Foster Dickson's Blog, page 19

Welcome to Eclectic: “The horror! The horror!”

With Halloween in the rearview mirror, what I like to call “Horror Movie Month” is over. My affinity for horror movies began as a child in the early to mid-1980s with then-new films like Poltergeist, The Shining, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, as well as slightly older films like Friday the 13th and The Amityville Horror. These were off limits to us in theaters – as children we couldn’t get into Rated-R movies – but soon enough, they came to cable TV and VHS. We were not old enough to take girls to horror movies hoping they’d cling to us in the darkness, so for us younger boys, these frightening stories served as a test of one’s mettle. We would gather for a sleepover, wait until dark, turn out all of the lights, and put on a horror movie. We had to find out who would run out of the room, pull the blanket over his head, beg to turn it off, or worst of all, cry for momma. As Generation-Xers, our childhood was also marked by the heyday of Stephen King, who explored every terrible scenario one might imagine, from bullying victims who’d rampage the prom to pets that wouldn’t stay dead.

But not all horror movies are worth watching. My somewhat-literary attitude toward the genre says that there must be some reaching-out for meaning, some effort to explore a scenario the way that speculative fiction should.  Slasher films, for example, are not interesting to me in the slightest. The blood, the gore, and the  absurdly creative ways to kill or maim people – often with ordinary hardware or some tool – just don’t seem necessary or enlightening. No, the best ones require us to look inside ourselves and ask, What would I do in that situation? or What do I believe? 

Perhaps the best and most frightening horror films involve situations that could really happen— or did happen. To me, The Exorcist is the scariest movie ever. (In fact, the hair on my neck just stood up when I typed that sentence.) The Amityville Horror is another great one. We have to ask, as the parents do in each of these movies, What do you do when neither scientists and doctors nor the police can explain – or stop – what’s going on? That is the source of true horror. All reasonable options are exhausted, but something must still be done. These movies dredge up our latent belief in things we can’t see, things that might want to hurt us. 

Sadly, when horror movies are set down South, where I live, one of three pitifully stereotypical motifs are typically explored. The first and most obvious is the haunted mansion. This allows national audiences to presuppose that the antebellum homes that dot Southern landscape are full of mysterious entities that do not wish to be disturbed. For whatever reason, an unsuspecting person, group, or family comes to a once-grand home and wonder why it sits vacant . . . Of course, they find out. The second is the ever-popular New Orleans/voodoo/swamp scenario. Here, we must assume the presence of evil forces in a haunted place. This kind of movie can take the form of elegant productions like Interview with a Vampire, or it can manifest as low-budget things like Mardi Gras Massacre or The Witchmaker. 

But the final one of the three may be the most pervasive and most exploited: the travelers who get lost on a backroad. This motif takes the South’s well-established disdain for outsiders and couples it with the helplessness of being far from civilization. This type of story isn’t particular to the South – The Hills Have Eyes is set in the desert Southwest, and Children of the Corn in New England – but the states of the Old Confederacy do provide a unique set of American cultural assumptions about ignorance, backwardness, and cruelty. Aside from traditional horror movies, we also can find these assumptions in mainstream Southern stories, like Deliverance and Trapper County War. These nightmare scenarios are based upon a myth: People in small towns don’t like you and won’t help you, and people in the backwoods are truly fucking crazy. This is frightening because urban cross-country travelers really can disconcerted by what hangs in the backs of their minds: these people out here could kill me and bury me, and no one would ever know.

And it is no surprise that films of the third type began gushing into the theaters in the 1970s, after the Civil Rights movement. In the 1950s and ’60s, groups of otherwise ordinary white men in small-town Mississippi committed horrific violence against Emmett Till in 1955, then against Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in 1964. While those crimes occurred out of sight, in 1965, Alabama state troopers viciously attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in plain sight. Americans could not deal with the fact that people who would commit such monstrous violence do live among us in this nation. Horror movies, like 1964’s Two-Thousand Maniacs!, presented a way to cope with the South’s intransigent legacy, while exploiting it simultaneously. 

Today, mindfulness gurus and their adherents preach a gospel of deep breathing and thinking about something else, but horror movies tell us two things that we need to remember. First, there are monsters among us. Second, they can be defeated, but only when we face them. In horror movies, staying positive won’t accomplish much. Running won’t work either. Ultimately, monsters continue to do harm until they are stopped. On the screen, that end comes literally, when the creature or killer is dead or subdued. But in real life, the next atrocity is just around the corner. And just as there is always another horror movie to watch, there is always – always – another danger to face. We are never truly out of the woods.

To read more from Foster Dickson’s blog Welcome to Eclectic, click here.

The Houghton Library’s Mini-Conference: “Good Trouble”

On Tuesday evening, November 1, Huntingdon College’s Houghton Library will be hosting its annual mini-conference. This year’s theme is “Good Trouble,” a phrase that comes from the late Civil Rights activist and congressman John Lewis.

I will be giving a ten-minute presentation on the process of researching for and writing Closed Ranks. I began the research in 2013, after discussing the possibility of a book about the Whitehurst Case with the victim’s youngest son and widow. The process continued through 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 with interviews, archival searches, and a longwinded effort to obtain federal court records. The book was contracted by NewSouth Books in 2017 and published in November 2018.

The Whitehurst Case is an unfortunate and neglected aspect of Montgomery, Alabama’s history. The victim Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. was shot and killed by a Montgomery police officer in December 1975. It was later alleged that a gun found near his body may have been placed there by police. A controversy followed in 1976, but no officers faced criminal charges in Whitehurst’s death. Ultimately, in 1977, nearly a dozen officers, including the city’s public safety director, left the department, and the mayor resigned amid charges that he was aware of a cover-up. Despite the public nature of this controversy, including the resignations, the family did not find justice in the courts, nor in voluntary compensation from the City. Thirty-five years later, in 2012, the City of Montgomery apologized to the Whitehurst family and placed a historic marker to the Whitehurst Case near City Hall. In 2015, a second marker was placed on the site of the shooting. Closed Ranks was written during the period that followed the 2012 events.

Southern Movie 61: “Macabre” (1980)

Set in New Orleans, the Italian horror-thriller Macabre weaves a complex plot that centers on an adulterous housewife whose extramarital affair goes horribly wrong. In the movie, a pretty wife named Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers) is seeing her lover Fred behind her husband’s back, but it is their young daughter who realizes what is going and reaps a terrible revenge on her mother. Directed by Lamberto Bava, Macabre also stars blue-eyed actor Stanko Molnar as the blind, homebound musical instrument repairman who provides the apartment where Jane has her affair.  Like perhaps too many movies of the 1970s and early ’80s, we begin with an on-screen bit of text that tells us what we will watch is based on a true story . . . 

Macabre begins simply enough with Jane Baker’s husband going to work, kissing their children on the his way to the car. He is older and bald, in a business suit and carrying a briefcase. A barely dressed Jane watches the scene with anticipation, then rushes back into the house, gets on the phone, and tells the man on the other end that they can meet in a half-hour. Outside, their children – an older daughter, who looks to be about twelve, and a son probably six – play on the lawn. The girl is clearly the dominant one, taking toys from her brother and informing him that she will dictate the rules of their game. 

When Jane comes outside to tell them that she is leaving, that she has a meeting to go to, the daughter challenges her. Their mother was supposed to take them to the movies. That won’t be possible today, the mom replies. The girl is suspicious, and angry, at her mother’s betrayal. 

Jane then takes a cab across New Orleans to a house, where she is let in by an old woman. The old woman’s grown son is taking a bath in the downstairs bathroom, and for some reason, his doting mother lets Jane come in there to say hello. The man Robert Duval – yes, with the same name at the actor – we soon realize is blind. Jane regards him with a smile and leaves the two to go upstairs to her apartment. Robert is clearly uncomfortable at being seen in the bath by a grown woman who is their guest.

Back at the Baker home, daughter Lucy snoops around the house, first lighting one of her mother’s cigarettes then searching for something to get into. She seems to know that something is going on with her mother. Across town, Jane gets ready for her lover to arrive, and the apartment phone rings— it is daughter Lucy calling her. Lucy has found her mother’s address book and makes the call to ask how the “meeting” is going. Jane hangs up on her, but seems unfazed and continues to prepare herself for sex.

What happens next is the horrifying part. While Jane rolls in the hay with her man Fred, Lucy coaxes her little brother into the bathroom. There, she drowns him in the bathtub. When she’s finished killing her brother, Lucy calls her mother to interrupt the liaison, but leaves out the detail that she was responsible for the death. Jane freaks out, of course, and she and Fred jump into his little Volkswagen Beetle to race toward the Baker home.  Except that, in their frantic attempts to navigate the streets, Fred misses a curve. They crash into a metal guard rail, which decapitates Fred.

Next we see Jane Baker, it is one year later, and she is exiting a mental hospital, alone. She ambles back to the house where she had the apartment, and it takes the blind young man Robert a moment to answer the door. However, he lets Jane in and seems pleased to see her. We learn from their dialogue that Jane was paying rent on the apartment the whole time she was confined, and Robert says that he would have kept the place empty for her anyway. His mother has passed away, so it’s just him in the house. At this point, there is no sign of Jane’s husband or Lucy.

When Jane returns to the apartment, it is just as she left it. She opens the fridge, and somehow there are groceries waiting on her. She also notes that the icebox has a small gold lock on it, and smiles at the lock’s presence. We now know that Jane is deeply troubled, refusing to let go of her traumatic experience. We also know that the blind shut-in Robert is in love with this woman, but is too frightened to be straightforward about it. What also lets us know this is the presence of a triangle-shaped memorial to Fred, which looks like a display poster for a class project. There are pictures of Fred, as well as bits of ephemera like cigarette butts, all mounted on red velvet. This little altar-homage is something between creepy and pathetic. 

From this point, we have two sources of tension, which will converge. First, Robert is in love with Jane. The problem is that Jane is beautiful and charming . . . and obsessed with a dead guy. On the other hand, Robert is quiet, squeamish, untidy . . . and blind. He is no match for the object of his affection. The second conflict revolves around Lucy, who re-enters the story when her father brings her for a very brief scheduled visit. The cuckolded husband is cold and resistant, wanting nothing to do with his former wife, while Lucy is bent on reuniting her parents. While the adults talk, Lucy looks around Robert’s house, and we get the sense that she has not mended her sneaky ways. (It is also clear that no one realized that Lucy killed her brother, that she suffered no consequences, and that she seems fine with being a murderer.)

