television is the greatest instrument for lies ever invented.  It not only lies with words but also with pictures. And let us remember who is the Father of Lies.


The sense of shame is especially acute when I realize that other countries have maintained some literary and artistic standards in their cinema—Britain, France, Italy, Norway, Poland, Russia, Australia, Japan, and even Iran, a country which our late-Empire  American megalomaniacs want to destroy. (Old men are irascible. I generalise too sweepingly about American movies. There are still good ones being produced by good people who have at least one foot out of the Hollywood mainstream.)


The hollow post-Christian post-Western “culture” reflected by Hollywood reflects the truth that there is no “American” culture, unless one counts a talent for gadgetry. If we define culture as creativity working in an authentic tradition, a combination of genius and folk culture, then we have to count “America” out. There are good reasons why every original American form of music has come from the South, as well as a preponderance of our greatest writers. Sorry, Minneapolis, but symphony orchestras with foreign conductors playing European music and museums full of European art bought by wealthy industrialists don’t make the grade. This, as Donald Davidson observed long ago, is “culture poured in from the top,” not the real thing.


We can be fairly certain that, accompanying a general decline of knowledge in the American public, most people now get their notions of the Old South and the Confederacy from the silly melodrama Roots and Ken Burns’s government-subsidised Radical Republican propaganda piece.  Americans are now obsessed with victimology, and “slavery” is now the main theme of our history. This feeds upon the all-too-common American self-righteousness that preens itself on condemning the sins, real or imagined, of others.

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As far as cinema is concerned, Southerners are going to have to rely on their own resources for truth-telling.  We have a number of advantages in this regard if they can be put to use—abundant  talent and the fact that our Confederate and other forebears are intrinsically attractive despite all that has been done of late to libel them.

19. Our Speech

The experts will tell you that there is more than one Southern accent.  This is true, but they all gather together as a marker of Southern that has been widely recognised for a long time—like barbecue.   For Hollywood a Southern accent usually is outre’, a sign of ignorance or villainy as discussed in preceding chapters. On the other hand, historically prominent Southerners (Washington, Jefferson, etc.) and other Southern characters viewed favourably always talk in the movies like they are from Chicago–they are honourary Yankees.  Only bad or inferior people talk Southern.  


Years ago I saw a docudrama about the James Monroe administration.  All of the characters except John Quincy Adams were Southern: Monroe, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun.  But the only one who had a Southern accent was the bad apple: Calhoun. This is the kind of thing that Northerners assume without even thinking about it. 


Hollywood is playing to long-standing Yankee prejudice.  Noah Webster with his Connecticut dictionary and generations of Yankee schoolmarms have established “proper” American speech as a sign of respectability, of social superiority over the masses. The result of this Puritan conformity and social ambition is to make standard “American” English the most boring and uncreative form that exists of the marvelous English language.  Southern English, alas diminishing every day, is a natural, living cultural expression, charming and creative.  Foreigners, without Yankee prejudice, tend to recognize this.


Hollywood and the American public would be shocked to learn that early settlers of Virginia talked like Southerners, as did Southern English people in the Shakespearean era.  The Oxford English now supposedly characteristic of the English is a much later development.  See Cleanth Brooks, The Language of the American South.

Yet, now and then, actors of knowledge and of professional dedication to authenticity do make an honest effort.  Interestingly, it is Brits and Australians who are the best at this.  They are more professional and more observant of reality than Hollywood celebrity types and do not suffer from an artificial assumption of Southern inferiority.  This might relate to the fact that Brits, and Southerners alone among Americans, are native English speakers from way back. 

The best I have seen is in the crime drama (T) Judas Kiss (hard to find and not to be confused with a sodomite film with the same title).  Brits Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman do a beautiful job of sounding naturally like New Orleans detectives.  Aussie Jack Thompson is on target in (X) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, an otherwise objectionable film. Aussie Russell Crowe in (T) A Beautiful Mind shows a brilliant man can have a Southern accent.  He also does it well in (T) A Body of Lies. Swiss-born Jim Caviezel plays a good Southerner with a perfect accent in (T) The Thin Red Line (1978 version). 

Matt Damon does good with our speech in **All the Pretty Horses as does the Scot Ewan McGregor in (T) Jane Got a Gun–as the villain, although there is no reason for the villain in this case to talk Southern. Another recent success is William Dafoe as the Louisiana cop and Matt Dillon as the criminal in (T) Bad Country.  Vincent D’Onofrio is very professional as a good guy in **The Whole Wide World and the bad guy in (X) Fire with Fire.

Sometimes a good job is aimed at but hard to sustain through a whole film and the accent becomes intermittent.  This is true with Henry Fonda, playing the Texan Admiral Nimitz in (T) Midway and (T) In Harm’s Way. (The new version of Midway does away completely with the Southern accent. It is certainly deceitful to eliminate Southerners from the heroic pilots.) Also true of Charlton Heston in **Three Violent People and Stacy Keach in (T) James A. Michener’s Texas.  In (T) Fort Dobbs Virginia Mayo struggles to talk with a Southern accent about half the time as do Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin in (T) Cat Ballou.


Some Northerners like John Wayne (some of the time)  and Walter Brennan, who did a lot of Southern characters,  and  Southerners like Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, speak in an authentic pre-Webster  American speech, which merges Southern and Western into a believable  natural character.  Certainly, Wayne and Brennan were justified in persisting in using their distinctive, immediately recognisable characteristic American speech on all occasions.


The moguls of Hollywood are ignorant of everything that is authentically American, but unwittingly they have made the signature Western speech Southwestern.  Often the characters in Westerns, even the good guys, talk like Southerners whether they are or not.  In the movie **Riders of the Purple Sage, Ed Harris, New Jersey born, gives the Western hero a definite Southern accent although the story is apparently set in Utah.  The same is true of the Australian star and other actors in the TV series (T) Longmire about a Wyoming sheriff. Owen Wister would be pleased.


Alas, in many recent movies, even if not objectionable in content, the Southern females talk like Valley girls (as do most American women in the films these days).   Hollywood does not understand that the voice of a cultivated Southern woman is the most beautiful sound on earth. Or perhaps they do know this and want to destroy it out of resentment.


A curiosity:  a recent French World War II film called Frozen Front.   In the English dubbed version, many of both the American and the French soldiers have Southern accents.


Why, in the recent (X) Factory, does a serial killer from Buffalo, New York, have a Southern accent?  Come to think of it, why do murderers and vicious gang leaders always have Southern accents in movies and television?  When they make movies about Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Bundy will they have Southern accents?  When they make a biopic glorifying Bill Clinton will he have his natural Southern accent?

20.  Hollywood Does Bush the Lesser

I forced myself to watch Oliver Stone’s takedown of George W. Bush called (X) “W”.   I have a morbid curiosity about cataloging trends among the fashionable pseudo-intelligentsia.  The film, like previous productions of the same auteur, is doubtlessly providing multiple thrills for the type in Europe and America.

I hold no brief for Bush Minor, a morally and intellectually defective man who has done irreparable damage to our country.  If anything, the film, while exposing his defects clearly, is actually too sympathetic.  Bush is portrayed as an almost tragic figure. But his career is not tragedy–it is a nasty farce.  Tragedy requires a fall from on high.  One gets the impression, no doubt intended, that George W. was inevitably doomed by being a Texan, a Christian, and from an ambitious family.  This impression is re-enforced by the background country music.  But, of course, Bush is no Texan and a man who calls Islam a religion of peace does not have much standing as a Christian.  The Bushes are museum quality specimens of Connecticut’s contribution to America.


There are natural limitations to docudrama, essentially a form of fraud which makes up acts and words from imagination and applies them, with a pre-conceived agenda, to actual events.  The purpose is usually propaganda rather than history.  Of course, some of our most celebrated historians these days do the same thing. Josh Brolin gives a good try at being W.  but it does not work.  He is more masculine than Bush and he lacks that slight hint of squeeze-faced New England ninniness that dominates Bush’s face.  (What, me worry?)  Brolin’s screen accent is more Southern than Bush’s, doubtless to make the point about the evil of being from Texas.


The portrayals of Cheney and Rumsfeld don’t convince me – neither Richard Dreyfus nor Scott Glenn show enough arrogance and force.  Colin Powell, as played by Jeffrey Wright, is not very convincing in addition to being portrayed as more noble and independent-minded than the real thing. Barbara Bush is played by Ellen Burstyn as feisty, but she misses the supercilious, arrogant Yankee flavor of Babs’ demeanour. Thandie Newton, however, does a great job of presenting the insipidness of Condi Rice. I am undecided about James Cromwell’s portrayal of Bush Major–perhaps because one has less feel for his private persona than the others.


My favourite moment is when candidate Bush avows that he will read the whole Constitution and even learn parts of it if necessary. Reminded me of freshman history students who have never read the Constitution and make no intellectual connection with it if they do.


There are some things that one won’t get from this highly doctored account of history.  For instance, some words never appear in the two hours: Douglas Feith, Office of  Special  Plans, and Project for the New American Century.

​18.  World War II and Other Wars


“To deliver examples to posterity, and to regulate the opinion of future times, is no slight or trivial undertaking;  nor is it easy to commit  more atrocious treason against the great republic of humanity, than by falsifying its records and misguiding its decrees.”  –Dr. Samuel Johnson


American wars are started by bankers and Northeastern “intellectuals,” but they are fought by American “deplorables.”  All glory to the many, many brave and patriotic Americans of all regions who fought in WWII.  Southerners did our part, perhaps a little more, but unlike every other group got no credit for it as far as Hollywood was concerned.  There is some reason that the Brits referred to the American air arm as “the Royal Texas Air Force” and the Japs yelled “To Hell with MacArthur!  To Hell with Roy Acuff!”  before a banzai charge.


In Hollywood’s vast output of World War II movies there is occasional favourable portrayal of Southerners. This doubtless reflects the good will with which the American public entered the war and its recognition that we were needed and doing our part or more. On the other hand, war movies also exhibited a relentless buildup of hostility to Southerners. 


This is due to the fact that in the 1930s refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, most of them Communists or fellow-trevlers, became powerful in Hollywood as directors and writers.  They of course neither knew or cared anything about Americans, then or now, but only wanted to promote leftwing causes.  They sensed that Southerners were the enemy.  The South is the part of the U.S. that is most alien to them and which has been their first target in their ongoing decimation of all-American heritage. The hostility has continued to the present. 


