Long Time Leaving (34 page)

Good old
Jezebel,
starring Bette Davis and Henry Fonda—crackerjack antebellum stuff. I've always thought of George Brent as a stiff, but he's got something going here as the drinkin’-and-duelin’ Buck Cantrell. When he says, “Seein you in that dress, Miss Julie, kind of gives me the all-overs,” you can see why he and Davis had an affair during the filming (after she dumped the director, William Wyler). You could pair
Jezebel
with the lavishly inferior
Gone with the Wind,
but I'd rather follow it with a reading of a fugitive humor piece by Veronica Geng (who was born in Atlanta—her father was stationed at Fort McPherson). “My goal,” Geng wrote when her piece was finally published in an anthology of authors’
favorite bits of jetsam, “was to write something that would actually be embarrassing to read.” It climaxes in an extraordinary riff on the famous
Jezebel
scene in which the formerly prideful Davis throws herself at the feet of her old flame Fonda, only to learn that he has married a Yankee. I have room here to present only a severely truncated version of the riff in question. When “you and your sophisticated Yankee fiancee” are relaxing after dessert at a restaurant in New York called Dixie's Home Away from Home, writes Geng,

Song of the South.
I saw it and loved it when it first came out, in 1946, when I was going on five years old. I saw it and loved it again the next time around in 1956. It's Disney doing Uncle Remus. Vivid cartoon renderings of the Brer Rabbit stories—bits of which I can still see and hear
in my head—mixed with live action reflecting 1946 white mainstream racial sensitivity. Disney last released it, probably for the last time, in 1986. Although no video version of this artifact is available in this country, Amazon.com has wistfully listed the nonexistent DVD as a magnet for would-be customers. Ninety-three of these have logged in with comments reflecting scant recognition that a largely cheerful evocation of slavery can be offensive. (“What could be more beautiful than a black lady breast-feeding a white child?” writes one decrier of political correctness. “Think that child didn't grow up to love that lady?”) I can see why Disney is wary of this briar patch, but I still had a craving to see
Song of the South
again—and I discovered that you can go on the Web to Songofthesouth.net and find a link that enables you to order it from the United Kingdom for $72. The U.K. video won't play on U.S. machines— but the company, CCNow, gets around whatever legalities are involved by throwing in (from another address) another tape, converted to a form compatible with American VHS, for free. Mine arrived within ten days. The movie dissolves into mush at the end, and the black folks are too consolingly cheery to reflect the period (post-Reconstruction) or any other period; but I'm still going on five, Brer Rabbit is still my hero, and I still love the movie.

Interesting to note that James Baskett, who plays Uncle Remus in
Song of the South,
also does the voice of Brer Rabbit's archfoe, Brer Fox. The voice of Brer Rabbit himself is by Johnny Lee, who played lawyer Algonquin J. Calhoun on the TV version of
Amos 'n Andy.
That of Brer Bear is by Nick Stewart, who as Nick O'Demus played the shiftless errand boy Lightnin’ on that series. Our festival could trace a wider range of African American film work by devoting a couple of days to a Rex Ingram retrospective. Ingram, who was born in Cairo, Illinois—which is where Jim and Huck plan to get Jim into free territory (but they drift past it in the fog)—played Jim opposite Mickey Rooney in the 1939
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
He also appeared as Teetot (the street musician who taught Hank Williams to play the guitar) in
Your Cheatin’ Heart,
as the voice of John Henry in the Oscar-nominated “puppetoon”
John Henry and the Inky-Poo,
as somebody named Uncle Felix in
God's Little Acre,
as a wondrous Southern-accented genie in
The Thief of Bagdad,
as both Adam and De Lawd in
Green Pastures,
as Lucifer Jr. in
Cabin in the Sky,
and, yes, as a Professor Thurlow in
Hurry Sundown.

Speaking of which, I felt I should see whether there was anything at all to that Aussie's account of the production difficulties
Hurry Sundown
encountered, so I consulted Michael Caine's autobiography,
What's It All

About?
I recall his Southern accent in
Hurry Sundown
as Cockney-tinged (Vivien Leigh advised him to prepare by pronouncing “four-door Ford” over and over as “foah-doah Fohd”), but his memoir seems as reliable as his acting has almost always been. He went South assuming that the movie would be good and folks would be folks, but to his dismay he learned different. If Preminger ran into trouble anywhere around Alabama or Georgia, it was during preproduction, because Caine reports that filming began somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The first night, the interracial cast went swimming in the motel pool. Caine was awakened by a loud explosion—someone had tried to blow up the pool. “The Ku Klux Klan had dubbed us ‘the nigger picture’ and tried to make life as awkward as possible for us, with little things like waiting until night then pumping our dressing trailers full of holes…. There was one small town where they actually came in their white hooded gowns and told us to get out. Otto for once listened to what someone else said and we all obliged.” Caine found New Orleans much to his taste, and persuaded Robert Hooks to attend an all-black musical production with him there. Hooks was told to leave. There were other nasty incidents.

P.S
.:

Among recent movies, here's one that would lead off a stimulating festival evening:
Junebug,
written by Angus MacLachlan and directed by Phil Morrison. I think it's the most painfully funny and telling movie about visiting the F.L.O.
^*
back home that I have ever seen. George, who moved five years ago from North Carolina to Chicago, has brought his sophisticated new wife, Madeleine, down to sign up a local outsider artist for her gallery and incidentally to meet his family.

I don't know how I would have acted watching this movie out in public, but on DVD at home it made me jump and flinch and cry out and go get another drink. The dialogue is good, the visuals are striking, there's one great subtle touch after another. Amy Adams
(whose mouth alone will break your heart) as the back-home sister-in-law, Ashley, and Celia” Weston as the mis-loving mother, Peg, are almost unbearably fine. Ashley immediately
loves
the new wife and repeatedly tells her so. Asked where she comes from originally, Madeleine says, well, she was born in Japan.