As the plot of Macabre moves forward, the three central characters become intertwined. Robert makes attempts to show Jane that he is interested in her, but those attempts are vague and easily thwarted. Jane is so amused by his naive, shy behavior that she even calls him upstairs for a drink then gets into the bathtub naked, taunting him. She knows that he cannot see what is right in front of him. On the other front, Lucy uses his blindness in her own way, manipulating him to gain entrance to her mother’s apartment. She puts herself out there as a sweet child, then uses the fact that he can’t see to do as she pleases. First, Lucy comes when her mother isn’t home and puts a framed photo of her dead brother in the apartment. After being scolded for giving Lucy access, Robert tries to prevent Lucy when she comes back again and again. But Lucy is too sly for the young man with the kind heart. Lucy claims to want her parents to get back to together, but her actions seem aimed at making Jane suffer. Robert eventually realizes what he is enabling, by allowing Jane to stay, when he finds a human earlobe with a gold ring in it.

Ultimately, Jane Baker cannot fend off all of the crazy that she has incited. Lucy and Robert both want to know what is going on, each for their own reasons. By sneaking around quietly – in what is his house – Robert discovers Fred’s head in the icebox. When he calls the jilted Mr. Baker to rat out Jane, Lucy hears one side of the phone conversation and surmises that there is a secret to be unearthed. She rushes over to Robert’s house and worms her way in, again, to find out what the secret is. That won’t bode well for Jane either. Of course, nobody calls the police.

Lucy Baker brings it all to head in the final ten or twelve minutes by playing nice. She offers to fix dinner for Robert, who no longer trusts her, and Jane, who seems to for some reason. Lucy cooks up a soup, and the three sit down to a candlelight dinner. Jane begins to eat, while Robert is hesitant. They soon realize that bits of Fred’s head are in it. Robert takes off, but Lucy throws him down the stairs, leaving him knocked out on the landing. Jane tries to go get one of her anxiety pills, but Lucy follows her into the bathroom. There, she informs her mother of the truth: she murdered her younger brother! Jane then goes bat shit crazy, enacting some poetic justice on Lucy: the girl gets drowned in a bathtub. 

If Macabre weren’t already weird enough, the director takes it one step further. With Lucy lying dead in the apartment’s tub, Jane dons her see-through nightie one more time and gets Fred’s head so they can get it on. With her dead daughter’s body soaking in the next room, Jane’s mind turns to satisfying her desire for necrophilia. Meanwhile, the running water from the bathtub overflows, rolls down the stairs, and wakes Robert up. He tries to leave but the front door is locked, the key removed. With no choice, he heads upstairs to confront Jane. Unwilling to give up her love affair with dead Fred’s frozen head, she attempts to fight Robert, who pushes her into the burning hot oven, which is still on from Lucy cooking dinner. Jane’s face is burned up, and she dies on the kitchen floor. 

Now comes the real shocker. As Robert – who is blind, remember – is rooting around and trying to find something, what we don’t know. He climbs onto the bed and is feeling around where Fred’s nasty head lies on a pillow. And as Robert moves across it, Fred’s head jumps up by itself and bites into Robert’s neck! The image freezes, with Robert’s terror held in place. Text across the screen tells us that Robert Duval’s autopsy information was never revealed. No one really knows what happened to him. We are left to wonder whether Fred’s head was really alive and participating in all that sex that Jane was having with him.

Macabre is one part Diabolique, one part Psycho, one part The Bad Seed, and one part Wait Until Dark. We have adultery, creepy children, a momma’s boy, blindness, murder, and . . . necrophilia. But is it Southern? Not hardly. Because almost all of the story occurs inside of Robert’s house, it is virtually irrelevant that it takes place in New Orleans. Granted, Jane Baker does go out a few times, walking the streets of the French Quarter, but the city scenes could have really taken place in any city. She doesn’t do anything particular to the Crescent City, and frankly, the fake Southern accents aren’t even right for that city. Also, I can’t think of a less New Orleans name than “Jane Baker.” A woman with that name would live in Iowa or Indiana. Of all the names the writers could have given a sexy adulteress in New Orleans— Jane Baker, really? Though they do try to jazz it up by making Robert a guy who repairs trumpets and saxophones, he tells Lucy that he doesn’t know how to play them. Again, really— a guy in New Orleans who repairs brass horns but can’t play them? I’m sorry to say so, but: though Macabre is a reasonably good Italian thriller from its time, as a document of the South, it falls flat. If Jane’s last name had been Delacroix, if Robert had tried to woo her with a sax solo, or if she had visited a voodoo shop to animate Fred’s head, then maybe we could at least give the filmmakers a nod on the stereotype angle. The sad truth is: they didn’t check a single box. 

 

Dirty Boots: Unencumbered

Ain’t nobody messin’ with you, but you . . .
— from “Althea” by The Grateful Dead

It was the last lines in the Gospel reading from June 26 – Luke 9:62 – that spoke to me: “. . . Jesus said, ‘No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.'” We had been at the lake and, though I hadn’t planned on it, I decided to come back to Montgomery with my daughter who wanted to go to Sunday evening Mass. My habit, when I arrive at Mass, is to kneel and pray for a few moments, then read the scriptures beforehand. That week’s Old Testament reading from 1 Kings made little sense to me, so I focused on the latter two, which were excerpts from Galatians and Luke. And I noticed those last lines right away.

The work of putting one’s past in the past is daunting. The Christian religion is chock-full of admonitions about forgiveness and living unencumbered, but here on Earth, our memories, judgments, and preparations are useful parts of our survival instincts. They’re also heavy burdens to bear in daily life— we try in the present to assess the future by using the past. By a worldly standard, only a fool would wander willy-nilly into tomorrow. On the other hand, tomorrow is not yesterday.

Five and a half years ago, in February 2017, I wrote a post here on the blog titled “Things.” about being attached to my belongings, not because they have material value but because so many of them connect to old experiences and memories. My wife and I had watched a feel-good documentary called The Minimalists, and I was contrasting these guys’ ideas with Mark Doty’s book Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. I have long kept books, tapes, trinkets . . . because of my experiences that were tied to them. My office is littered with all manner of ephemera, an eclectic array of things that no one but me would see any reason to keep. I also wrote, a year later in January 2018, about my habit of clinging to old keepsakes in “The Boxes in the Attic: A Love Story.” When I look at any of it, I remember the story: where I was, what I was doing, who was around.

That was before the pandemic. I can’t speak for other people, but nothing has been the same for me after experiencing and witnessing what the years 2020 and 2021 brought. While most of us did survive it, those memories and revelations are not so easily put in the past. We “put hand to plow” to get through those hardships, but looking to “what was left behind” seems necessary to harvest the lessons from that suffering. So, recently, in considering that Bible verse from Luke’s Gospel, I had an idea: what if I just got rid of all the negative stuff— the things that hold the ugly reminders of past pain? And I threw out a garbage bag full: music, mementos, notes, photos, clippings. It felt good, and I haven’t missed any of things that I scrapped. In short, that small act felt like a step in the right direction, a shift toward something better.

I’m not one of those people who focuses on the positive, because some of the best lessons I’ve ever learned came from bad situations. I also saw a Thich Nhat Hanh quote on Instagram (on the right) that encapsulates why I feel that way. We got to misstep, fall down, and err in judgment in order to learn— and to be willing to! I struggle with this idea of not looking back, and sometimes intentionally remind myself of bad situations in the past so I can be aware and not repeat them. The trick, however, might be to remember and use those bad experiences without allowing them to usurp the present and the future. It’s a tightrope-walking kind of distinction, but one that seems important to embrace.

For more, start with Dirty Boots: An Introduction

The Great Watchlist Purge of 2022: A Late Summer Progress Report

*You should read the first post for this year’s Great Watchlist Purge.

As I began another Great Watchlist Purge, with over fifty movies in the list, I took a look around to see which ones were available. Not many, that’s why they were still in the list . . . Once again, my watchlist has tended to be heavy on the 1970s, so my viewing preferences haven’t changed: twenty-two of them – nearly half – were made during the Purple Decade. The oldest films on the list are 1929’s Prince Achmed and 1930’s Blood of a Poet. There is only one movie from the 1950s and one from the 1960s this time. However, there are eight from the ’80s and seven from the ’90s. The remaining films were made in the twenty-first century.

First, here are the twelve movies from the list that I’ve watched since mid-May:

1900 (1976)
I’ve liked Bernardo Bertolucci ever since I saw Stealing Beauty in the 1990s, but this four-plus-hour film was not at all the same thing. It stars Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu as boys then men then old men who are wrapped up in the politics of early twentieth-century Italy. Depardieu’s character is a peasant who has been raised on socialism, and De Niro is the child of landowner who doesn’t share his family’s uppity ideas about how to treat workers. Ultimately, they are both friends and enemies. While some portions of this movie did get tiresome, the end was bittersweet, and I was glad I finished it.

Haiku Tunnel (2001) 
I remember this being one of the last attempts at a GenX zeitgeist films, but it came out too late— even well after the purely Hollywood takes on our generation: Singles (1992), Reality Bites (1994), and SubUrbia (1996). By the early 2000s, the youngest Xers were getting into the working world, and unfortunately for the Kornbluth brothers, all of the types and tropes had become clichés. I probably chuckled at this when I saw it the first time, but was generally disappointed in it this time.

Images (1972)
Knowing a little bit about Robert Altman, I felt that I knew what this film would be like, but it surprised me. I was picturing something like Play It as It Lays after watching the trailer, but it was more like The Wicker Man. The main character is a schizophrenic woman in Ireland, who has three men in her life: a dead husband, a current husband, and a former lover who is a friend of her current husband. The conflict comes from her mind not knowing which of them she is looking at, talking to, or sleeping with— and we don’t always know either. If that wasn’t complicated enough, she also sees another version of herself, who always seems to be far-off in the distance, until the end when she confronts herself. Yes, that’s as confusing as it sounds.