The highly regarded films (X)A Walk in the Sun and (X)The Big Red One are supposedly about the celebrated Army 1st Division, also known as the Texas Division.  In A Walk in the Sun the only Southern soldier is portrayed as stupid and the good soldiers are from Rhode Island, Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Ohio. These two films were directed by immigrants who were Communist fellow travelers.    


In general, war movies follow the usual pattern of Hollywood. Real Southerners are not identified as such and only bad people have Southern accents. You would never know from (T) Darby’s Rangers that the founder of American Special Forces was from Arkansas. Or from **We Were Soldiers that Gen. Hal Moore was from Kentucky. 


There is a whole library of malicious or incompetent Southern officers in WW II movies: (X)The Bridge at Remagen, (X)Between Heaven and Hell, (X) Attack! and (T) The Thin Red Line (1998 remake) for just a few.  Such Southern officers usually have to be saved from their deadly mistakes by Yankees. In (T) Objective Burma!  and (X)Away All Boats!  the only Southerners who appear are hopeless bumpkins.  In (T) Battleground the only Southerner is a tacky loutish fellow named “Abner.” I’ll bet that name is a lot more common in New England than in the South.  In (X)Guadalcanal Diary the only Southerner is a fool, although he is a good marksman.  The director did not have a clue about real Americans.


Then there is the crazy Southerner image. In Hollywood’s fictional version of the famous bomber (X)The Memphis Belle (1990) there is one Southerner in the crew, a gunner.  He is described as his father having lost the family farm in a card game and having connections with a New Orleans brothel.  No such person existed.  The real commanding pilot was from North Carolina. After all, the plane is named “the Memphis Belle,” not “the Brooklyn Broad” or “the Cleveland Playmate.”  In the celebrated **Saving Private Ryan (which contrary to common knowledge is not a wholly true story) there is one Southerner in the unit: a sniper who quotes Bible verses as he kills the enemy. There was no such person. But at least we are considered good marksmen.


While I am complaining, I might as well mention **Patton.  It is an excellent film about a real American hero.  But Patton was a lean, mean Southern Celtic type, and George C. Scott does not work for me.  He plays Patton more like an urban tough guy in 1940s crime films.


There is similar disdainful treatment of Southerners for Korea, Vietnam, and our recent endless filibusters in the Middle East.


Hollywood’s presentation of war heroes has been and will become even more so mostly a matter of ethnic spoils distribution (affirmative action without regard to history), with Southerners left at the hind tit, as always.  In many World War II movies, one gets the impression that most of the fighting was done by short swarthy ethnics with Brooklyn accents.  That does not square with authentic photos and films from the time, which show mostly tall fair men from the Heartland, the West, and the South.  There are likely millions of people who falsely believe, thanks to Hollywood, that most of the combat in Vietnam was done by black soldiers. 


Movie representations of combat units almost never match reality. And that has been true for a long time. In (X) Bataan (1945) a small American squad wiped out in a last stand includes one black and one with a Jewish name (played by an Irish actor).  This seems rather unlikely.  The movies are full of affirmative action heroes with Southerners, as always, the losers.  The most recent egregious example is **12 Strong, a generally well-made film about the first American team into Afghanistan after 9/11.  There are a black and a Mexican on the Hollywood team, and they are given more screen time and character development than all the white soldiers except the leader.  There were no such persons in the real “12 Strong.”  They were all white men from the Heartland and a few from the South. To distort history with the intent to control perception of the present and thus control the future is a grave offense against truth.


The fact is, the masters of Hollywood can say anything about the South without any attention to truth. That is what it means to be a conquered people.


Keep this point in mind when you watch those war movies, old and new, and see if I ain’t right.


A few suggestions:


**Sergeant York (1941) Gary Cooper received the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Alvin Cullum York (1887-1964) and the film got 10 other Academy Award nominations during the patriotic fervour of 1941. York, from the Tennessee mountains, was the most highly decorated U.S. soldier of World War I, having, astoundingly, single-handedly captured a large German machine gun position and its men. The film is good, although a little condescending, on York’s early life–first as a drinker and fighter, and then, after being struck by lightning, a devout Christian who unsuccessfully sought conscientious objector status before being drafted and sent to France. When York comes back to the U.S. he is greeted in New York by bands playing a celebratory “Dixie.”  Randolph Scott is said to have coached Cooper on the accent.


**Gung Ho (1943).  A serious and realistic work with Randolph Scott as the tough Marine officer.  There is a little bit of leftist “popular front” propaganda stuck in the end, inappropriately.


(X) To Hell and Back (1955). The most decorated U.S.  soldier of World War I was Alvin York of Tennessee. The most decorated soldier of World War II was Audie Murphy of Texas. He went on to become a good and popular actor in many Westerns and other films, but I do not recommend his first autobiographical film on the war.  It is excessively focused on his alleged white trash upbringing and the fighting is not very real.


**Black Hawk Down (2001).   This is a vivid account of the Somaliland disaster.  No concessions are made to portraying the Army Rangers in the interest of affirmative action, and some of the Rangers even talk like Southerners.  There is a subtle lesson given that probably few have noticed.  The most featured Northern soldier sees his mission in the backward and war-ravaged country as doing good.  Another soldier, played by the Australian Eric Bana with a perfect Southern accent, quietly knows better. He is a warrior doing his duty without illusions. Of course, Black Hawk Down was created by a Brit, Ridley Scott.  No American with the power to make a movie could have or would have done it that way.


(T) Pearl Harbor (2001). Quite surprisingly to anyone who has observed Hollywood products lately, this flick has as its central heroes two pilots from Tennessee.  They are played by non-Southerners Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett who make a good try at the right accents.


**We Were Soldiers (2002). This good Vietnam film is based on a book by the Southerner Joseph Galloway, who is portrayed with the correct accent.


** The Pacific (2010).   This series about the 1st Marine Division (the “Old Breed”) in the worst fighting of the Pacific is very good.  I recommend it partly because it is based on With the Old Breed:  At Peleliu and Okinawa, the memoir of Eugene B. Sledge of Alabama.  Sledge and another Marine from Louisiana are important characters.  And the Marine hero General “Chesty” Puller appears with a proper Virginia accent.


**Hacksaw Ridge (2016).  The interesting story of the Christian Virginia private who would not fight, but was highly honoured for his courage tending the wounded under fire.


In yet another John Wayne World War II production, (T) Operation Pacific, (1951), the Duke goes out of his way to praise the Southern sailors in the fighting Navy and show the Confederate flag of one who is a casualty.  The Italian War Devils (1969) has American soldiers whistling “Dixie” as a signal.  In **The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) an American soldier plays “Dixie” on his harmonica on the road to liberate Rome.  For the Korean War I might note (T) Men of the Fighting Lady (1954) in which Keenan Wynn has a Confederate emblem on his fighter plane and a Southern flag at his funeral. 


By the time of the Vietnam War, America had one foot in the revolutionary era, yet I have seen in a number of films fighting men with Confederate symbols. The television series **China Beach is a serious treatment of Vietnam experience, even though at times it seems more about affirmative action than about the war.  But now and then you have Confederate flags and Southern accents without arousing much negative reaction.


The soldiers’ music of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam was country with a little old-fashioned pop.  The movie music of our military ventures since Vietnam is rap–rather incongruous, I would think, and Hollywood’s obsession with multiculturalism is in full bloom. Could that have anything to do with losing all our recent wars?
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Addenda


PART II: Jamestown (TV series, 2017-2019).  The **first season of the English series about the early days of Jamestown after the arrival of the first women is well done and pretty sound.  From (X) season 2 on it collapses into a ridiculously unhistorical account of African Americans and slaves.  Too bad.  It could have been an occasion to educate Americans on that subject.


PART IV: (T) A Rebel Born (2019).  This is an episodic biography of General Forrest.  The screenplay is by Lochlainn Seabrook, a good Southerner and good writer. The director is Christopher Forbes, previously director of the excellent **Firetrail.  We should be grateful that this has been done in the present time.  A good start but, of course, not the big budget epic treatment that Forrest deserves and will never receive until there is an independent Southern film industry.
PART XI:  **Where the Red  Fern  Grows  (1974) .   Don’t know why I overlooked this Ozark family story. **Richard Jewell (2020). I have not yet had the opportunity to view this, but the descriptions make it seem a good work on how a Georgia hero was falsely targeted by evil federal agents for a bombing at the Atlanta Olympics  

16.  EXECRABLES. The Worst Movies about the South: A Small Selection


The competition here is fierce. We can only provide a sample of some of the worst.  A few examples out of a vast field, many of them presenting a ludicrously distorted South. 


(X)  The Southerner (1945). This movie was made by a famous French director while a refugee in the U. S. during World War II.  For some reason that I have never been able to discern, a lot of critics think this is some classic achievement. All I see is a dull, meandering thing by people who know nothing about Southerners.  It smacks of “Soviet realism.”


(X)Hurry Sundown.   Landowner beating up on poor blacks and whites. 

                                          
(X) Fled and (X) I Walk the Line. Chain gangs, evil Southern sheriff stories that have been around since the Abolitionists. 


(X) A Face in the Crowd. Andy Griffith against type as the worst sort of despicable Southern demagogue.


(X) God’s Little Acre, the ultimate po’ white trash fantasy.


(X) Shy People, about Louisiana bayou folk, one of the silliest movies ever made.   


(X) Mandingo. The porn version of (X) Roots.                                   


(X) The Gift (2000), an early Cate Blanchett atrocity of which she should be ashamed. This monstrosity involved a half-dozen A-list stars in a truly absurd plot that brings in every evil Southern cliché that has ever been dreamed of–even when they contradict one another.                            


(X) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the ultimate dark Southern city story.  Although there is one hilarious scene with Kevin Spacey dealing with an ultramodern Atlanta hotel. Anything based on a Tennessee Williams play about the perverted South:  (X) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,  (X) A Steetcar Named Desire, (X) Suddenly Last Summer,  (X) Baby Doll, all extremely popular with New York audiences and critics. 

                                                                                    
(X) Convicts (1991). Robert Duvall usually presents a fine Southern persona, but he is guilty of carpet-chewing over-acting in this heavy-handed story about an ex-Confederate mistreating convict labour.