“No, you weren't!” exclaims Ashley, in wide-eyed delight.

Scott Wilson, who many years ago played the killer Dick Hickock in
In Cold Blood,
is oddly riveting as George's father—absurdly muted but benignly insightful (not that anyone is listening). When Madeleine confides to the father that she finds the formidable Peg awfully “powerful,” the father murmurs, “She's not like that inside. She hides herself. Like most.” As we all know from the business and political news, it's the cover-up that's actionable.

There are things about this movie, however, that put me off. I didn't buy what we see of the outsider artist's work. Faking naive art is a tough assignment, and Ann Wood (according to the credits) has pulled it off, as to the look. Content-wise, though, I am skeptical. For a male Southern visionary, huge malevolent penises are not a likely motif. Or, actually, penises at all. If you ask me, women think that we men dwell more on literal penises (as opposed to missiles, hot rods, and clubs) than we do. Straight men, anyway. A boondocks Mapplethorpe? I'd have to have a little more information.

A boondocks Leonardo, maybe, but never mind that. What bothers me about
Junebug
is the central figure, George. He gets off too easy. Talk about hidden selves—we hardly ever see George doing or saying anything. When we do, it's George singing “Softly and Tenderly” softly and tenderly; George screwing with Madeleine well and truly (though at one point he loses the thread, inferably, under homecoming pressure); and George coming through in a pinch as poor brave Ashley's only sympathetic listener. It's cool that Madeleine doesn't come off predictably snotty and superficial, and, okay, you can see how George takes after his father—but if you're going to lay the homefolks open, you've got to expose, or at least
characterize,
the wandering boy, too. I'm not talking about leaning over backward to level the playing field, but it oughtn't to be such that one side gets to coast.

Every story is suspect, right? That's part of the fun of it. Every family story, especially—from
Hamlet
to “Why I Live at the P.O.” (and check out V. S. Pritchett's “When My Girl Comes Home,”
whose last sentence—a great punch line—bears on this issue). And you just
know
every family story is suspect to the extent that it seems to assume, or to be out to prove, that one member of the family—the one by whom or through whom or in reflection of whom the story is told—is the sane one.

He or she may in fact be. May have gone off somewhere and gained perspective as to what is wrong with everybody where he or she comes from. But he or she has got to show it, and in the process he or she is probably going to show a flash or two (case in point, Hamlet) of his or her own ass as well.

After writing the above, I had several
Junebug
discussions with friends Northern and Southern. One Southern friend demanded to know “what is George LIKE? He has no attributes, no dialogue, except the sanctimonious part about ‘family’ when he's trying to get Madeleine to go with him to be with Ashley for the birthing instead of going to lock in the deal with the painter, which is what they had come there for in the first place. Then he tries to make her feel guilty because she wasn't there and even seems to imply that if Madeleine had been there to talk Ashley into using the whatever it was that she didn't use, the baby might not have died. Meanwhile, Ashley's in-laws—George's real family, who OUGHT to be there— and her slug husband (where was HER family by the way?) have gone home and left her to grieve with George for a while and then the next day totally alone…. What kind of real people—especially real Southern people—act like that?”

A good question. My response is this:

Dubious as it may often be to defend a movie's unrealistic aspects by calling it dreamlike,
Junebug—
which spookily takes its name from what Ashley was going to call the baby—does have a nightmarish semicoherence. For instance, when the brother hits George glancingly, ineffectively, with a jack handle, it reminds me of the ghoulish patriarch's feeble efforts to dispatch the innocent hero with a hammer (as I recall), at the dinner table, in
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
In
Junebug
the brother and the father are ghostly, the mother a witch, and the sister an angel. The father's obsessive search through the house for a missing screwdriver (“What woodworking hobbyist with his own shop would only have one Phillips head screwdriver?” my friend wants to know), and the heavy-handed joke in his muttering, “I have done some screwing in here I guess” are like the brother's feckless attack: unsettling
passivity or at least ludicrous inconclusiveness on the part of the male element, which presumably the male dreamer needs to connect to or bounce off against (and which the artist's phallic imagery brings grotesquely to the fore). Having had an inconsolable mother myself, I don't have much trouble imagining one like George's, whose counterproductive resistance to Madeleine might be exaggerated by George's apprehensive (and semi-creeped-out, but, hey, it's Mom!) perception.

We don't get outside of George's perceptions enough for the situation to make realistic sense. If the whole family had gathered around Ashley's hospital bed for some resolving confrontation, we would have a sense of George's objective place in the family circle-but what the movie evokes is his subjective place. When you go back home and you don't fit in anymore, it's disorienting. You aren't exactly like anything anymore. You can still sing in church, but your folks have become folk art.

When Madeleine pursues her business with the artist instead of going with George to the hospital, where she would just muddle the nuclear psychodrama, she does the sensible thing, from her point of view and also from the viewer's, and when George halfheartedly tries to lay a guilt trip on Madeleine (as his mother would wholeheartedly have done), Madeleine doesn't take it to heart and he doesn't persist. There is, in fact, a kind of naturalism in both his and her behavior in this regard, and also in the irresolution of the ending: Ashley persists in being too good to be true, Madeleine remains secure in her own concerns, and George abruptly departs with her for Chicago. He hasn't worked through his home-folk issues, but he's taking a pragmatic jump away from them. Madeleine, without taking on the burden of being a heroine, has facilitated his adjustment, but she is also (without taking on the burden of being a siren) leading him away from the roots of his personality. Given her baggage-free taste for backwoods products, those roots may be what she saw in him to begin with, but she'll never see what he feels in those roots. And he'll always have a long way to go from home.