40 Years on The Farm (2012)
It has always been interesting to me that such an infamous hippie commune would exist in Tennessee of all places, and watching this documentary, I learned why. One of the early members explained that the San Francisco group led by Stephen Gaskin on a nationwide speaking tour had found friendly people in rural Tennessee, and they also saw that the East and West coasts were so heavily politicized that they wanted to avoid those regions. After a search and some minor obstruction from locals, they found a 1000-acre piece of land and started The Farm. I also hadn’t realized that Stephen from the infamous Monday Night Class was the founder. This documentary was not terribly exciting, but it was informative and well put together. I was glad to learn the backstory of this longstanding sustainable and peaceful community to my north.

Fascination (1979)
The only Jean Rollin movie I’d seen before was Shiver of the Vampires, which was hippie-weird and kind of hokey. This one was nothing like that; it was slow-paced, dark, and sinister. The story centers on a group of women who practice vampirism; they drink blood but are not vampires. They prey on a fleeing criminal who shows up at their chateau. He has double-crossed his cohorts and must get away, but he falls into something much worse. The movie’s star Brigitte Lahaie is beautiful, but there’s not much else to say about Fascination.

Zabriskie Point (1970)
When this movie began, it was seemed typical of its time and subject, and reminded me of the movie adaptation of The Strawberry Statement. The subtitle description says it is about a hippie revolutionary and an anthropology student hiding out in Death Valley, but that’s really not what the movie is about. Of the movie’s two hours, that part is about twenty minutes and has less to do with the story. Also, the way that scene is handled – as a hippie orgy, heavy with symbolism? – comes out of nowhere, since the rest of the film is stark realism.

Ravagers (1979)
I didn’t know anything about this movie, but it caught my eye for having been filmed in Alabama. The cast looked solid – Richard Harris, Ernest Borgnine, Art Carney, et al. – and the concept driving the plot seemed that way, too. But the story kind of wandered around in the space, and its style screamed late-1970s TV movie. I should have known to be suspicious when the IMDb rating was 4.3, but I was curious about the on-location stuff. So, I got what I was looking for: Alabama. I recognized Huntsville early in the film, and Mobile in latter parts.

The Beautiful Troublemaker (1991)
I was a little worried that this film would be just a bunch of rambling about abstract existential topics, since it’s four hours long and French, but there was a strong story here. An aging painter tries to recapture his old magic by restarting an unfinished work, using the girlfriend of a visiting painter as his model. Of course, there’s jealousy, ego, and the interplay of the two couples: the old painter and his wife, and the young painter and his girlfriend. The style of the film was very deliberate, sticking with shots for longer than one might expect in modern films, which emphasized the humanity of the characters through highly realistic storytelling.  I liked this movie, but will admit that I started checking how much was left at about the two-hour point.

Simple Men (1992)
I knew nothing about the director or the stars of this one, but it appeared to be a GenX indie film. I gave it a half-chance, for about forty-five minutes, then admitted that it was pretty bad. The credits indicated that it was produced by a small theatre company, which I could see— a group of twenty-something stage players overacting for the camera. As for the Generation X elements: randomness, quirky characters, urban decay, absurd authority figures . . . I wouldn’t suggest watching this one, unless you’re just really into obscure ’90s stuff.

Rabid (1977)
This film reminded me a lot of Shivers, which preceded it by a few years. There was the medical angle to the horror, like Shivers, but this time, we had zombies, too. The pacing and the acting were typical of the ’70s, which was fine, but there was one major problem for me: the way the main character became the host/source of a monstrous epidemic. Somehow, a perfectly normal young woman (played by porn star Marilyn Chambers) got some skin grafts after being burned in a motorcycle accident near a cosmetic surgery resort, but while in a coma, she developed a tongue-like feeding apparatus in a hole in her armpit that murders people. I get that both horror films and Cronenberg films are supposed to be strange, but this premise didn’t fly. Something was missing in the leap from point A (healthy young woman) to point B (horror movie monster).

What the Peeper Saw (1971)
This movie was actually in the last Watchlist Purge, but I struck it after not being able to find it. Then it showed up recently in Tubi. At first, I thought it would be like The Bad Seed, but the story was more complicated than that. It took a turn similar to Images (above) or the 1990s drama Falling Down, where the person who starts out with our sympathy loses it slowly as we figure out he/she might be the actual problem. The boy they cast as the problem child is creepy, the star Britt Eckland is beautiful, and the interplay between them works. The ending is pretty gruesome— I won’t spoil it, but it’s unexpected.

Chronopolis (1982)
If I were going to describe this, I would say that it’s art-deco meets steam punk in a highly symbolic claymation sci-fi movie. This one is very abstract and mixed Polish and French. The plot, if there is one, seems to based around this amorphous substance that is living but can also be control kinetically with various tools. There is also a group of majestic but expressionless figures who are counterbalanced by – or possibly at odds with – some marionette-like mountain climbers. Chronopolis is visually very interesting, but I felt about it like I did about the surreal 1988 movie Begotten— I know watched something pretty cool, I’m just not sure what it was.

Booksmart (2019)
This was not in the original list from May, but a friend recommended this to me as “a female Superbad.” That was all I needed to add it to the Watchlist. . . . (No, I didn’t learn my lesson about adding to the list while trying to whittle it down.) This movie was laugh-out-loud funny in places, though in general, it was a little too Gen-Z for my taste. Booksmart is a best friend movie, a high school movie, a raunchy comedy, all at once. There are elements of Superbad here, but also of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and American Pie. I’d recommend it, yes, but if you’re over 35 years old, be prepared to spend a little time thinking condescending thoughts about younger generations.

The Psychedelic Priest (1971)
Another one that I added to the list since May, this one appeared on Tubi right after I learned about it. It was another of those might-be-terrible-but-might-be-great “lost” films— and . . . it was terrible. No story, bad acting, trite social commentary, cheap cinematography. With the alternate titles Electric Shades of Gray and Jesus Freak, it was made in 1971 but not released until 2001. It’s described as a road movie, which is one of my favorite genres, but they really just drive in the California mountains for no reason. I thought when I saw it, It could be like that Orson Welles thing with John Huston, The Other Side of the Wind, where they took the footage and made a film later, but probably less artistic and more indie . . . No, this was awful. At least hippie flicks like Zabriskie Point or Stanley Sweet have a point. This one should have remained lost.

The Downing of a Flag (2021)
This two-episode program on PBS looks back at the efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia after the killing of nine African-Americans in Charleston in 2015. The issue of the flag has long been an issue in Southern states, especially since 1961 when it was flown on many Southern state capitols in response to the Civil Rights movement. This two-part documentary was very well done, presenting speakers on both sides of the issue, as well as former governors and legislators who dealt with the politics of it themselves.

And as I went through the watchlist, I had one cut, too:

Salt of the Earth (1954)
This black-and-white, social justice film about the plight and lives of Mexican miners has been available on multiple platforms for quite a while. After passing up the opportunity to watch it over and over, I’ve finally admitted that I don’t really want to watch it.

So, these forty films are still in the list. So far, all of these have been harder to access, for various reasons. A few are available for rent-or-buy on streaming services, but most aren’t. A handful are foreign films that are available in a language that I don’t speak. I recently subscribed to Mubi, which has more foreign films, so we’ll if some come up.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1929)
I had never heard of this animated movie before seeing a reference to it on Twitter from an account that was disputing Fantasia‘s designation as the first full-length animated feature film. The clip attached to the tweet was interesting, and I want to see the whole film.

The River Rat (1984)
I found this film when I was trying to figure out what Martha Plimpton had been in. I tend to think of Plimpton as the nerdy friend she played in Goonies, but this one, which is set in Louisiana and has Tommy Lee Jones playing her dad, puts her in a different role.

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)
I’ve read about this movie but never seen it. I must say, the title is great, and it doesn’t hurt that Jacqueline Bisset is beautiful.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)
This horror-thriller came up alongside Deep Red, which I watched last year, after I rated two recent horror films: the disturbing Hagazussa and the less-heavy but still creepy Make-Out with Violence. Deep Red was good, so I want to watch this one, too.

Born in Flames (1983)
This movie looks cool but is obscure. It’s an early ’80s dystopian film about life after a massive revolution. But it is difficult impossible to find. (Apple TV has it but I don’t have Apple TV.) I was surprised to see a story on NPR about it recently, so maybe it will show up.

Personal Problems (1980)
This one is also pretty obscure – complicated African-American lives in the early ’80s – and came up as a suggestion since I liked Ganja and Hess. Though the script was written by Ishmael Reed – whose From Totems to Hip-Hop anthology I use in my classroom – the description says “partly improvised,” which means that the characters probably ramble a bit.

Little Fauss and Big Halsey (1970)
Paul Newman movies from the late ’60s and early ’70s are among my all-time favorites. This one came out about the same time as Sometimes A Great Notion. Despite having seen Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Long, Hot Summer numerous times each, I’d never heard of this movie until a few years ago.

All the Right Noises (1970)
I found this story about a married theater manager who has an affair with a younger woman, when I looked up what movies Olivia Hussey had been in other than Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. It looks a little like Fatal Attraction, like the relationship goes well until it doesn’t.

All the Colors of the Dark (1972)
I have memories of seeing this movie in the late 1980s when USA Network used to have a program called Saturday Nightmares, but every list that appears on the internet doesn’t include this movie as having been shown on that program. That weird old program turned me on 1960s and ’70s European horror movies, like Vampire Circus and The Devil’s Nightmare, and I could have sworn this one was on that show— but maybe not. No matter where I first saw it, I haven’t seen this movie in a long time and would like to re-watch it. However, the full movie was virtually impossible to find. One streaming service had it but said it was not available in my area, and one YouTuber has shared the original Italian-language movie . . . but I don’t speak Italian.

Deadlock (1970)
This western came up as a suggestion at the same time as Zachariah. It’s a German western, so we’ll see . . . Generally, it has been hard to find, with only the trailer appearing on most sites.

The Blood of a Poet (1930)
Jean Cocteau’s bohemian classic. I remember reading about this film in books that discussed Paris in the early twentieth century, but I never made any effort to watch it. I’m not as interested in European bohemians as I once was, but if the film is good, it won’t matter.

Landscape in the Mist (1988)
This Greek film about two orphans won high praise. I haven’t tried to find a subtitled version yet, it may be out of reach.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
I can’t tell what to make of this movie: Phantom of the Opera but with rock n roll in the mid-’70s?

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)
As I’ve already shared, I just like ’70s horror movies. We’ll see if this one is any good.

White Star (1983)
This biopic has Dennis Hopper playing Westbrook. As a fan of rock journalism, I couldn’t not add it to the list!