(X) Shag-The Movie. This is about a Myrtle Beach summer. What could have been an enjoyable coming-of-age flick about South Carolina’s classic beach dance turns into an obscene mess.


(X)The Education of Little Tree. This began as a good book, widely touted in Establishment circles, recommended by Oprah Winfrey, and republished by a university press as an authentic Native American memoir although it is obviously a novel. Then it was accidentally discovered that the author was Asa Carter, an Alabamian and speech writer for Governor George Wallace. Horrified scandal erupted.  But anyone who actually reads the book (the usual “authorities” never do) can see it is not about “Southern bigotry” but about persecution by puritanical Yankees.  Needless to say, the movie version is all about evil Southern bigotry.          


(X) Spencer’s Mountain.  In a typical burst of artistic genius, Hollywood took Earl Hamner’s story of the Walton family, which became a popular TV series, moved it from Virginia to Wyoming, stuck in Henry Fonda, and made an unintentionally comic farce.

                     
(X) Forrest Gump.  I have never been able to see the point of this joke and why it is so beloved. I think it must be some kind of nostalgia trip for the former flower children of the 1960s. Take it from one old codger who was there, the 60s were not all that pretty.

                                     
(X) To Kill a Mockingbird. If it were any good it could not possibly be so popular. 


(X) LBJ. Lyndon Johnson told entirely from the Kennedy viewpoint.  LBJ is crude, tacky, corrupt, clueless, and most of all he is Southern and not one of us. 


(X) “W”. This George W. Bush biopic will be discussed more extensively later.


(X) Alamo Bay:  Southerners beat up on Vietnamese refugees.  A Ku Klux melodrama directed by an avant-garde Frenchman, Louis Malle.


(X) Scorchers. Southern-born Faye Dunaway ought to pay reparations for this ridiculous Southern sex farce.


(X) Crimes of the Heart.  This absurdity, about three crazy Southern sisters, should have stayed on the New York stage where it was popular. 


(X) Cross Creek: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling, wrote also Cross Creek, a touching memoir of her life among Florida backwoods people during the Depression. Mary Steenburgen, although Arkansas born, is miscast. The movie should have been called “Yankee Feminist Goes to Dogpatch.”


(X) God Save Texas (2019). The latest entry into the hate Dixie sweepstakes is a strong contender.


But enough of this, with which I could easily go on until Christmas.  These are merely scrapings from the top of a very deep pile.


17.  Southern Crime and Mystery

In recommending films set in the 20th century South I have emphasised family viewing opportunities.  I have neglected a plethora of ugly films of crime and mystery set in the South.  The most vicious and vile criminals always have Southern accents. Quite often they have Confederate flags on their walls and vehicles.


Hollywood movie makers know that this will create an automatic antipathy in most of their viewers since they strongly feel such antipathy themselves.  This is true even when the scene is far from Dixie: Primal Fear (Chicago); Copycat (San Francisco); Fire with Fire (Long Beach CA); Deadfall (rural Michigan), for just a sample of evil people with Southern accents in unlikely places. And the most despicable people always have the most unmistakable Southern accents, unlike most of the likable characters in movies taking place in the South.


Listen to your crime movies carefully and you will see that this is almost always so.  Even though, of all of the notorious serial killers of our time, I can’t think of a single one who could be called Southern.  I have not seen any films about Bundy or Dahmer but it would not be surprising to see them having Southern accents.


Here are a few (T) that are entertaining and have more or less authentic Southern settings and characters, if you like this type of movie:


(T) Thunder Road (1958). The old standby moonshining classic.


(T) Sharky’s Machine (1981).  Burt Reynolds as an Atlanta detective fighting organised crime.  Worth a look just to hear Reynolds characterise the local crime boss: “He’s a thief, a murderer, a pervert, and worst of all he’s from out of state.”


(T) Southern Comfort (1981).  What can I say? Everybody enjoys this slightly far-fetched drama of city boys lost in the Louisiana swamps.


(T) Thompson’s Last Run (1986).  A con fight the odds to go straight and save the remnants of his family, a niece and her child.


(T) The Newton Boys (1989).  Serious and realistically human treatment of a Texas bank-robbing gang.


(T) Rush (1991).  Two agents fighting the ugly world of narcotics in Texas find themselves drawn into addiction.


(T) The Real McCoy (1993).  Kim Basinger as a high-end Atlanta thief trying to go straight.


(T) Conair (1997). I mention this ugly thriller mainly because Nicholas Cage plays a heroic good guy from Alabama.


**Lake City (2008).  The always marvelous Sissy Spacek confronts danger for her criminal son.


(T) Winter’s Bone (2010).  From the Arkansas novelist Daniel Woodrell, author of the book from which **Ride with the Devil was taken.  A bleak but unfortunately truthful look at criminality among the lower end of the plain folk (“depolrables”).


**Highwaymen (2019).  Two over-the hill Texas Rangers take on the mission to finish off the reign of terror by Bonnie and Clyde.  Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson are excellent on the accents and the demeanour of real Texans.

NEW ORLEANS


Yankees seem to be particularly unhinged by the laisser les bon temps rouler of New Orleans and the South Louisiana bayous.  (X) A whole catalog could be compiled of absurd films about this region:  No Mercy, Shy People (which contains another repulsive misuse of the Confederate flag), Angel Heart, A Love Song for Bobby Long, JFK, Pretty Baby, Suddenly Last Summer, A Walk on the Wild Side, Albino Alligator.   Ignore also the repulsive contributions to the New Orleans scene with Clint Eastwood, Nicholas Cage, Sylvester Stallone, and Jean-Claude van Damme. You can safely miss these.  I have suffered through them for your benefit.


But let me positive for a change and give you a few decent New Orleans movies, though none are suitable for family viewing:


(T) The Big Easy (1986).  A New Orleans crime drama that manages to catch some of the spirit of the unique city.


(T) Storyville (1992).  A decent political drama.


**Undercover Blues (1993).  A really entertaining caper with Dennis Quaid and Kathleen Turner as light-hearted crime-fighting agents who take their baby with them on jobs.


(T) Heaven’s Prisoners (1996).  A pretty good New Orleans crime story based on a Dave Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke.


EXECRABLES:  The list in infinite. I cite just a few that are highly touted, to avoid unless you want to wallow in irredeemable evil. (X) Night of the Hunter, warped and evil Southerners; (X) Deliverance, the ultimate Deep Dark South fantasy from a silly novel by an over-rated poet; (X) Cape Fear, two versions.  But enough of this. These are merely scrapings from a very deep pile from the South-hating Cultural Cleansers of Hollywood.
​

​15.  Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Southerners:  Films for the Family


The major movie stars of the 1930s through the 1970s came from the East and Midwest.  Nevertheless, there was a strong presence of native Southerners in the top ranks:  Oliver Hardy, Ava Gardner, Randolph Scott, Joseph Cotten, Jeffrey Hunter,  Miriam Hopkins, John Payne (an almost forgotten Virginian star of film noir and Westerns),  Cyd Charrisse, Geraldine Page,  Dana Andrews,  Johnny Mack Brown, Charles Coburn, John Carradine,  Ben Johnson, Elizabeth Patterson, Tex Ritter, Joan Crawford,  not  to forget  Elvis and Gene Autry.  And a little later Faye Dunaway, Jaclyn Smith, Robert Duvall, Joanne Woodward and James Garner. A good many Southern writers served in Hollywood as well.


It is interesting how in very recent  times, an increasing number of top Hollywood  female stars,  apart  from the overwhelming presence of British and Commonwealth people, come from the Deep South: Julia Roberts, Holly Hunter, Kim Basinger, Andie McDowell. Maybe the Southern charm still works although Hollywood would never admit the truth of what they are exploiting. Or from Texas and the  Upper and Border South or with Southern background: Reese Witherspoon, Renee’ Zellweger,  Sissy Spacek, Brad Pitt, Kevin Costner,  Cybill Shepherd,  Will Patton, Tommy Lee Jones, Kathy Bates, Kathleen Turner, Don Johnson, Ned Beatty, George Clooney, Steve Martin, Johnny Depp. I do not claim all of them as Southern, but they have Southern and not traditional Yankee in their backgrounds.  The only American rivals of the Southern born these days seem to be Italian Americans and Californians.


It is perhaps relevant in this regard that some of the most authoritative African American stars are Southern-born - Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, Jamie Foxx.


In portrayals of Southern characters, even if they are favourable we have to always be alert to what I call “the tacky factor.” While good people, these cinema Southerners are often backward, badly-dressed hayseeds without a clue to contemporary manners and fashions.  The tacky factor is usually accompanied by an assumption that Southern women are highly desirable but stupid, apparently a long-running sick fantasy north of Mason-Dixon.


The list that follows is intended to point to some good down-time entertainment for Southern people.  You may find a few pleasant surprises, and you will usually not have to send the children out of the room.


**Coquette (1929). Mary Pickford, a top star of the time, received an Academy Award for her performance as a Southern girl who clashes with her father over her preference for a poor suitor, Johnny Mack Brown before he moved to Westerns.  A box-office success but now hard to obtain.


(T) Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936). Decent treatment of family feuding in Kentucky.


**Kentucky (1938). A Romeo and Juliet story with a happy ending in horse country.  Includes Loretta Young. The inimitable Walter Brennan received a Supporting Actor Oscar.


**My  Old  Kentucky Home (1938).  A playboy returns home from the big city blinded by an accident and in the depths of despair.  His former sweetheart helps him to find his way.


**Maryland (1940). After his father is killed in a riding accident, his mother forbids John Payne (Virginia born star) to ride. But his new love encourages him to enter the big race.


**Virginia (1941). Fred MacMurray as Stonewall Jackson Elliott confronts wealthy Yankees buying up Southern plantations in the 1930s and teaches them there is more to life than pursuit of the Almighty Dollar.


**The Vanishing Virginian (1942).  A nice portrait of a conservative and honourable man adjusting to changing conditions and his liberal (for the time) daughter.


**Two Weeks to Live (1943).  Through the 1930s and 40s “Lum and Abner” was a popular radio show.  It was about two gentleman from Arkansas (as characters and in actuality) and featured humour that was a little more mature than many similar shows.  Several movies were spun off.  This one concerns a mistaken diagnosis of terminal illness and pursuant misadventures in New York City.