The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)
This French thriller, which came up as a suggestion from All the Colors of the Dark, caught my eye with the wonderful artwork on its cover image. The title is also compelling, and those two factors led me to see what it was. It didn’t hurt that the description contained the phrase “surreal kaleidoscope.”

Cronos (1993)
A mid-1990s film by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, who later made Pan’s Labyrinth, which is an incredibly beautiful film. (He also made The Shape of Water, which won an Oscar a few years ago.) I had never heard of this movie at the time, but found it when I went down the rabbit hole of seeing what else the director of Pan’s Labyrinth made. 

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)
Though I’ve seen most of Spike Lee’s movies, this one got past me. It doesn’t look at all like his classics Do the Right Thing or School Daze, so I’m curious to what it will be.

Valérie (1969)
Not to be confused with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, this film is a Quebecois hippie film about a naive girl who comes to the city to get involved in the modern goings-on. This one came up as related to Rabid, but only has 5.1 stars on IMDb— it may be a clunker, we’ll see . . .

The People Next Door (1970)
I’ve been a fan of this movie’s star Eli Wallach since seeing The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but this film will certainly be nothing like that one. This movie is about a couple in New York whose daughter ends up being on drugs. The premise and title remind me of the ultra-depressing Ordinary People and also of one subplot in the more recent film Traffic. Some of the reviews reference TV movies and those short films that were meant to scare kids into not doing drugs. I hope this is better than either of those genres.

The Slums of Beverly Hills (1998)
I remember seeing this movie when it came out but not much about it. I do remember it being funny in kind of an off-color way. In short, I’d like to watch it again.

Cat People (1982)
This is Natassja Kinski a few years before Paris, Texas. Early ’80s horror, but perhaps its redemption will come in its cast: Malcolm McDowell, Ed Begley, Jr., Ruby Dee, et al— a whole host of ’80s regulars. (Also John Heard, the jerky antagonist in Big, and John Larroquette from TV’s Night Court.) It’s possible that this movie won’t be good, but I’ll bet two hours on it and find out.

The Decameron (1971)
About ten years ago, I read The Decameron – the Penguin Classics translation into English – over the course of about a year, reading a story or segue each night. (Every year, I make a New Years resolution to read another one of the Western classics that I haven’t read, and this book was part of that annual tradition.) So, when I saw that Pasolini had done a film version, I was intrigued— how would anyone put 100 stories held within a frame narrative into a film? Well, he didn’t . . . He sampled from them. The Italian-language version is available on YouTube, but of course, I don’t know what they’re saying. I’d like to find this film with English subtitles.

The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (1976)
This film caught my eye because Hy Pyke is in it. Sometimes “erotic” means porno, and sometimes it means that there are just some gratuitously naked people. This movie was made in Spain, which is appropriate for Don Quixote. I seriously doubt if this one is up to par with Orson Welles’ version, but it should be good for a chuckle or two— if I can ever find it.

Tanya (1976)
Somebody, in the mid-1970s, made a sex comedy out of the basic plot line of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. This movie is probably terrible, but it’s also hard to find. It appears that this was the only film for director Nate Rogers, who gave himself the pseudonym Duncan Fingersnarl, which is both creepy and gross. The young woman who stars in the movie was a topless dancer who also starred in one of Ed Wood’s movies. I serious doubt that Tanya is any good, but I have to admit that I’m curious . . .

The Lobster (2015)
I had to add this movie to the watchlist. The director made Killing of a Sacred Deer, which was infuriatingly tense, and Dogtooth, which was disturbing, and Colin Farrell was great in In Bruges. So, add it all up into a dark comedy, and I want to see it.

The Dreamers (2003)
Another Bertolucci film, this one set in 1968 in Paris during the time of student riots. The star here, Michael Pitt, I recognized from supporting roles in Finding Forrester in the mid-1990s and The Village in the early 2000s.

Burning Moon (1992)
What fan of strange horror films could resist this description of a German film made in the 1990s: “A young drug addict reads his little sister two macabre bedtime stories, one about a serial killer on a blind date, the other about a psychotic priest terrorizing his village.” The information on it says that it is really gory, which doesn’t interest me as much as tension and suspense do, but I’d like to see this for the same reason that I wanted to see House before.

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
This film is French and Polish, and follows two women leading parallel lives. Though the film may be nothing like it, the premise reminded me of Sliding Doors, but this film preceded Sliding Doors by seven years. It gets high marks in IMDb, so it should be good.

Lamb (2021)
This came up as a suggestion on Prime, then it went to Rent or Buy status, and I should’ve watched it when it was available. I’ll probably bite the bullet and rent it sometime.

The Order of Myths (2008)
This documentary about the krewes involved in Mobile’s Mardi Gras was recommended by a friend who is a folklorist. I’ve written a good bit on the culture of Alabama, which is my home state, and I understand that this documentary caused some controversy when it was released.

Eddie and the Cruisers (1983)
I remember this being a really good movie. I like early 1980s Michael Paré generally – mainly from Street of Fire – and the Springsteen-esque main song from the soundtrack was really good: “On the Dark Side” by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band. But this movie is virtually absent from streaming services.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
An early ’70s Spanish drama set in 1940 about a seven-year-old girl who goes into her own fantasy world after being traumatized by watching a film adaptation of Frankenstein. I had never heard of the director Victor Erice, but browsing his other films, I’m excited to see what he does.

Wrong Turn (2003), Burnt Offerings  (1976), and Session 9 (2001)
All three of these made it onto the watchlist from a documentary called The 50 Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen. I’d seen more than half of them, but these three I had not. They were numbers 39, 30, and 19, respectively.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)
Based on the Tom Robbins novel, this film was one I remember watching when I was college-age. But I haven’t seen it in a long time, and now, it’s rather hard to find. Sadly, the movie gets low ratings on sites like IMDb, but I remember Uma Thurman being good in it. Right after this, she was in Pulp Fiction then Beautiful Girls, which were easily better movies, but I still don’t think this one was bad at all. I’d like to re-watch it.

Three Women (1977)
I actually ran across this one on one of the movie-themed Twitter accounts I follow. The description on IMDb says, “Two roommates/physical therapists, one a vain woman and the other an awkward teenager, share an increasingly bizarre relationship.” Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall star.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Two of the most unique actors around, John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe, star in this story about the filming of 1922’s Nosferatu.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
Last, but certainly not least: I remember watching this movie as a boy. Jason Robards stars as an older father whose son is enthralled with a carnival that has come to town, but the carnival is a front for a sinister group of evildoers. Now, this movie is very hard to find. It’s not on any of the major streaming services, and a general search on Roku yields nothing.

As for those other movies that I added to the list . . . here they are:

Brother on the Run (1973)
I love blaxploitation films. There are literally hundreds of them, some look pretty cheesy, most are low-budget. This one looks like it could be better than most. The poster art caught my eye, to be honest, and the main character is a teacher or a professor, which is very different than most of the movies in this genre.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
This one was made by Peter Weir, who later made Gallipoli, Witness, and Dead Poets Society— all good movies. The description says, “During a rural summer picnic, a few students and a teacher from an Australian girls’ school vanish without a trace. Their absence frustrates and haunts the people left behind.” That’s just too tantalizing to turn down.

The Little Hours (2017)
I don’t know how I missed this one, as a Catholic, as a fan of Saturday Night Live, and as someone who has read the Decameron. I would watch this for Fred Armisen alone . . .

Synecdoche, New York (2008)
I remember this film coming out but I never went to see it. The director Charlie Kaufman wrote the script for Being John Malkovich and made Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the  Spotless Mind in the years prior to making this one. I had to add it.

 

A Quick Tribute to “Mountain Man” Bill McKinney

Rewatching Deliverance to write last week’s Southern Movies post got me to thinking about . This unfortunate soul has gone down in the movie history as the “squeal like a pig” guy, but his legacy is much more than that, especially to a GenXer like me.

McKinney was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1931. His IMDb bio shares that his family moved often, and “when [they] moved from Tennessee to Georgia, he was beaten by a local gang and thrown into a creek for the offense of being from the Volunteer State.” However, a stint in the Navy landed him in California, where he became part of The Actors Studio in the 1960s. After some minor roles on TV, he was cast as the Mountain Man in Deliverance. 

This role is brief but haunting. From the moment we see him, the Mountain Man is standing on the shore, ready to accost the unwitting suburbanites. He speaks first with a threatening, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and then proceeds to taunt and then rape a man who did nothing more than happen by. When he is done, he comes over, sweating and panting, to his accomplice and asks how he wants to abuse the other man they’ve trapped. It’s a brutal part to play, and despite the fact that it only last seven minutes, I would say that no one who watches that scene will ever forget it. 

I think of Bill McKinney as a guy who always seemed to play some hapless villain or antagonist, often in Clint Eastwood’s movies. In The Outlaw Josey Wales, he was Red Legs, the man our anti-hero was looking for. In Every Which Way but Loose, he played the biker in the Viking helmet who always got bested by Philo Beddo. He was also in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Gauntlet, Bronco Billy, and Any Which Way You Can. McKinney played a good jerk, with his deep voice and stony expression— characters who usually ended up being more talk than substance. So much so that he also found himself in blaxploitation films like Cleopatra Jones and the TV show Get Christie Love! 

During my childhood, McKinney was one of those actors that always seemed to show up on screen. He was in episodes of The A Team and the quirky trucker sitcom BJ and the Bear in the late ’70s and early ’80s. All in all, his TV credits include The Monkees in the late ’60s, Columbo in the ’70s, Falcon Crest in the ’80s, and Walker, Texas Ranger in the ’90s. Reading his filmography, I was surprised that he never found his way onto The Dukes of Hazzard— he would have been perfect.

Bill McKinney died in 2011 of esophageal cancer. An LA Times article about his passing says that he had been writing an autobiography, which doesn’t appear to have been published. However, he did leave behind a Deliverance-themed country album, Love Songs from Antri, which was released in the 1990s.

 

Southern Movie 60: “Deliverance” (1972)

It was fifty years ago today – August 18, 1972 – that the film adaptation Deliverance was released. Based on the 1970 debut novel of James Dickey, this movie is best-known for two infamous scenes: “Dueling Banjoes” and “squeal like a pig.” The latter, of course, has been used for decades to frighten fellow campers and kayakers— “I think I hear banjoes,” some jokester on a trip will claim. But, as powerful as they are, the movie is more than those two scenes. Directed by John Boorman and filmed mostly in Rabun County, Georgia, its stellar cast features Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Jon Voight, and Ronnie Cox, whose characters are taking a guys’ trip down the river when things go horribly wrong.

Deliverance opens with scenes of huge bulldozers and dump trucks destroying the rural landscape. As we look over the huge wound amid miles and miles of misty green mountains, voices are heard: a group of men, one among them exhorting the rest to leave their comfortable suburban lives and make the best of this one last chance to ride the river rapids before a dam eliminates the whole thing. After massive blast of dynamite wrecks another corner of the torn area, the scenes shifts to a yellow International Scout and a wood-paneled station wagon barreling down winding two-lane roads among those mountains. Canoes are strapped on top, and the continued voiceovers tell us what the men are going to do. The main voice insists that, if they’ll agree to go out on the river, he will have them home in time to watch the Sunday football game and gawk at the cheerleaders. We sense from this dialogue and the chuckles that we have one fiercely individualistic outdoorsman and three barely willing participants in this plan.

After they’ve left the paved road and driven up a dirt road in the woods, the cars stop in front of an old shack that is surrounded by rusty car hulls and other detritus. They get out, and one asks if they are lost. The driver of the station wagon kicks an old can and remarks condescendingly about the junk. His passenger gets out with a guitar. The other two men, from the Scout, are standing closer to the atop an embankment. Soon, when a person appears, we see that the shack is a gas station, and it is where the four travelers will try to find people to drive their cars to Aintry, the spot where their canoe trip will end. We quickly see that the condescending station-wagon driver (Ned Beatty) is mouthy but not confident, so the leader of the group in the Scout (Burt Reynolds) steps up to make the deal. At first, the old Appalachian fellow wants to know if they’re from the power company, which is building the dam, then he shrugs them off when he finds out that they’re not. 

Though we’re less than five minutes into Deliverance, one of those two famous scenes is upon us. While the old fellow puts gas in the Scout, the guitar picker (Ronnie Cox) is tuning his instrument when he gets a retort from a banjo picker on the porch. It is a boy with a buzz cut and overalls, who by appearances could be assumed to be inbred. He doesn’t speak and is emotionless at first, but slowly the two musicians find their song and play it with vigor, while a handful of dirty, rough-looking men emerge from the woods individually. Soon, both pickers are smiling and playing, while the assembled group enjoys the music. The old fellow at the gas pump even starts to dance. After the song” Dueling Banjoes” is over, though, the guitar man tries to shake hands with his newfound musical companion, but the strange boy jerks his head to the side, a gesture that says, I don’t know you and don’t plan to.

A short ride up the hill, and the guys are at a ramshackle garage made from old boards. Everything in this tiny community is dilapidated and mean. In the car, Lewis asks his passenger Ed (Jon Voight) about the station-wagon driver Bobby (Beatty). We find out that Lewis doesn’t really know the other two, but Ed does. Bobby is a successful insurance agent, and Lewis replies that he has never had insurance in his life, nor wanted any. Here, they are looking for the Griner brothers, who the old fellow at the gas station said would handle their cars. Inside the house, Ed sees a grizzled old woman and a severely handicapped child, while Lewis walks down the hill, following the clanging sound of blacksmithing. Lewis opens the barn door and startles the man working there, causing him to smash his finger. After a tense moment, Lewis asks him about driving their cars to Aintry. The man wonders why— they’re on a canoe trip.

“What the hell you wanna go fuck around that river for,” Griner asks roughly.

“Because it’s there,” Lewis replies, turning his back on the man.

“It’s there alright,” Griner says more to Ed than Lewis. “But you get in there and can’t get out, you’ll wish you wasn’t.”

Ed then walks over to Lewis, who still has his back turned, and says, “Look here, Lewis, let’s go back to town . . . and play golf.” Here, the exchange gets even more tense, as Lewis winks at Ed. He offers Griner thirty dollars for the task, and Griner replies that he’ll do it for fifty. “Fifty, my ass,” says Lewis. Griner challenges him to repeat himself, and Lewis does, so Griner backs down to forty. They have a deal. Lewis hands the money over his shoulder, keeping Griner at his back, and storms to his vehicle. Drew wants to know if everything is alright, and Lewis forces upon him that it is. 

In the next scene, we see more of Lewis’s mannish arrogance. The Griner brothers load up in a rusty tow-truck, one putting a gun in back-window rack, and they begin to lead the way to the river. But Lewis cuts across their yard and gets in front of them. Ed advises that they let the locals show them the way, but Lewis tells him that he’s missing the point. When they take a wrong fork and have to back up, the Griners are waiting on them, and the brother that Lewis talked to says with smile, “Where you goin’, city boy?” Lewis shouts back, “We’ll find it!” as another Griner shouts back, “It’s only the biggest fuckin’ river in the state!” 

After blasting their way down a one-lane dirt path, screaming at each other as the Scout is slapped by tree branches and shaken by ruts, Lewis screeches to halt. He implores Ed to listen. Lewis hears the river and jumps out of the truck, leaping up the embankment. Looking back at Ed, who has stayed in the car, Lewis whispers, “Sometimes you gotta lose yourself . . . before you can find anything.” Ed gets out, and they marvel at the shimmering river that is just past the trees. The four men then put their canoes in the water and begin their trip. Bobby worries out loud that the cars won’t be at their end point, but Lewis insists that they will. The Griners watch this scene from atop the embankment then leave without saying a word. 

Out on the river, things begin mildly. They go over some rocky spots with relative ease. Then, the banjo boy appears on a rope bridge above them. Drew tries once again to be friendly toward him, but the boy just stares. It is awkward and foreboding. The first rapids come up after that, and for a moment, we watch Man versus Nature in the Georgia wilderness.

A half-hour into the film, the four men reach their first night of the trip. As they pull onto the shore, Lewis is admonishing Ed once again that the world has gotten too civilized, and Ed retorts that he likes his life. As this conversation ends, Lewis shoots a fish with his bow and arrow. This will be their dinner. They camp in the darkness, Drew plays guitar, Bobby says silly things, and Ed relaxes, but Lewis’ survivalist ideals hang over them like a cloud. Amid the pitch-black darkness, Lewis suddenly stands up and, without a word, appears to go looking for something he has sensed or heard. The other men wonder what is happening, then Lewis shows back up behind them, which frightens them. That ends the night, and everyone heads for sleep.

In the morning, Ed is the first one up. He decides to take to the bow and attempt to hunt. Tiptoeing through the woods, he encounters a deer and gets within mere feet of it, something few hunters experience. He draws back an arrow, but shakes with such severe nerves that he misses. Back in the camp, Ed attempts to tell the others about it, and they half-debate the merit of shooting an animal. Lewis is once again interjecting his tough-guy ideals, and Bobby responds that he doesn’t give a shit. In a quiet word, Lewis tells Ed to take that “chubby bastard” with him today.

The first scenes of day two on the river are peaceful: smooth sailing, fingerpicked guitar music in the background. We follow Ed and Bobby, while Lewis and Drew are nowhere to be seen. But everything changes when Ed and Bobby stop on the shore. Two men, one with a gun, are waiting on them, and one steps out front to say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” We quickly sense that this is bad. 

The second infamous scene in Deliverance lasts about seven minutes. Ed and Bobby  are ordered at gunpoint to comply. Ed is strapped by his neck to a tree, while the toothless, gun-toting man guards him. The other man (played by Clint Eastwood mainstay ) has Bobby to strip down to his tighty-whiteys and taunts him for a bit before putting him on all-fours, yanking his drawers down, and sodomizing him while he is face down in the dirt. The rapist further taunts him during the assault to “squeal like a pig.” After he is finished, leaving Bobby silently traumatized and with his bare butt in the air, the rapist goes to Ed and takes the strap off his neck. Ed, who has just witnessed the rape, falls to his knees with the gun at his neck. The rapist asks what they should do with him, and the toothless one says, “He’s got a real pretty mouth.” Ed’s eyes widen, but what he sees that the two other men don’t is that Lewis has arrived on the shore. He has his bow drawn back and is ready to shoot. The toothless man hands the gun off, tells Ed that he will do some “praying,” and begins to open his trousers, when the arrow pierces the rapist straight through. Ed uses the opportunity to snatch the gun, and the toothless man runs away. Drew comes out of the boat with the paddle, chasing the toothless man away, before tending to his naked friend who lies in the leaves and mud.  The rapist drools and dies slowly, and after showing no mercy, he will get none.

After the rapist is dead, the debate begins about what to do. These are civilized men from the civilized world. Drew believes they should carry the body with them, take it to the police, and explain the situation. Ed is flabbergasted and has no idea what to do. Bobby is silent and stares at the dead body, but does make one move to commit some sort of violence against it, which the other men stop him from. Lewis, by contrast, handles the situation entirely different. Unlike the others, he recognizes that any reporting of the killing and trial by jury will be handled there, where the victim is known by everyone and the killers are outsiders. His idea, instead, is to dispose of the body in the vast wilderness and escape this land without retribution from the dead man’s kin and friends. Drew asks what will happen if the toothless man goes to the police, and Lewis answer is: and tell them what? Drew is the main one who can’t handle it, but Lewis reminds them all of the truth: the dam is about to flood the whole area, including the place where they will hide a corpse. Drew’s challenge is still that he is worried about the law, to which Lewis retorts, “What law!? Do you see any law out here?”

Ultimately, they decide to handle it democratically. First, Bobby votes to bury the body. Lewis has already spoken. It is up to Ed. Drew speaks to him feverishly about the consequences, but Ed sides with Lewis. They carry the rapist’s body upstream into the woods and dispose of it, then head back to the canoes.

In the boats, Drew is clearly distraught. Despite the rapids, he refuses to put his life jacket on, and at points, stops paddling. The three others may have outvoted him and gotten their way, but his inability to accept the outcome will cause them harm. As the four enter the rapids, with rock walls on both sides, they are all nervous, fighting the rapids and fearing discovery by the dead man’s friends. Then, Drew falls out of the canoe on purpose. He leaves Ed without steering, and the canoe jams between two rocks and breaks in half. This causes Lewis’s and Bobby’s boat to capsize, too. Now, all of the men are in the water.