(T) The Shepherd of the Hills (1945).  Family conflict in the Ozarks.


**Colonel Effingham’s Raid (1946).  This is an excellent example of the South-friendly phase of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s.  Charles Coburn (Southern born) is a retired army officer in a Georgia town who successfully raises a public campaign to defeat a “progressive “plan to tear down the local Confederate monument.  (Remind you of anything more recent?)  The film, set on the eve of World War II, with Confederate flags flying and “Dixie” blaring, makes clear the compatibility of Southern tradition with the best of American patriotism.


(T) All the King’s Men (1949, 2006).  Robert Penn Warren’s acclaimed novel has been made into two big-screen movies as well as a stage drama, a radio drama, a TV drama, and an opera.  Of course the book is a fictional rendering of the Huey Long regime in Louisiana. The (T)1949 version was highly honoured with prizes, the (X) 2006 one was rightly considered a flop. Both versions concentrate on corruption, take many liberty’s with Warren’s work, and lose the deep historical element.  (X) The Kingfish (1995), with the comic actor John Goodman as Huey, is unrealistic but amusing, the anti-South unrealism having won it several prizes.  (T) Blaze (1989) about the antics of Earl Long, played strictly for comedy,  is entertaining with Paul Newman doing some justice to the character.


**Carbine Williams  (1952).  In this film James Stewart is David Marshall Williams (1900 - 1975), North Carolina moonshiner, convict, and firearms genius.  While a prisoner in the 1920s Williams invented a revolutionary rifle mechanism that became the basis of the M-1 carbine carried by Americans in World War II.  After his pardon in 1929, Williams secured more than 20 additional patents.  The film is good in portraying Williams’s large Southern family that  never gave up on one of its members despite adversity.


**Goodbye, My Lady  (1956). A poor Mississippi farm boy finds a dog of a strange breed and trains it up to be a good hunter.  Then he has to do the painful  right thing and  give it back to the well-heeled Yankee owner  from whom it has strayed.  Walter Brennan is cast as the boy’s grandfather.  He has a memorable line:  “Met a Yankee once. Snake bit him.  The snake died.” Though he was born in Boston, Brennan superbly  portrayed many Southern and Confederate characters in the films. He was also for a long time a stalwart  conservative  voice in leftwing Hollywood.


**The Beverly Hillbillies  (TV, 1962-1971).  Various  collections  of TV episodes are now on DVD.  Who can resist  the  Clampetts, simple but honourable country folks dealing with the greedy Yankee banker “Mr. Drysdale” and the Yankee pseudo–intellectual “Miss Jane.” The Clampetts are kind-hearted, honest to a fault. Transported to Beverly Hills, their naïve goodness always triumphs over Yankee greed and pretentiousness.  Granny thought that Americans had won the “war between the Americans and the Yankees.”  There are plenty of Confederate flags and Southern  sharp-shooting  and good country music.   Near the top of the national TV  charts for years.  Though cast in comic form, does this have something serious to say about American society of its time?


**The Miracle Worker  (1962).  Inspiring story of Helen Keller of Alabama,  one of the most  awesome persons of  the 20th century. Inaccurate to a degree in portraying Helen as less lacking in ability to communicate than was the  fact  before her devoted Northern teacher arrived.  Remade  in 1979.


**Hellfighters (1968).  Texas oilfire fighters doing their thing very well in South America.


**Smokey and the Bandit (1977).  Memorable very  popular  comedy in which Southerners bestowed on the American mainstream some things it sorely lacks—riotous good  times and an ability to laugh at yourself.  Detroit has banned Burt  Reynolds’s  iconic car from all auto shows because of its Southern flag.


**The Dollmaker  (1984).  This is a  moving  dramatization of Harriette  Arnow’s  great novel of a Kentucky mountain woman  condemned to life in industrial Detroit.  Jane Fonda, believe it or not, does well as the title character.


**The River  (1984). Mel Gibson and Southern-born Sissy Spacek  are a Tennessee  farm couple struggling to save their land and survive the ravages of nature, poverty, and developers.  The accents are good  and there is even a Southern flag.


**Marie (1985). A Tennessee lady courageously fighting political corruption in high places. Based  on a true story.


**Murphy’s Romance (1985). The entertaining experiences of an aging man “in love for the last time.”


**The Trip to Bountiful (1985).  An old lady, beautifully played by Geraldine Page, lives unhappily  in  the city  with  her grown son.  She evades supervision and takes  a bus trip to the abandoned  rural community of Bountiful, Texas, where she grew up and  had her happiest days.  A moving  study of old age and memory. (There is a later remake with African American characters that I have not seen.)


**Hard Promises  (1991).  Sissy Spacek  handles her rambling husband.


**Man in the Moon  (1991). Pretty good family drama set in Louisiana.  Early Reese Witherspoon.


**Something to Talk About  (1995). Well done treatment of traditional values versus contemporary breakdown of morals in Kentucky horse country.


**Stars Fell of Henrietta  (1995).  An Oklahoma farm family is about to go under in the Great Depression when a washed-up promoter (Robert Duvall) shows up and against all the odds finds oil.


**The Spitfire Grill  (1996).  A Southern girl coping with life in Maine.


**The Whole Wide World  (1996).  A portrayal of the tragic life of Robert E. Howard (1906—1936), the Texas writer who created the iconic character of “Conan, the Barbarian” and launched a whole new literary genre of fantasy adventure. The period and regional background are authentic and Vincent D’Onofrio  plays Howard with the right accent.  The story is told by an aspiring young writer played by Texas-born  Renee’ Zellwegger.


**All the Pretty Horses  (2000).  Young Texans experience the dangerous alien culture of Mexico.  Based on  a Cormac McCarthy novel.


**Harlan County  War  (2000).  A sympathetic and  realistic  account of Kentucky coal miners’ struggles.   Vastly superior to (X) Norma Rae  on a similar theme.


**The Notebook (2000). The people portrayed in this “romantic drama” set on South Carolina in the 1940s, for better or worse,  do act like real Southern people.


**Papa’s Angels  (2000).  An Arkansas craftsman who has lost his wife after a long illness is brought back to life by his five children.


**Crazy Like a Fox  (2004).  A Virginian resorts to eccentric but effective measures to thwart developers out to destroy his historic Southern “place.”


**Man of the House  (2005). Tommy Lee Jones as a gruff Texas Ranger  in charge of  protecting some lively cheerleaders who have witnessed a murder.  Labeled  a “crime comedy.”


**Their  Eyes Were Watching  God  (2005).  This is based on the 1937 novel by Zora Neale Hurston, the greatest African American writer yet to appear. The sympathetic  story of an independent  minded  black woman in a black community is pretty well adapted for film.  The only flaw is typical Hollywood.  Hurston and her character were black and proud of it, but the lead is played by a half-white actress. 


**A Touch of Fate (2005). Good drama of family life among real North Carolinians.


**A Burning Passion: The Margaret Mitchell Story (2007). This made for TV movie has some soap opera aspects but  overall  is a well-done biopic  of the author of Gone With the Wind.  In contrast to many or most films, the accents are good and the Georgia background  treated respectfully.


(T) The Wager  (2007).  Randy Travis as a man at the top in Hollywood struggling  with his Christian conscience.  Disappointing  considering the star and the topic.


**The Last Run  (This is the Last Damn Run of Liquor I’ll Ever Make).  (2008).  This documentary features Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton (1946—2009), who was the last of a long  line  of  high quality  whiskey makers in the mountains of Tennessee.  He  followed  a  tradition in his family going  back to the 18th century and was something of a folk hero. In 2008 he was raided by the BATF, led by James Cavanaugh, the man who conducted the massacre of children at  Waco.   Though  he was in his 60s and suffering from cancer, the U.S. government denied  his  request  to serve his sentence under house arrest. The day before he was to go to the penitentiary “Popcorn” Sutton took his own life.


**A Beautiful Mind  (2011).  Shows  that  a highly intelligent  man can have a Southern accent.  The Aussie Russell Crowe does a good job.


**Duck  Dynasty  (TV, 2012—2017).  The seasons of this Southern story are now on DVD.  The real  Robertson  family of Louisiana became nearly as popular as The Beverly Hillbillies with the national TV audience.  Real  Southern  people with sound values and able to laugh at themselves. There is something in real Southerners  that  continues to appeal to many Northerners despite the prevalent  ethnic cleansing directed  against us.


**Wish You Well  (2013). An elderly Virginia lady fights to save her beautiful  mountain  land  from  coal  companies.


**Life on the Line (2015).  A  pretty good  drama about  New Orleans in hurricane time.


**Serena  (2015). Lumbering, carpetbaggers, and  tragedy in the North Carolina Smokies during the Depression.  Setting  pretty authentic and Brit actors do good accents.


**Chesapeake Shores (TV, 2016–2022).  I am calling this pleasant family series Southern whether they like it or not.  Chesapeake people are part of Southern culture.  If  the  characters  were  real people  they would have Confederate ancestors. These even have a Nashville  music connection.


**The Choice (2016).  Romantic drama in the South Carolina Sea Islands.


**Deepwater Horizon  (2016).  Good dramatisation of an l offshore oil platform disaster. Kurt Russell does a good job of a Texas persona and accent. John Malkovich  is a silly failure trying the same thing. 


**The Beach House (2017). Not bad family drama set in contemporary Charleston.**The  Leisure  Seeker  (2017).  An aging couple revs up the old RCV and heads out for a last trip—to contemporary Florida.  The great Helen Mirren is excellent  on the demeanour  and accent of a South Carolina lady

12.   Southerners in the Late 19th  and Early  20th Centuries

**The Yearling (1946).  This is an all-time favourite about family life on the Florida frontier and a troublesome pet deer.  Seldom noticed is that the father, Gregory Peck, is a former Confederate soldier.  The film is based on the novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.  Another fine Rawlings book about her life among Florida “crackers” during the Depression was made into a less successful film, (X) Cross Creek.  This one comes across as feminist meets Dogpatch.  The star, Mary Steenburgen, is from Arkansas and should have known better.