By the time, they come to rest in a calm cove, Lewis’s leg is broken so severely that his torn flesh hangs out of the seam of his pants. Drew is nowhere to be found, and Ed calls out over and over, “Drew! Drew! Drew!” Lewis, who is in agonizing pain, knows that he is dead. Ed swims out to their floating gear but see nothing of his friend. Bobby remains helpless.

By now, just past the halfway mark, Deliverance has become a full-on Man versus Nature story. The strongest man among them is wounded to the point of being no help. They have three men and one boat, and their gear is soaked and useless, in part because there is no land they can reach. They are in a river gorge whose rock wall goes straight up. So, Ed begins to climb the wet rock wall, with no gear and no idea of what he will find at the top.

Halfway through his climb, Ed looks back and comments on what a wonderful view he has from there, but has to continue into the night. Once at the top, he falls asleep. However, he wakes in the morning to realize that a man is standing nearby with a rifle. Ed readies an arrow and aims, but he begins shaking like he did with the deer. He holds on so long that the man sees him, aims, and shoots, which causes Ed to release the arrow. Ed is hit in the side and almost rolls off the cliff, and the man ambles toward him. It is too late to ready another arrow, so Ed pulls out a Bowie knife as the man approaches and aims at him point-blank— but he misfires as he falls. We see that Ed’s arrow went right through the man’s neck.

Exhausted and bewildered, Ed rushes over to see if the man is dead. He is. Ed begins to mutter, No, No, thinking that this was not actually the toothless man who escape the scene of the rape. He pulls back the dead man’s top lip and sees a full set of teeth, then with his thumb pulls down them— they are false teeth. It is him. Now wounded, Ed has a broken bow and no arrows, and a dead body to dispose of. He throws the bow over the Cliff. Bobby, who is still waiting below, sees it come down and hit the water. Back at the top, Ed ties a rope to the body and begins to lower it down carefully. 

With just under a half-hour to go, the situation is getting worse and worse for the men who just wanted to take a weekend canoe trip. One is dead and gone, one has been raped, one is severely injured, and one has been shot. That would be bad enough, but they’re also deep in the woods, stuck in an impassable gorge, and probably being hunted by the vengeful families of a men they’ve killed.

Back down in the water, Ed gets down by using the same rope he is lowering the body with, but falls into the water rather than go down easy. Bobby is there to extract him and praises Ed over and over for killing the man. He also asks if Ed is sure that was the other rapist, the one with the gun, not “just some guy hunting.” Ed grabs the dead man’s hair, turns his face to Bobby, and yells, “You tell me!” Lewis is still lying on a rock ledge, completely unconscious. Bobby remarks that he thought that Lewis had died at one point during the night.

The only thing left to do is keep going. They lie Lewis down in the canoe, sink the dead body, and shove off. Some ways down the river, they find Drew’s corpse wedged among some rocks. Bobby says to no one in particular, “There’s no end to it.” They tie Drew’s body to the side of canoe, floating in the water beside it, and continue. If the rapids weren’t bad enough, Lewis writhes and moans in pain as the bumpy ride goes on and on.

Eventually, the canoe makes it to the end point. Bobby keeps saying, “We made it!” As they pull the boat into the shore where two old car hulls lay, Lewis is weeping like a child. Before they disembark, Ed emphatically tells them, this is the story they must repeat: Lewis’s leg was broken in that last section of rapids, and Drew drowned there, too. It is important that they not say anything to send people looking upriver. Bobby stares dumbfounded, but Lewis is muttering to Ed that he understands. 

After rowing through a bit more water, this time peacefully, they land, and Ed jogs up a logging road into the place we saw at the beginning of the movie. We can feel his exhaustion as he tops the hill and sees both the yellow Scout and the wood-paneled station wagon waiting there. Also there is family and a truckload of their belongings. A boys steps and asks if he’s there for the cars. Yes, he tells the boy, then asks if they have a telephone.

In the next scene, medics are loading Lewis into an ambulance. Ed gets in and rides with him, while Bobby stands with two sheriff’s deputies. As Ed rides off, he looks back at Bobby with an uncertainty about what this weak man will say.  

After Ed receives medical treatment for his gunshot wound, we see him arrive at large white house whose sign reads Colonial Lodge. On entering, he sees Bobby sitting at a long dinner table with several older couples. The proprietor invites Ed in to sit down and eat. As they serve his plate, the tension is so thick that it could be cut with a knife. Then, Ed breaks into tears while the other stare at him slack-mouthed, then they resume with friendly banter.

The next day, the sheriff arrives and is talking to Bobby when Ed sees them. Ed darts outside and sees the broken canoe has been recovered, and that means that they won’t believe his story about the accidents taking place near the end of the trip. In the hallway, he accuses Bobby of cracking under pressure. The men tussle, but both insist that they’ve stayed strong. Then, we see them at the riverside, watching while law enforcement and locals search and dredge the river. The sheriff explains that one of the men standing nearby has a brother who went hunting a few day prior but never came home. They are reasonably sure that Bobby and Ed know something about him.

Afterward, the Bobby and Ed are being carried back to the hospital in a cab, and the driver’s slow monologue reminds them the whole area will be underwater soon. They have to pause while the white, clapboard Church of Christ that marked their landing point is hauled up the road on a flatbed. On arriving at the hospital, the doctor tells them that Lewis may lose his leg. Lewis, who goaded the men into the trip in the first place, who became helpless, and who had to be carried out by the same men whose manhood he didn’t respect.

As Deliverance wraps up, Ed and Bobby enter the hospital room. A deputy is there, and Lewis is sleeping. When he wakes up at his friends’ presence, he says slyly that he doesn’t know what happened— can’t remember a thing. Ed and Bobby go up to where their cars are, but before leaving, the sheriff arrives and makes one more go at questioning them. He senses what they have done, but can’t prove it. Ed gives him hard stares and cold answers, while Bobby winces at what he believes to be mistakes. Ultimately, the sheriff tells them not to ever come there again. He wants the town to “die peaceful.” As they leave, Bobby says goodbye to Ed and tells him, “I probably won’t see you for a while.” 

On his way home, Ed stops and takes one more look at the river, which is already flooding, and also sees a graveyard where men are unearthing coffins to move them. At home, his wife and child are there, but Ed doesn’t seem pleased or content. The movie ends with Ed’s nightmare that the man he killed has floated to the surface of the flooded lake. He gasps, his wife comforts him in the bed, and the credits roll.

The writer Isabel Machado put it well in an article for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture: “The imagery, stereotypes, and symbols produced by the film still inform popular perceptions of the US South, even by those who have never actually watched it.” Yes: even by those who have never actually watched it. I will readily admit that the rape scene is deeply disturbing, especially the first time you see Deliverance. A high school friend used to make cackling references to the scene, saying “Squeal like a pig!” and we would all laugh, not really knowing what he was talking about. Seeing the scene is another matter, and seeing it makes you know that it isn’t funny. In fact, in a case of bitter irony: it is so not-funny that jokes about it have emerged to deal with how not-funny it is. 

Deliverance makes real what is carried to an surreal extreme in horror movies like 1973’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The premise is basic: city folks, suburbanites, or sometimes college kids leave the comforts and certainties of the civilized world and make a foray into or across rural America, and while there, they encounter what is uncivilized. In the South’s wilderness, they are faced with an uncaring natural world and dog-eat-dog lawlessness. In horror movies, this is presented through wild psychopaths, like Leatherface and his family, but in Deliverance, we see it in the form of otherwise ordinary people, albeit gun-toting hillbillies who enjoy their home-field advantage. At the Griner brothers’ garage, this advantage is exhibited in mostly real-world terms. However, in the rape scene, it is taken much farther. In the latter scene, the vacationing mens’ apologies and pleas are useless, and the backwoodsmen use the opportunity to commit anal rape against one and demand oral sex from the other. What makes it more disturbing than the strange atrocities committed by Leatherface’s family is that this could really happen. The four men in their canoes are prepared and equipped to take on the natural wilderness (the woods, the rapids) but they are not – with the exception of Lewis – prepared to take on the people of the wilderness— almost none of whom are helpful, friendly, or accommodating. 

The movie also says something about how we treat these rural Southerners. The Appalachian people are helpless against the power company’s dam, which will flood the area and run them off their own land. It will cause them to move churches and unearth graves, if they don’t want to lose them. They are expected to accept this and move along. More specifically, after killing the rapist, Lewis presumes that local law enforcement, courts, and juries will offer nothing resembling justice or fairness toward outsiders. Having faced down the rapist’s immoral behavior with violence, he believes that everyone here will be equally immoral, that vengeance against him will matter but justice for Bobby will not. That said, the dead man becomes a throwaway: a person (?) with no redeeming qualities from a culture with no redeeming qualities. In civilized society, the dead deserve funerals and proper burials, but not this guy. Drew is the only one who argues in favor of treating both the local justice system and the dead man like they would treat people in their urban/suburban world. The other three vote to toss the dead man aside and evade any recognition that they played a role in his death. 

In the end, we see that, however harsh he may have been, the mechanic Griner gave good advice to the men from civilized society. His words were meant to serve as a warning against taking on the landscape of the rural South: “It’s there alright. But you get in there and can’t get out, you’ll wish you wasn’t.” But he might have been talking about the people, too. It leaves us to wonder about the story and its title: Deliverance. Who was to be delivered, and from what, or from whom? 

Read more Southern Movies posts.

The Fitzgerald Museum’s Literary Contest and Zelda Award

The Fitzgerald Museum’s fifth annual Literary Contest for high school and college students opens its submissions period on September 1, 2022. This year’s theme for the general contest, which accepts submissions from anywhere in the world,  is “Unclassified Masterpieces.” This theme celebrates the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. Also, this is the third year for the Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Young Writers Award, which is open to Alabama high school students. Submissions for this award are not governed by a theme, but should be comprised of a portfolio of writings.

The Fitzgerald Museum’s fifth annual Literary Contest:
Unclassified Masterpieces

F. Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald were daring and revolutionary in their lives and in their art and writing. More than one hundred years after they met in Montgomery, Alabama, the Fitzgeralds’ literary and artistic works from the 1920s and 1930s are still regarded as groundbreaking, and The Fitzgerald Museum is seeking to identify and honor the daring and revolutionary young writers and artists of this generation.