**The Virginian (2000).   Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian is a benchmark in American Western literature and made the Cowboy an American icon.  Its Southern hero in Wyoming cattle country acts with natural integrity, deals with rustlers, and successfully courts the Yankee schoolmarm and corrects her strange notions. The Virginian has been put on the screen numerous times, dating back to the silent film era, and it provided the title for a popular TV series that ran for nine seasons. Unlike its predecessors, which were at best routine oaters, this 2000 version with Bill Pullman is excellent, I might even say beautiful.   It has a real feel for the Wyoming frontier and a poetic appreciation for the characters.  By contrast, (X) The Virginian (1946) with Joel McRea is a joke.  Whoever made that version evidently knew nothing about the book except a plot summary, piled on every false Hollywood idea of “the West,” and completely missed the point.



**The Bostonians (1984). Why have I included a movie which takes place mostly in Boston on my Southern list? Henry James, who published his novel The Bostonians in 1886,  is regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the greatest fiction writers in English of all times, although for us plain folk he is something of an acquired taste, like opera. In The Bostonians a young ex-Confederate from Mississippi comes to New York in hopes of making a living.  He pays a visit of duty to a lady cousin in Boston where he meets “the girl of his dreams.”   There  follows a contest between Boston reformers  who want  to use the young lady, who has a mesmerizing stage presence, as an orator for feminism, and the Southerner, who wants her for his wife.  This time, the Southerner wins.  Though defeated and poor, he is alive and vital, a great contrast to the decayed Boston society living on the remnants of abolition glory. 



**Song of the South (1949).  Atlanta newspaperman Joel Chandler Harris began writing his Uncle Remus stories in 1876 and continued till 1906.  They became immensely popular in America and across the world.  Uncle Remus, a former slave, tells white and black children his fascinating and meaningful  stories of  Br’er Rabbit  and his friends in the Briar Patch  The work is now disparaged because Uncle Remus is a wise and good man rather than a revolutionary and  thus  is not appropriate  as  a  role model.  But Harris was personally knowledgeable of and inspired by firsthand acquaintance with African Americans and he preserved a great body of African American folklore that might otherwise have been lost.  Disney successfully rode the popularity of Uncle Remus into Song of the South, very popular in its time.  It is a musical, part animated and part live action (the first live action film produced by the cartoon genius Walt Disney).  It is a charming film. Uncle Remus’s song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” won the Academy Award for best song.  James Baskett’s performance as Uncle Remus is excellent and he was the first black man to receive an Oscar.  Of course, today the Disney Corporation does not produce or celebrate this non-PC classic and a DVD is hard to find.  My copy has Japanese subtitles.  And you can always read the books.


**The Rough Riders (1997).  A well-done history of the famous U.S. 1st Volunteer Cavalry in the Spanish-American War.  Much attention is given to Teddy Roosevelt and to volunteers from the Northeastern elite, but there is much Southern flavour also.  Sam Elliott is the Texas sheriff who leads Southwestern volunteers and Gary Busey is former Confederate and now U.S. General Joe Wheeler, who now and then forgets that he is fighting the Spanish and not the Yankees.


**I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (1951).  A Methodist minister and his wife bring God to a rural Georgia community, which is pictured realistically and sympathetically. Based on the real-life memoirs of Corra Harris that were once very popular.


WHAT COULD BE:  Wister’s novel about Charleston, Lady Baltimore, published four years after The Virginian, would make a fantastic story for a Southern film industry.  It contrasts the genteel impoverished folks of Charleston with New Rich Yankees. 

11.  Post-bellum and Westerns

There are two  interesting,  important,  and  little-noticed features of films about  the South  in the  period  after the War for Southern Independence. First, until recent times they generally portray the mainstream view of “Reconstruction” as corrupt and oppressive that prevailed before the Marxist coup in American history writing. Carpetbaggers are shown as vicious, greedy, and unprincipled, and Southerners as generally honourable people struggling against oppression.  Hollywood was all on our side on the badness of Reconstruction. Indeed, that was the American consensus at the time.  Even the impeccably Bostonian Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard in his standard college history text deplored Reconstruction.

Second, such earlier films generally avoid most of the troubled Reconstruction South. Usually they are  set in the western South - Texas, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), New Mexico, Arkansas, and Missouri.  They often show sympathetic ex-Confederate people moving or returning West, which was indeed a major theme of Hollywood Westerns for a time. Such Reconstruction stories thus become in popular perception “Western” rather than Southern.  This is conspicuously true of such classics as **The Searchers, **True Grit, and **Lonesome Dove, all stories of frontier Southerners.


 “Western” is vague and elastic in the American imagination.  American  thought,  writing,  discussion,  and cinema  presentation  of  “the  West” is  confused  and lacking in any clear idea of what the term should  mean.  Of course, Hollywood today usually means by “the West” the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, the last settled regions.  But the West actually began in 1607 just beyond the palisades of Jamestown in Tidewater Virginia and was a moving process for almost two centuries. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner, a Midwesterner, famously announced that the frontier ended in 1890—but he did not allow for the Texas and Oklahoma oil men who pioneered Alaska after that date.


Southerners were present everywhere during the great period of Western movement and were earliest and predominant everywhere except the Great Lakes and the Pacific coast.  The American consciousness has put this truth down the memory hole:  Western is assumed to be good and American (i.e., Northern) and Southern to be bad and un-American.  This is done automatically and without reflection.  The treatment of Texas provides a proving ground for this observation:  if one likes Texas and wants to present it favourably, then it is “Western.” If one does not like Texas and wants to give it a bad rep then it is “Southern.”  Of course, Texas is simply Texas, unimaginable except as a creation of Southerners and an extension of their homeland into new terrain. 


Southerners acquired almost all the new territory of the U.S. after the Revolution, often against fierce Yankee opposition. They were also generally the earliest explorers and settlers of new territory. Daniel Boone moved west from North Carolina and Davy Crockett from Tennessee. Lewis and Clark were Virginians.  Most of the men of the Alamo were Southern volunteers.  The “mountain men,” who first explored the Rockies, like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and Charles Bent of Bent’s Fort, were mostly from the South. In fact, the Cattle Kingdom began in the colonial South long before it reached Texas and merged with the Mexican version.  And it was Texans who spread the Cattle Kingdom to the Northern plains, although Yankee and Brit capitalists swiftly moved in. (The late great Mel  Bradford  told  me that there was a very large Confederate flag prominently displayed in the Cattlemen’s Club in Cheyenne. No telling if that is still so.)


The story of the West in general American thinking gets assumed into generic “America.”  The multitude of watchers of the Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett television series in the 1950s never had any notion that this was Southern history.  People are still shocked to learn that Boone’s and Crockett’s relatives were Confederates.   Even though the people and settings are Southern, almost any time in film where Southern characters are sympathetic they are honourary Yankees.  It is only the bad people who are obviously Southern.

Now there are some good films about the explorers and settles of the Northern plains and Rockies.  **Jeremiah Johnson, **Heartland, and **O Pioneers!  come immediately to mind.  But “the West” was mostly Southern.  The Philadelphia novelist Owen Wister understood this perfectly when he entitled his 1902 Wyoming novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.  The Northern West is mostly about sodbusters, Yankee schoolmarms, snowstorms, and McCormick reapers.  (The inventor Cyrus McCormick was from Virginia.)   


Think about it.  What is “a Virginian” doing in Wyoming?  In fact, Wister was right on target.  The cowboy, insofar as he is a heroic, chivalric figure and not merely a labourer in the hard and dirty business of moving livestock on the hoof, is a Southern gentleman moved to a new environment. 


The schmaltzy Western  movies  and TV  series  of  the 1950s  and later  perpetrated a cultural atrocity which would be eternally  shameful  were Americans any longer capable of experiencing shame: “the Singing Cowboy.” Several  generations got their idea of the West from “Roy Rogers” (Leonard Slye from Iowa) singing “Happy Trails” in movies  that  were  utterly  anachronistic  in  their time  and  settings.  Or from showbiz celebrities from the North pretending to be cowboys.   Even the horses became stars.  And there were the comic Westerns.   The great and grim civilisational feat of the conquest and settlement of a continent, one of the most noble parts of American and world history, became juvenile commercial fluff imagined by Hollywood urbanites who had not a clue of genuine frontier history.


Remember that as you watch your “Westerns.”
​

The moguls were so ignorant of anything authentic that they almost always hopelessly misused the honourable terms “sheriff” and “marshal.” A sheriff is an elected official of a county, not a local officer who can be removed by the town.  And a U.S. Marshal is an officer of a federal court with a wide jurisdiction, although there can be, I suppose, such a person as a Town Marshal.


**The Searchers (1956). The American Film Institute declares this the best Western of all time, and the British Film Institute lists it as the seventh best movie ever made.  It is certainly a great film.  It is set in the Texas frontier ravaged for several generations by war between Texans and the Comanche.  (The U.S. Army had little to do with this war, neglecting the Texas frontier, especially during “Reconstruction.”) John Wayne, a former Confederate soldier, lives out a long and epic quest for his niece who was carried off as a child by the Comanche.  There is a great deal of authentic flavour of the time and place.  I must point out, however, that almost nobody talks like a Texan. The one character with an unmistakable Southern accent is a fool, a buffoon. This is unconscious Yankee prejudice.  These are all Southern people, but in the Yankee mind they are Americans and “Westerners,” so a Southern accent is an automatic marker for something that is inferior.  Remember, this is a Southern story.


**True Grit (1969). In what is perhaps his most beloved role, John Wayne is Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn, an ornery lawman on the border between Reconstruction Arkansas and the Indian Territory.  Based on a novel by the Arkansas writer Charles Portis, True Grit, like most “Westerns,” is really a “Southern” story.  A feisty young woman enlists Cogburn’s reluctant aid for a mission into Indian Territory.  The film is deservedly popular and often considered John Wayne’s best.  The remake, (X)True Grit (2010), though widely praised, is much inferior.  Everybody in it acts and talks like they come from California and have not a clue about the people they are impersonating.  The young woman’s Christianity disappears completely. A  Smithsonian production called (X) “The Real True Grit” epitomises the confusion of West and South. The “experts” speculate about whether a brave and adventurous girl like Mattie Ross could have really existed, and then get into discussions about “Calamity Jane” and such stuff.  Mattie Ross was not a frontier moll, she was a Southern lady.


**Rooster Cogburn  (1975).  In this enjoyable sequel Rooster (John Wayne) tangles with the Yankee schoolmarm Katherine Hepburn.


**Hondo (1953).  It is implied that Hondo (John Wayne) is an ex-Confederate.


**Hondo and the Apaches (1967). Pretty good film based on the TV series with the Hondo character.

(T) Texas (1941).  Ex-Confederates Glenn Ford and William Holden go to Texas. 


(T) Texas Rangers (1951) is pretty good on context although not in the plot. 

**The Rebel (TV series, 1959 - 1961.  Ex-Confederate roams the west doing good deeds.

**Lonesome Dove (1989-90) is of course about the Southern frontier and the expansion of the Texas cattle kingdom, although the scalawag author of the novel on which it is based plays down the Southern element.  Yet the movie and its prequels and sequels (**Return to Lonesome Dove, **Streets of Laredo,  and **Dead Man’s Walk are inescapably Southern.  Some of the actors, like Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and James Garner act like real Southern people.  Dead Man’s Walk is actually set in the antebellum period.


**Comanche Moon (2008).   This Lonesome Dove prequel is actually set in the Confederate period and does not disguise the fact.


**Red River (1948) and **Chisum (1970).   John Wayne “westerns” that present the heroic early pioneers of Texas through antebellum, Confederate, and post-bellum years, although they do not make a point of it.  In Red River Montgomery Clift leaves the ranch to join the Confederate army.


(T) Belle Starr:  Bandit Queen (1941).  Weak on history but entertaining and good on “Reconstruction.”  Randolph Scott at his best. The accents are good, although Gene Tierney tends to overdo it, and there is great “Dixie” background music.   (X) Belle Starr (1980) may be a little closer to history but is slow and boring.

**Geronimo: An American Legend (1993). Dramatisation of the true story of Charles Gatewood, a lieutenant in the postbellum U.S. Army who came from a Virginia Confederate family.  Gatewood worked hard to understand the Apaches and a great risk to himself brought Geronimo in with a peace agreement.  The dishonourable, ethnic-cleansing Yankee government then repudiated what they had agreed to and shunted Gatewood into obscurity. Jason Patric, though a New Yorker, does one of the most faithful Southern accents in recent times.


**The Missing and **Open Range (both 2003). Excellent truthful stories of hardship, danger, and courage on the rugged Southwestern frontier.

**The Long Ride Home (2003).  Randy Travis trying to get home to his family after years of dodging the law and the lawless.

**Reckoning (?).  This toughly realistic Southwestern seems to have fallen through the cracks and I can find little information.  (It is not to be confused with a 2018 Western or any other films of the same title.)   The main actors seem to be relatively unknown Southerners and all of the good guys have authentic accents.  And for once the chief villain definitely does not speak Southern.


Nearly every major Hollywood star of the 1930s—1960s at some time played a sympathetic Confederate character, often in the Reconstruction era.  Something sure to send today’s guardians of culture into frantic pearl-clutching. A few examples:

**The Proud Rebel (1958).  Alan Ladd is an ex-Confederate travelling to Illinois and Minnesota in search of a cure for his traumatised son.  Northerners give him a hard time but he triumphs in the end. (And I have to mention Alan Ladd in **Shane when he tells the gunman “Your’e a lowdown Yankee liar,” before finishing him off.)


**Escort West (1958).  Victor Mature is a widowed ex-Confederate soldier heading West with his young daughter in search of a new life.  A brave and honourable man, he comes to the aid of two Northern women in peril from Indians.

**Dallas (1950).  Gary Cooper is a Confederate hero from Georgia fighting very nasty Carpetbaggers in Texas who are not only oppressing Southerners but Mexicans as well.  Meeting a decent Northerner he comments:  “That Yankee furriner is talking like an American.” The star does pretty well on the accent most of the time. Cooper plays another ex-Confederate in (T) Vera Cruz.

**Three Violent People (1956). Charlton Heston returns home to fight carpetbaggers who want to seize his land.

Four Southern stars with a similar ex-Confederate theme:

**El Paso (1949).  Ex-Confederate John Payne cleans up corruption

**The Vanquished (1953).   Confederate John Payne returns to his Texas home and successfully counters the Carpetbaggers.

**The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953).  Tough ex-Confederate Randolph Scott fights bad men in Arizona.   Based on the novel Yankee Gold.  Not to be confused with the unrelated Stranger with a Gun (1958).

**Hell on Wheels (TV, 2011—2016).  A recent surprising revival of the good Confederate moving West genre. Anson Mount, a native Southerner, is the hero in this complex and tough drama of railroad building in the West.

A few non-Western Reconstruction films:

(T) Tennessee Johnson (1942). Andrew Johnson is portrayed as a hero by Van Heflin.  This is hard to find but is worthwhile for its portrayal of President Johnson struggle against the evil Radical Republicans.

**Menace on the Mountain (1970).  Southern families fighting against corruption and violence in North Carolina right after The War.

**The Keeping Room (2014).  Bleak but telling story of Southern women suffering Yankee depredations as the war ends.
____________________________________________________________
JESSE JAMES
The exploits of Frank and Jesse James (along with the Younger brothers) have fueled a library of movies and TV shows, far more than it is possible to survey here.  Many of them are just mediocre “Westerns.”  A few understand that the James boys came to their path as outlaws because they were victims of “Reconstruction” oppression. 


(T) Jesse James (1939) and (T) The Return of Frank James (1940), with the major stars Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power, are old standbys, not very strong on Southern but telling the story well enough.

**Frank and Jesse (1994), which includes Randy Travis as Cole Younger, comes closest to representing the real history and is the truest to life James movie in my opinion. 

** The Long Riders (1980), about the failed James and Younger raid in Minnesota. Arthur Hill, a good director, gives the last period of the James-Younger gang an appropriate epic treatment.  The atmosphere and accents are good.   (X) The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), on the same subject in worthless and seems to have no purpose other than to degrade the characters.

Most of the other films on the subject are hardly worth your notice.   (X) The Lawless Breed with “Rock Hudson” as Jesse James and the silly (X) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford may be safely ignored.

WHAT COULD BE:  The stories of any one of the most conspicuous carpetbaggers—Adelbert Ames, Henry Clay Warmouth, etc., would make entertaining and informative flicks.  Many carpetbaggers were extravagant characters blatantly and joyfully corrupt.  Their careers would be a good way to tell the truth about “Reconstruction.”  The Texas Rangers appear in many mediocre Westerns, few of which touch the real story.  What marvelous films could be made of the Rangers in their greatest period after The War and their heroes like John C. Hays, “Rip” Ford, and L.H. McNelly.  But such stories would be unkind to noble and oppressed Mexicans and Redskins.

More Southern Westerns set in later times appear in subsequent chapters.

10. Spielberg’s  Lincoln


​(X)  Spielberg’s Lincoln. Life is short. Although I am a devoted if amateur student of Hollywood’s treatment of the great American War of 1861-65, I intended to spare myself the ordeal of Spielberg’s Lincoln.  However, the honoured editor of America’s bravest and best journal (Tom Fleming of Chronicles) instructed me to go.  I have always found such instruction to be wise.  And so, I bit the bitter pill or swallowed the bullet, or whatever, and went.  You may regard me as having suffered in your behalf, Gentle Reader, and be relieved of the burden of attendance.

Daniel Day-Lewis portrays Lincoln, following in the footsteps of Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, and Sam Waterston—all better looking than the real thing.  One side of Lincoln’s face was deformed, he had moments of doddering unconsciousness from having been kicked in the head by a horse, and, as everyone noted, his arms were disproportionately long, which led his accomplices to call him “the Ape” behind his back.  But I suppose one should not complain about that—actors and actresses are always better looking than the real life people they mimic.



After all the praise lavished upon the Irishman Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Lincoln, I was surprised at how poor it was.  The appearance is wrong. The accent is very wrong for a 19th century Midwesterner born and raised among people from the upper South. Worst of all, Lincoln is played with a strange diffidence such as no successful lawyer and politician ever had.  It is like Jimmy Stewart with a beard and spectacles, the humble saint that many imagine Lincoln to have been. Nearly all testimony of the time disputes the tender Lincoln family relations that are presented early on to establish the gentle benevolence of the man.  His wife and his children were considered nuisances by most of the people around them.



The film begins with a false portrayal of the battle of Jenkins Ferry, which was a victory by outnumbered (as usual) Confederates, that put an end to a major Union cotton stealing campaign.  There was no massacre of black troops nor any massacre of Confederate prisoners by blacks in retaliation as is claimed.   Most Northern soldiers would have slaughtered their black “comrades” before allowing them to slaughter Confederate prisoners. I suppose this invention makes a gratifying vicarious revenge fantasy for the leftist homosexual screenwriter. The 1st and 2nd Kansas Regiments (Coloured) are described inaccurately as cavalry.  There were no black cavalry units in active service in the war, though sometimes infantry may have been mounted on mules.  Northern soldiers would have balked at blacks riding while they walked.  During the war black soldiers were mostly labor and garrison troops, and occasionally, as at Fort Wagner and the Crater, sacrificed in forlorn hopes to spare the lives of white Northerners.  Ambrose Bierce, a frontline Union soldier for the entire war, said he never saw any black people except the servants and concubines of Union officers.


It reminds me of an Italian flick I once saw, in which a tall, handsome black American paratrooper drops in to liberate an Italian village.  There were no black paratroopers and very few black combat units in World War II.  The U.S. Army was as segregated as it was in the Civil War.  There is no question that affirmative action is aggressively alive and well in entertainment. Black men are portrayed as proportionately more numerous than they were as combat troops in Vietnam and later wars, as well as more frequently than is likely as brilliant surgeons, scientists, philanthropists, admirals, judges, noble statesmen, and such.


The film shows Lincoln in friendly conversation with black soldiers who were veterans of Jenkins Ferry, though how they got to Washington from Arkansas is not explained.  Such a scene is unlikely.  Lincoln throughout his life had relatively little contact with black people. They were by law excluded from settling in Illinois. Some were run out of Springfield in Lincoln’s time and there was at least one lynching there after the war.  He did receive a delegation or two at the White House, to whom he hinted that the best thing their people could do was to emigrate to some friendlier clime. He spoke to them. They were not allowed to reply.  Lincoln, an earthy man of his time and place, adept at amusing the yokels around the cracker barrel, probably, like most Northerners then and later, used the n-word routinely.  As Frederick Douglass observed, Lincoln was emphatically “the white man’s President.”