Categories: Grades 9–10, Grades 11–12, Undergraduate

General Guidelines for 2022 – 2023:

The Fitzgerald Museum’s fifth annual Literary Contest is accepting submissions of short fiction, poetry, ten-minute plays, film scripts, and multi-genre works that exhibit the theme “Unclassified Masterpieces,” which is the title of the middle section in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. This theme implies works that defy genre and/or reach beyond expectations. Works with traditional forms and styles will be accepted for judging, yet writers are encouraged to send works that utilize innovative forms and techniques. Literary works may include artwork, illustrations, font variations, and other graphic elements, with the caveat that these elements should enhance the work, not simply decorate the page.

The submissions period is open from September 1 until December 31, 2022. Works will be judged within three separate age categories, not by genre, so please be clear about the age category. Submissions should not exceed ten pages (with font sizes no smaller than 11 point). Each student may only enter once. Awards will be announced by March 15, 2023. Each age/grade category will have a single winner and possibly an honorable mention.

Works should be submitted through the web form on the Fitzgerald Museum’s website. Due to issues of compatibility, works should be submitted as PDF to ensure that they appear as the author intends. Files should be named with the author’s first initial [dot] last name [underscore] title. For example, J.Smith_InnovativeStory.pdf. Questions about the contest or the entry process may be sent to contest coordinator Foster Dickson at fitzgeraldliterarycontest@gmail.com, with “Literary Contest Question” in the subject line.

This year’s judges are Barbara Wiedemann for the undergraduate category and Janelle Green for the high school categories. Barbara Wiedemann, professor emerita of English and former Director of Creative Writing at Auburn University Montgomery, is the author of four chapbooks from Finishing Line Press, most recently Desert Meditations (2018). Her poems have been published in journals such as Southern Women’s Review, California Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Kerf, and Riverwind. She has also received a nomination for a Pushcart Prize. Janelle (Jae) Green is an English Instructor at Auburn University. She is an artist and poet who focuses on/specializes in ekphrastic art and poetry. 

The Literary Contest’s annual themes honor and reflect upon the Fitzgeralds’ literary legacy. The inaugural contest had as its theme “What’s Old is New,” which encouraged students to look to tradition for inspiration. For the second year, the theme “Love + Marriage” celebrated the centennial of the couple’s courtship and marriage. In year three, “The Education of a Personage” centered on themes of growth and maturing aligned with the centennial of Scott’s debut novel This Side of Paradise. Last year’s theme, for year four, harkened back to 1921’s The Beautiful and the Damned with the theme “The Radiant Hour.” While these themes do parallel the Fitzgerald’s literary and personal history, they are intended to guide students to consider and examine the present and the future as Scott and Zelda did in their day.

The third annual Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Young Writers Award
(for high school students in Alabama only)

 Montgomery, Alabama native Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was daring and revolutionary in her life, art, and writing, and The Fitzgerald Museum’s Young Writers Award that bears her name seeks to identify and honor Alabama’s high school students who share her talent and spirit. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in spring 2020. This award, which was first given the following year, celebrates her life and legacy by recognizing the talents and abilities of young Alabama writers.

General Guidelines:

The Fitzgerald Museum’s third annual Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Young Writers Award is accepting submissions of portfolios from young writers who are currently attending high school (grades 9 – 12) in Alabama. Portfolios should contain literary works (stories, poems, plays or film scripts, multi-genre works) totaling 5 to 15 pages with font sizes no smaller than 11 point. Writers are encouraged to include works that are innovative in style, content, form, and/or technique. Literary works may include artwork, illustrations, font variations, and other graphic elements, but these elements should enhance the work, not simply decorate the page.

The submissions period is open from September 1 until December 31, 2022. Each student may only enter once. 

Portfolios will be judged holistically, and only one award will be given each year. The recipient will be announced by March 15, 2023.

Portfolios should be submitted through the web form on the Fitzgerald Museum’s website. Due to issues of compatibility, works should be collected into one PDF named with the author’s first initial [dot] last name [underscore] ZeldaPortfolio (for example, J.Smith_ZeldaPortfolio.pdf). Questions about the award or the entry process may be sent to contest coordinator Foster Dickson at fitzgeraldliterarycontest@gmail.com, with “Zelda Fitzgerald Award Question” in the subject line.

This year’s judge for the award is Jonathon Peterson, also known as JPdaPoet. Peterson is a two-time Alabama Music Awards Spoken Word Artist of the year (2017 and 2019), and the founder of the Just Hear Me movement, which provides a platform for local artists in Birmingham and Montgomery. He also has been featured in Dope 30 Under 30, a book highlighting leaders in the community.

The two previous winners of the Zelda Award are Colby Meeks from Lee High School in Huntsville and Kathleen Doyle from LAMP High School in Montgomery.

Alabamiana: Professor Charles L. Floyd, 1858 – 1924

In August 1980, I began first grade at the school we all simply called Floyd. The school, which was located at the corner of Augusta Avenue and LeBron Road in Montgomery, Alabama, had an elementary that served grades one through six and an adjacent junior high with grades seven through nine. (At that time, kindergarten was being phased in and only had a few students, who were chosen by lottery.) My father had attended Floyd Junior High in the late 1950s, when his family moved into the then-new Normandale neighborhood in south Montgomery. By the mid-1970s, he was a married father of two who had inherited the house after his mother’s death, so my brother and I grew up there. That fall in 1980, my brother was beginning the fifth grade as I entered the first.

Floyd was where every kid in the neighborhood went. Its zone covered our neighborhood down to the Southern Boulevard as well as the eastern portions of Ridgecrest across Norman Bridge Road. About a block north of the school, Glen Grattan Drive was the cut-off line for families whose children would leave Floyd after sixth grade and attend Cloverdale Junior High instead, a fact that made the two schools into rivals in sports. (Cloverdale originally had elementary grades as well, but was only a junior high by the 1980s.)

Though none of us knew it back then, Floyd was named for Professor Charles Lewis Floyd, Montgomery’s first superintendent of schools. He was hired in June 1889 and moved to Montgomery from Atlanta, Georgia. According to information in The Montgomery Advertiser article about his hire, Floyd was born in Monroe County, Georgia, on the west side of Macon, and after his “early education” at Gordon Institute in Barnesville, he went to the University of Georgia on scholarship. His first teaching job came in 1879 in a tiny community called Colluden, then in 1881, he went to Means High School in Atlanta to teach math, Latin, and Greek. Two years later, in 1883, Floyd became the principal of the Crew Street School. It is also noted that Floyd choosing to leave “Atlanta is regarded as a calamity. His record is first class in every particular, and many of the prominent citizens have been his pupils.”

In the final paragraph of that 1889 article, we see that he was married to Rosa Bowie Floyd. She was born in 1863 in South Carolina, the daughter of Colonel John A. Bowie, then a Confederate officer. The couple married in 1885 in Atlanta. At the time of their move to Montgomery, she was also a teacher.

The high praise for Charles L. Floyd continued in Montgomery. His two-year contracts were renewed again and again. An 1896 article about the high quality of Montgomery’s schools called him “one of the best and most progressive superintendents.” In 1901, when he had been in Montgomery for more than ten years, he was called “a most competent official, who personally looks after the community’s welfare in regards to educating its children.”

Not only was Charles L. Floyd praised by the local school board and newspaper, he also receives a mention in another, unlikely source. In the “slave narrative” of a man called Uncle Daniel Taylor, Floyd is discussed as a man of great character. After slavery had ended, Taylor had worked as janitor in Montgomery’s public schools. In telling the story of the day that the Herron Street School burned, he shared that Superintendent Floyd was so concerned that even one student might still be inside that he “hastened back into the burning building” himself. Taylor waited a moment, then: “I could stand it no longer, so I rushed right into the smoke and flames, I found Mr. Floyd and dragged him out to safety. My God! I loved that white man, he was one of the finest men I ever knew.” He ends by saying, “No! Mister John, I have never sought a heroe’s [sic] medal for bravery for risking my life, my one great reward was in saving the life of my true friend Professor Charles L. Floyd.” (Unfortunately, it is hard to tell exactly when this episode occurred, but there was catastrophic fire at the Herron Street School in late 1901.)

In a sad twist, Floyd’s wife Rosa passed away in May 1903 from “uraemic convulsions,” a condition usually caused by kidney failure. She had become a teacher in Montgomery at Girls High School and was an officer in the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. When she died, she was in her thirties. The couple had no children.

Charles Floyd served as superintendent until June 1917, when he retired after twenty-eight years. His successor was William Robert Harrison of Florence, Alabama. After his retirement, Floyd did not continue to live in Montgomery, but went back to the area where he was raised in Georgia. He died in Oglethorpe County, Georgia in 1924.

Soon after he retired, Montgomery dedicated the Charles L. Floyd School in January 1918. Said to be located in north Montgomery, the school was for white children only but may have had a specific or special mission. The published remarks at the dedication, made by school board member Gustave Mertins, called it a “house of hope” and noted the location’s clean and healthy air several times. Also, in a June 1919 list of all public schools’ faculty members published in The Montgomery Advertiser, a teacher’s name is shown for each grade, except for the Charles L. Floyd School, which only lists a principal and one teacher with “mixed grades.” From 1921 through 1927, similar lists show two teachers with two grades each and the principal with three grades. The school disappears from these lists in 1928.

The Floyd that I attended came later and seems to have no connection to the previous school. This one was also named after Charles L. Floyd, and it opened in September 1952. During a time of fervent new construction, its zone took some of the pressure off of two adjacent schools: Cloverdale to its north and Bellingrath to its west.  The school operated as a traditional, zoned elementary and junior high combination, with the Falcons as our mascot, from the early 1950s until the mid-1990s. What had been Floyd Junior High School became a middle school within the city’s magnet program in 1996. Floyd Elementary remained a traditional, zoned school within this change. Twenty years later, as perhaps the final step in the evolution of the school that I attended, Floyd Middle Magnet School moved to the former Houston Hill school campus (near Cramton Bowl), and the elementary school was closed. The dilapidated state of the buildings and a declining school-age population in the area were cited as the reasons for the move and closure.

Read other Alabamiana posts.

A Southern Movie Bonus: The “Porky’s” Trilogy

For us boys growing up in the Generation-X South, there were a handful of movies that made up a fabled watchlist. Among them, the original Walking Tall from 1973, Smokey and the Bandit from 1977, and Porky’s from 1981. All set in the South, Walking Tall was infamous for its mannish violence, Smokey and the Bandit for its flagrant disrespect of law enforcement, and Porky’s for raunchy sexual comedy that any reasonable adult would keep away from children. Older boys claimed to have seen these movies – many probably hadn’t – and younger boys were left to wonder at their seemingly knowledgeable insinuations and innuendos, half-told jokes and half-described scenes, which were always punctuated by bawdy laughter.