We are told that Lincoln had never accepted slavery, which is belied by both his legal and political careers. And that he had fought the war to end slavery, something which he denied repeatedly. The strangest thing about the film is that the producers chose to build it around the machinations leading to acquiring Congress’s two thirds vote for the Thirteenth Amendment emancipating the slaves.  If I wanted to make an attractive dramatization of Lincoln there are many other events that I would choose:  his adoption of “free soil” and the Republican party late in his career; the Cooper Union speech; his winning the nomination in 1860 over better-known men; the Fort Sumter crisis; the Emancipation Proclamation; the second inaugural.

Obviously, these makers of a film about Lincoln wanted the film to be all about slavery, requiring a basic perversion of accuracy. A number of authorities have pointed out that Lincoln did not play a very active a role in the Thirteenth. Nor at the time was it as important or decisive as portrayed.  The presentation of the political and Constitutional issues is full of erroneous and presentistic assumptions and incoherent reasoning. There seems disinterest in the fact that Congress proposing the amendment was just that.  The amendment still had to be ratified by three-fourths of the States.  What did that mean when more than two-fifths of the states were fighting the Union or kept “loyal” only by the Army? And when Lincoln relied on the silly theory that they were still States though temporarily controlled by mobs of lawbreakers, while many in his party contended that the “rebellious” states were no longer states. Anyway, the question could not be settled until the war was over.


Besides, the amendment meant little. Confederate opinion had already accepted that slavery had been altered by the war and was willing to give up slavery in exchange for freedom from the invading tyrant.  In the brief postwar period before harsh Congressional Reconstruction descended, the Southern states ratified the Thirteenth readily and breathed a sigh of relief at putting down the burden. The real issue left untouched by the Thirteenth was what would be the status in American society and law of the people thus freed.


But like so much of the treatment of The War we are subjected to, the charity for black people actually takes second place to the white-washing of Northern behavior, to safeguarding what Robert Penn Warren called “the treasury of virtue.” The amount of whitewash needed to keep up the fraud of a benevolent North far exceeds what was needed for Tom Sawyer’s fence.


Another Italian flick I saw (I waste a lot of time, even though life is short) purported to be a dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In this film, a group of Catholic brethren are maintaining a fort deep in the South for the protection of runaway slaves.  No such thing ever existed, nor would antebellum Southerners have allowed it for a day. Further, despite today’s Yankeeization of most American Catholics, the Roman Catholic Church never discountenanced slavery in the U.S. It generally disapproved of abolitionist agitation, and not only because most abolitionists were also virulently anti-Catholic. Not to mention that the Church lived comfortably for centuries with slavery in Latin America.  The poet laureate of the Confederacy was Father Abram J. Ryan. Pio Nino sent a Missouri Confederate chaplain to preach against the Yankee recruitment of cannon fodder. Bishop Las Casas, the saintly prelate of the Spanish Indies, thought slavery was bad for Indians but good for black people.  


​Meanwhile, don’t reward Spielberg by buying an absurdly over-priced theater ticket.  Instead, rent Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, a 1988 film with Sam Waterston and Mary Tyler Moore as the presidential couple. Unlike Hollywood moguls and writers, I know a little something about 19th century America, and I feel assured in telling you that Waterston and Moore are vastly more authentic Lincolns than the Irishman Day-Lewis and the Flying Nun, Sally Field.  The portrayal of Lincoln is sympathetic but honest.  You will learn some genuine American history rather than endure the fantasies of people who have remade that history in their own image.

9. Confederate Hollywood

From the beginnings to rather recent times portrayals of Confederates have been a mainstay of American cinema.  After all, the Confederacy is a rather large and interesting slice of American history.  Given the virulent malice today against everything Confederate, it might surprise many folks to see that during Hollywood’s Golden Age an astounding number of major stars of American cinema have had no objection to portraying Confederates, usually as sympathetic characters.  Many of such films showed Confederate flags in favourable contexts and sometimes in glorification.  What has changed in recent times is that there have been evil Confederates appearing more often on the screen and the once popular theme of good Southerners oppressed by Reconstruction has disappeared.


The list below presents Northern and foreign actors who have played more or less attractive Confederates.  The list does not include 1) those who portrayed very villainous Confederates;  2) those who were Southern-born or have Southern background; and 3) portrayals of Southerners not in the Confederate period:

• Nick Adams: The Rebel
• Tod Andrews: The Gray Ghost
• Armand Assante: The Hunley
• Christopher Atkins: Guns of Honor
• Richard Basehart:  The Andersonville Trial
• Anne Baxter: Three Violent People
• Louise Beavers: Belle Starr
• Noah Beery: The Last Outpost
• Tom Berenger: Gettysburg
• Ward Bond: Gone with the Wind
• Marlon Brando: Appaloosa
• Walter Brennan inimitably played Confederates and other Southerners in many films although he was born in Boston. Brennan was for decades the strongest conservative in leftist Hollywood.
• Lloyd Bridges: The Blue and the Gray
• Pierce Brosnan: The Son
• Bruce Cabot: The Best of the Badmen, The Undefeated
• David Keith and Robert Carradine: The Long Riders
• Jim Caviezel: Ride with the Devil
• Montgomery Clift: Red River
• James Coburn: Major Dundee
• Gary Cooper: Dallas, Vera Cruz, Operator 13
• Robert Cummings: So Red the Rose
• James Dale: Echoes of War
• Jane Darwell: Gone with the Wind
• Olivia de Haviland: Gone with the Wind
• Colleen Dewhurst: The Blue and the Gray
• Angie Dickinson: Gray Ghost       
• Brian Donlevy: The Woman They Almost Lynched
• Michael Douglas: The Ghost and the Darkness
• Clint Eastwood: The Outlaw Josey Wales, Ambush at  Cimarron Pass
• Hope Emerson: The Guns of Fort Petticoat
• Errol Flynn: The Santa Fe Trail, Rocky Mountain
• Henry Fonda: Jesse James, The Return of Frank James
• Glenn Ford: Texas
• John Ford: The Birth of a Nation
• John Forsythe: Escape from Fort Bravo
• William Forsythe: Echoes of  War
• Clark Gable: Gone with the Wind
• Kathryn Grant: The Guns of Fort Petticoat
• Peter Graves: The Raid
• George Hamilton: The Long Ride Home
• Richard Harris: Major Dundee
• Gabby Hayes: Arizona Kid, Southward Ho!
• Van Heflin: The Raid
• Charlton Heston: Three Violent People, Arrowhead
• William Holden: Texas
• Leslie Howard: Gone with the Wind
• Rock Hudson: The Undefeated, The Lawless Breed
• Alex Hyde-White: Ironclads
• Jason Isaacs: Field of Lost Shoes
• Jewel: Ride with the Devil
• Van Johnson: Siege at Red River
• Richard Jordan: Gettysburg
• Stacy and James Keach: The Long Riders
• Buster Keaton: The General
• Arthur Kennedy: Red Mountain
• Alan Ladd: Red Mountain, Proud Rebel
• Stephen Lang: Gods and Generals
• Vivien Leigh: Gone with the Wind
• John Lund: Five Guns West
• George Macready: The Rebel
• Hattie McDaniel: Gone with the Wind
• Tobey Maguire: Ride with the Devil
• Victor Mature: Escort West
• Doug McClure: Shenandoah
• Dylan McDermott: Texas Rangers
• Joel McRea: Border River, The Outriders
• Ray Milland: Copper Canyon
• Thomas Mitchell: Gone with the Wind
• Chris Mitchum: Rio Lobo
• Elizabeth Montgomery: Belle Starr
• Jeanette Nolan: The Guns of Fort  Petticoat
• Maureen O’Hara: Deadly Companions, Rio Grande
• Dennis O’Keefe: The Eagle and the Hawk
• Eleanor Parker: Escape from Fort Bravo
• Barbara Payton: Drums in the Deep South
• Gregory Peck: The Yearling
• Tyrone Power: Jesse James
• Jurgen Prochnow: Guns of Honor
• Ronald Reagan: The Last Outpost  (Cavalry Command)
• Pamela Reed: The Long Riders
• Christopher Reeve: The Bostonians
• Jonathan Rhys-Myers: Ride with the Devil
• Jorge Rivero (Mexican star): Rio Lobo
• Cliff Robertson: The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
• Roy Rogers: The Arizona Kid, Southward Ho!
• Kurt Russell: Mosby’s Marauders
• Tom Selleck: Last Stand at Saber River 
• Martin Sheen: Gettysburg, Guns of Honor
• Madolyn Smith: The Rose and the Jackal
• Robert Stack: Great Day in the Morning
• James Stewart: Shenandoah
• Meryl Streep: Secret Service (her opening monologue is in front of a large Confederate flag)
• Margaret Sullavan: So Red the Rose
• Donald Sutherland: The Hunley
• Shirley Temple: The Littlest  Rebel
• Gene Tierney: Belle  Starr
• Lawrence Tierney: The Best of the Badmen
• Constance Towers: The Horse Soldiers
• Claire Trevor: Texas
• Tom Tyler: The Best of the Badmen
• Skeet Ulrich: Ride with the Devil
• Jan-Michael Vincent: The Undefeated
• John Wayne: The Searchers, True Grit, and doubtless others.
• Richard Widmark: Alvarez Kelly
• Jeffrey Wright: Ride with the Devil
• Robin Wright: The Conspirator
• Here are some Southern-born or Southern background actors who have also played Confederates: Claude Akins, Gene Autry, Glenn Campbell, John Carradine, Patricia Clarkson, Joseph Cotten, James Craig, Robert Duvall, Frankie Faison, Miriam Hopkins, Jeffrey Hunter, Ben Johnson, Kris Kristofferson, Anson Mount, Audie Murphy, John Payne, Dennis and Randy Quaid, Tex Ritter, Will Rogers, Randolph Scott, Randy Travis.​

In the Enola Gay President Truman, considering whether to drop the atomic bomb, is seated in front of an array of flags, one of which is Confederate, or possibly a Mississippi or Georgia flag. Robert Redford plays an actor wearing a Confederate uniform in (X) Inside Daisy Clover. In **The Ghost and the Darkness Michael Douglas is a famed lion hunter, an American who is described as having come to Africa because his people lost a war. In (T)Warm Springs Franklin D. Roosevelt is inspired by the example of Confederate general Francis Nicholls, who lost an arm and a leg in the War but went on to become Governor of Louisiana. In (T)Texas (1941) William Holden calls a carpetbagger “a dirty Yankee.” In the postwar setting of (T)The Missouri Traveler (1958) Lee Marvin survives unscathed a lavish presentation of the Southern flag and anthem.

Scorcese’s Gangs of New York (2002)

Martin Scorcese, in an interview, candidly described his Gangs of New York as an “opera.”  He had been asked whether the event s portrayed were true to history.  I took his reply to mean that the events of the movie were selected and organized for dramatic emphasis and were not to be taken as literal factual record.


And, indeed, as a historical record of 19th-century New York, the film has many failings. Nevertheless, it has provoked some useful discussion of the historical context – specifically for the light it sheds on the Lincolnite mythology of the Civil War era. It seems that the accepted idea of the gloriously united North trampling out the wrathful grapes of slavery and treason is not so sound a picture of the real thing after all.


For one thing, the film gives a glimpse of the rather nasty nativism among Northerners, a great many of whom hated Catholics and immigrants as much or more than they hated Southerners.  None of the above fit into the Yankee ideal of true Americanism.  Nativist gangs burned down convents in Philadelphia and Boston when such things were never dreamed of in the South. This window into the real history of the antebellum North becomes even more significant for three reasons.


1) Nativists of the American Party went en masse into Lincoln’s Republican Party and made up a strong element of his support. Though, of course, Lincoln cared nothing about religion and he and other leading Republicans were too savvy politicians to embrace overt nativism. Republicans did not generally like immigrants, but they loved the militaristic German centralisers who flooded into the Midwest after the failed revolutions of 1848. Confederate General Richard Taylor recorded in his memoirs that when he surrendered at the end of the war, a German Union general lectured him on how Southerners were now to be taught true Americanism.  Taylor was the grandson of a Revolutionary officer and the son of a President. (Does this maybe give you a little hint of where Straussians and Neocons are coming from when they claim exclusive monopoly on the meaning of America?)  These Germans made the most solid core of Lincoln’s support, with the possible exception of tariff-protected manufacturers and New England “intellectuals.”


2) The film can open the door on another dirty little secret.  We have heard a lot about immigrant criminal gangs. The fact that vigilante law prevailed over much of the North before and during the war has been conveniently forgotten. Besides the tens of thousands of his critics Lincoln jailed without due process, thousands more were killed, injured, intimidated, and run out of town by proto-fascist gangs of Republican bully boys called “Wide Awakes.”  They played a major role in making sure Northern elections turned out right, i.e., Republicans won.  And you thought ugly mob violence was something that only happened in the South!


3) Although the film does not give a satisfactory view of the New York City draft riots, it lets us in on at least part of the secret when the draft rioters point out the $300 men who had bought exemption from conscription. The fact is that no affluent Northerner fought in the war if he didn’t want to - certainly not Rockefeller, Morgan, Gould, Swift, Armor, Goodyear, and the others who were making fortunes out of government contracts.  Nor most of the patricians - only one of five military age Adamses served and Teddy Roosevelt’s father bought an exemption. Lincoln’s worthless son Robert spent most of the war at Harvard.  Sherman once complained that men of wealth were found in the ranks of the Southern army and lamented that Northerners were not like that.


But that is not all the story. The “riots” did not start out as race pogroms, though they degenerated into that. They started out as organised civic resistance to the draft, encouraged by the Democratic state government. Everyone knew very well that the Lincolnites enforced the draft at a much higher rate in areas that opposed them than they did in Republican areas - according to studies by the New York playwright and historian John Chodes, the draft was imposed in New York City at four times the rate for Massachusetts.  And the conscripts were well aware that they stood a good chance of being used up as cannon fodder by Republicans who knew if they lost four men for every Southerner killed they would still end up on top, as long as the immigrant flow kept up. About a fourth of the total enrollment of Lincoln’s armies were immigrants, many of whom were brought over and paid bounties for enlisting. The situation was so bad that the Pope sent persuasive priestly orators to Ireland to warn the people about being used up for Union cannon fodder.


Perhaps we can begin to recognize the historical fact that millions of Northern citizens did not willingly go along with Lincoln’s war. And the opponents were not limited to the New York City draft rioters.  Who opposed the war: free traders who were on to the Republican tariff game; traditional Jeffersonians and descendants of Revolutionary families (outside of New England) who understood that killing Southerners and overthrowing legitimate state governments, as well as suppressing freedom of speech and press, were not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind; Irish and German Catholics, though that history has been suppressed as one of the fruits of Lincoln’s victory.


The truth is that Lincoln’s party did not save the Union and the Constitution. It was a Jacobin party that seized power and revolutionized the North as well as conquering the South. Gangs of New York can perhaps open a window that will encourage further historical discovery along these lines.


Alas, the wrong lesson is drawn by one of the usually fine writers at Vdare.com, Steve Sailer, who sees the movie as Scorcese  making points for immigrants against the natives.  According to Sailer: “When the Civil War came, many Irish and other immigrants in New York City refused to fight for the Union that had given them refuge.”


Wait a minute. That was a civil war going on here. Can a newcomer really be faulted for not wanting to take sides in a civil war?  I think rather it shows real patriotism and good sense. And how about that “refuge.”  Here is a Dublin paper commenting in 1861: “We cannot but recollect that in the South our countrymen were safe from insult and persecution, while ‘Nativeism’ and ‘Know-Nothingism’ assailed them in the North.” Sailer is a well-known advocate of immigration restriction, but immigrants are OK, it seems, when they kill Southerners.


How about John Mitchel, the Irish patriot who had been exiled to Van Diemen’s land, from whence he escaped to the land of freedom, where he joined the Confederate cause of liberty, to which he gave the lives of two sons?  It is not true, by the way, that the Union General Burnside’s sacrifice of the Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg was a great exhibit of Irish devotion to the Union cause? The so-called enthusiasm was political propaganda drummed up by Republican promotion of Gen. Meagher as an Irish leader, which he wasn’t. Irish recruiting fell off sharply after Fredericksburg.


Let me recommend to those who want to use conditions in the War of Southern Independence for the otherwise worthy cause of immigration restriction a recent work: Clear the Confederate Way!  The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia by Kelly J. O’Grady.  The book covers much more than the title suggests.  And while you are at it, take a look also at The Jewish Confederates by Robert N. Rosen.


The film bypasses yet another little secret, an unknown matter that is finally exposed in Dr. Samuel Mitcham’s The Greatest Lynching in American History:  New York, 1863 (Shotwell Publishing, 2020).  In response to the riots the city paid the $300 exemption fee for the conscripted men.  So much for Northern enthusiasm for Lincoln’s war.

No, I am not referring to (X)Roots or to Ken Burns’s pseudo-history.  My subject is the film Guns of Honor. Most of the world knows of the Hollywood celebrity “Martin Sheen,” (born and baptized Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez). Much of the world knows that he portrayed General Robert E. Lee in the film Gettysburg.  I am even on record mildly complimenting his performance. Few people know that Sheen played an admirable Confederate officer in another movie. It was known as Guns of Honor, released in 1994. Here is the official description by the producing company: “A stellar cast, including Martin Sheen (Gettysburg), Christopher Atkins (The Blue Lagoon) and Jurgen Prochnow (Interceptor) star in this fast and furious adventure set across the Rio Grande just after the great Civil War.  Defeated Confederate soldiers, branded outlaws by their own government, are recruited for one final mission to restore their lost glory. Aided by a beautiful former Southern spy, they are assigned to run guns to the Mexican government. After blasting it out with the local rebels, these renegades must then pass through territory controlled by the invading French army.  With nothing to lose, they ride bravely into battle, determined to regain their honor and prepared for anything that lies ahead!” 


I once owned a VHS of this movie and it was not bad, Sheen being, of course, the admirably brave, honourable, and able Confederate commander.  Foolishly, I tossed out the VHS tape thinking that I would replace it with a DVD. Well, I have the newly purchased DVD. The cover of the disc container shows Sheen and Atkins, well-armed, before a very large waving Confederate flag, just as did the VHS container.  The back cover of the disc holder displays word for word the description cited above, as does the selling information on Amazon. But, alas, an entirely different movie has been substituted on the DVD. It is a film, from the same company the same year, formerly called Trigger Fast. In what now is sold as Guns of Honor  there are no Mexicans, nothing taking place across the Rio Grande, no Confederate flags or uniforms, no beautiful Southern spy, no French army, no glory, lost or otherwise, and no General Sheridan (who  appears  as a character in the real Guns of Honor). Sheen and Prochnow barely appear, in the first few minutes of the substitute.  Trigger Fast is not bad and seems to be more or less about ex-Confederates suffering under Reconstruction in Texas.  This theme is so vaguely and faintly portrayed that most viewers will not understand that Sheen, Prochnow and other good people are ex-Confederates.  They will assume that this is just one more Western with an evil cattle baron against the small fry.


What can explain this deception other than as an attempt to delete the Confederacy from film history? This is certainly Orwellian as well as probably an actionable bit of fraudulent advertising. Somewhere the real Guns of Honor still exists, perhaps in a foreign country or in cyberspace. We ought to find it and make it available, even if we have to bootleg it.

A noted Southern writer sent this comment in response to our earlier discussion of **Gods and Generals:


“I was invited to preview the director’s cut of G&G in 2002 or 2003.  When several friends and I went out at the intermission, we were all streaming tears. I was mostly deeply moved, and no less by the movie’s second half. One scene that particularly moved me showed two slaves talking over a soldier’s coffin in camp. One had been the slave of the now dead Confederate soldier. The other asked him how he felt about freedom, did he plan to run away, etc. The dialogue was precisely what you expect from slaves conflicted between love for the masters they had grown up with and desire for freedom. Last line was the dead soldier’s slave saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but I know this much [tapping on the coffin], this Rebel’s in heaven.’ I bawled. Then the movie came out. The scene that had so moved me nowhere appeared, but instead had been substituted by the wretched sequence with Donzalea Abernathy, the slave in Fredericksburg, quoting a long and not pertinent passage out of Esther.  Not possible to tell you how disappointed and disgusted I was. Fear struck Maxwell, it appears, over the impact of that scene and its truthfulness.”