There were three Porky’s movies in all, though only the original is a classic. The first movie introduced us to the boys from Angel Beach, a coastal community in Florida that was driving distance from an infamous (fictional) backwater strip club and brothel. A 1983 sequel called Porky’s II: The Next Day attempted to ratchet up the absurdity, adding overzealous evangelicals and the Ku Klux Klan to the already established jokes. It was followed by Porky’s Revenge in 1985, because – of course – Porky couldn’t just waddle back into the swamps and disappear. In each movie, though, the standard elements are there: a mainstay group of irreverent, fun-loving high school boys who spend their time on basketball and lewd pranks. Even though he is the smallest, weakest, most foolish, and least likely have sex, Edward “Pee Wee” Morgan is probably the main character of these films. Other members of the group are the wily Tommy Turner, the good ol’ boy Mickey, the good-natured Billy, the tough guy Tim, the big guy Meat, and their Jewish friend Bryan. Supporting players include the school nympho Wendy Williams, the bitter gym teacher Beulah Balbricker, the sexy gym teacher Miss Honeywell, the squeamish principal Mr. Carter, a couple of half-wit coaches, and of course, the fat strip-club owner Porky.

The first two Porky’s movies were written and directed by Bob Clark. While his name might not be recognizable, we know his work: the classic 1974 horror film Black Christmas and the quirky holiday classic A Christmas Story from 1983. Porky’s and Porky’s II were made between the two. Clark was a native of New Orleans, who lived as a boy in Birmingham, Alabama then in Fort Lauderdale, Florida— the latter was probably the inspiration for Angel Beach.  The third, Porky’s Revenge, was written by a man named Ziggy Steinberg, whose credits mainly consist of television comedies: The Bob Newhart Show, Three’s Company, and The Garry Shandling Show. Its director James Komack was also a TV guy, having produced and directed Welcome Back, Kotter and Chico and the Man.

All three Porky’s movies were set in the mid-1950s during a time of relative innocence, but the nuances of Southern culture are still there. Outside of crass sexual jokes and pranks, there are features of the movies that are actually steeped in Southern culture. Set near the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, racial protest has not yet come to Angel Beach, so a certain kind of Southern racism is seen in the boys’ antics and attitudes. For example, early in the movie, the boys arrange for an encounter with a prostitute named Cherry Forever – an arrangement some of them know to be fake – which will be interrupted by a black man who is paid to act as her husband. When the angry black man bursts in with a machete, the naked and unsuspecting teenagers flee into the yard, as Tommy and Billy laugh with the man at their successful prank. The black man is bought and used, because he will be frightening in this context: outside of town where social mores won’t protect them. Furthermore, they are white boys who plan to take turns with a prostitute, who has a black husband, which really means that social mores won’t protect them!

Then, back at the drive-in that night, Tim’s father arrives and knocks him around publicly, while berating him for running away from a black man. The boys clearly don’t like it, but do nothing. The next day, when Tim comes to school with a busted face, he attempts to redeem his pride by picking a fight with Bryan, who is Jewish, calling him a “kite” (a mispronunciation of the actual slur). Unfortunately for Bryan, the boys once again stand silent when faced with bigotry, so Tim and Bryan fight after school. And unfortunately for Tim, Bryan beats him up, which will incite another beating from his father for losing to a Jew. After the fight, Tommy Turner and Billy walk Bryan to his car, excusing Tim’s racism and saying that’s he’s not such a bad guy. Bryan has little choice but to shrug off this antisemitism and get along with guys aren’t openly bigoted toward him. Later in the film, Tim and Bryan make peace, though Tim never does acknowledge that his behavior or attitudes were wrong.

Another nuance of Southern culture utilized in the film is the relative lawlessness of people in the backwoods. Of course, Porky’s – the strip club and bar where the boys go at Mickey’s suggestion – is raucous and wild. It is down a dirt road and has a gravel parking lot. In the stage show, there are images of farming and livestock that lean toward insinuations of bestiality. Confederate flags hang prominently. Porky himself is an almost morbidly obese, middle-aged man who smokes a cigar and is urged on by throngs of rednecks around him. And when the boys from Angel Beach attempt to navigate this backwoods scene, they are tricked, laughed at, then outnumbered when they try to complain. Finally, the backwoods sheriff shows up – he is played by football great Alex Karras – but he is corrupt, busting up Mickey’s truck then demanding all of their money as fines. The boys are sent away, penniless and shamed, and told pointedly, This here’s a man’s county, so get your candy-asses back to Angel Beach. Every aspect of the encounter tells the viewer that you don’t go into the deep woods and mess around with these people— they’re mean, ruthless, cunning, and without conscience.

Not one to be shamed, Mickey is the one among them that seeks revenge. It was his idea to go there in the first place, and after the incident, none of the others want to go back. Mickey, however, is the redneck – that fact was established early in the movie – and he won’t be disrespected like that. Unfortunately for him, going back down there, walking into Porky’s, and telling the owner that he’ll beat his “fat ass” was not a wise decision. Mickey comes back bloodied. Unlike the other boys, who learn their lesson, Mickey is the hardcore Southerner who would rather get beat over and over than admit that someone got the best of him.

By the second movie, those dark elements take on a different tone. Bryan has become part of the group, not so much an outsider to it. The frank treatment of racism has dimmed. This time, the boys from Angel Beach have to navigate two threats at once – an overzealous preacher and the Ku Klux Klan – while still attempting to “get laid” and play basketball. The first challenge of the two is a white-haired preacher with an overly exaggerated, constantly disapproving, Bible-waving style of social control. He is a trope, of course, one recognizable as especially Southern. His role in the story is to shut down the school play – a production of Shakespeare – because of its immoral content. In this sequel, Beulah “Ballbreaker” is converted from a grouchy PE teacher who tries to prevent people from having sex at school into a full-on evangelical nut and the preacher’s biggest cheerleader. Personally, I thought that was a mistake to alter her in this way – I would say it was a misinterpretation of her, but Bob Clark invented her – since it takes an otherwise funny character and turns her into a type.

The boys’ other challenge, perhaps added to answer for the acceptance of bigotry in the first movie, comes from a group of Ku Klux Klansmen. This is also a trope, one that came about in the post-Civil Rights years when the nation needed some way to cope with widespread realizations of the Klan’s menacing presence. In reality, the Klan of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s was clearly organized, violent, and terrifying. This latter-day portrayal of them, which is not unique to Porky’s II, has them as inept, disorganized buffoons whose robes and hoods allow even silly teenagers to infiltrate their midst and lead them astray. Ultimately, the boys maneuver the unsuspecting Klansmen into a gymnasium full of Seminoles to answer for having beat up one of their Seminole classmates. (This act by the boys is markedly different from their response to antisemitism against Bryan, but it also completely absurd.) Sadly, the scene of their comeuppance isn’t funny but more odd, almost bizarre, with actions that involve kidnapping with threats of torture and mob violence. The fact that it would be the Klansmen on the receiving end doesn’t make it funny. 

The final movie of the three, which Bob Clark was not involved in, has Porky to return. This time, the boys’ beloved basketball coach has been placing bets on sports and is behind with the bookie, who we soon find out is Porky. A side plot in this movie has Billy being caught – by Beulah Balbricker, of course – showing a reel-to-reel porn film in the audio-visual room in the library. Another side plot involves the boys’ trickery in convincing Beulah that her high school sweetheart is returning for a rendezvous. In actuality, they’ve convinced Pee Wee to meet her in a hotel room, but he is thwarted by Tommy Turner who ends up unclothed in the dark with his arch-nemesis. Yet another side plot has Meat unable to pass a science exam, which disallows him from playing basketball, but the boys find a way to entrap the mean-spirited teacher, who is having a kinky sex affair with another teacher. 

Though the tagline of the third movie reads, “The Pig Strikes Back,” he really doesn’t. After his waterside bar was demolished by the Angel Beach boys with a tow truck, he essentially has left them alone. After the collapse, Porky has quietly revamped his operation on a riverboat, which they find out when they come looking for him to wheel-and-deal. In part three, Porky does not “strike back,” but is tricked into betting on the boys’ championship game in an agreement to throw the game if coach’s debts will be forgiven, but he is duped. 

This third film doesn’t add anything new in terms of the trilogy’s Southern-ness. By part three, the two most Southern characters Mickey and Tim are absent. Bryan is basically the brains of the group. In short, the jokes are pretty well played out. The sets are also very 1980s-looking, where the earlier movies looked more authentic to the 1950s. At the end of the third movie, the boys have it all: the state basketball championship and high school diplomas. They have outsmarted and outmaneuvered Porky (twice), an evangelist, and the Klan, all while regularly escaping from both Beulah “Ballbreaker” and the principal Mr. Carter. There is nowhere else to take this cast, but – it pains me to say – someone still tried— 2009’s Pimpin’ Pee Wee purports to be about the Angel Beach boys going to college. I haven’t watched it and don’t intend to.

Finally, what may be the most Southern thing about the whole trilogy is the imagery of Porky Wallace. Yes, Porky has a last name, and it is Wallace— like the segregationist governor George Wallace. Actor Chuck Mitchell could not have forged a better archetype for a revolting, mean, rude, redneck kingpin. This man is everything you don’t want to encounter in the backwoods of the South. His immense size, drawling accent, gruff manner of speaking, half-chewed cigar and cowboy hat, and a slow walk that is a combination of waddle and swagger . .  are all threatening, which makes Porky Wallace intimidating as hell. Porky points when he talks, and he demands that you to repeat anything he doesn’t like the sound of, just to see if you will. He will take your money, convince you to pile into a closet, dump you into swamp water, then come outside to laugh at you. And what’s worse, he has a large group of friends who come out to laugh at you, too. And what’s even worse than that: his brother is the sheriff! These films may be comedies, but Porky is scarier than any crazed backwoods murderer-freak-sicko in any horror movie—because Porky could be real. 

Most people think of Porky’s as a sex comedy, not as movie about the South. Maybe this story could have happened somewhere, but it would have lost something if it had been.