Southern Movies

The Oxford American Southern Movie Issue is in, complete with DVD of film clips, including a stellar bit by William Shatner as an anti-segregationist rabble-rouser in an obscure (to me anyway) 1962 film called The Intruder. Shatner is so creepily detestable in this role that I almost regret that he had the (mis)fortune to catch the world’s imagination as James T. Kirk. The man could act. And not a sign of a pot gut.

There is also a longish article by Tom Carson, “The Ideal Imposter,” about all the Southern misfit roles Hollywood gave Paul Newman before his own sweet bird of youth flew away. Carson is delicious on the synthesis of the dapper Cleveland-born Newman, who is quoted as saying “My thing is Ivy League,” and “Hollywood’s … view of the South as a repository of American pathologies in their most charismatic form.” Carson made me laugh a lot with his gossip and effrontery. He’s good on my particular pet peeve, The Long, Hot Summer:

As the adaptation of Faulkner’s The Hamlet it intermittently affects to be, the movie is an abomination—set in a 1950s Mississippi whose modern amenities turn the book’s hardscrabble class antagonisms into Cinemascope taffy while euphemizing predatory Flem Snopes into chipper Ben Quick (Newman). Quick’s triumphs in snaring the girl and the loot aren’t malignant; they’re rowdily celebratory.

It’s a film in which Newman, Orson Welles, Lee Remick, Tony Franciosa, and (of all people) Angela Lansbury “are working up bumptious pot-likker dialects to beat the band,” but Georgia-born Joanne Woodward “just has to talk.”

But what I came here to tell you is that I was tickled pink to find that one among the “Thirteen More Essential Southern Documentaries” picked by the OA editors is Shakespeare Behind Bars that I talked about here a while back. Mike Powell’s review begins like this:

In a medium-security Kentucky prison with decades to piddle, wile, suffer, and eventually atone, acting seems like a better way to spend time than moving drugs or getting shivved. But the prisoners in Shakespeare Behind Bars attend rehearsals like a church congregation—for them, the theater becomes a place to sweat out their troubles rather than project for the benefit of an audience. Because they have nothing. A library card and time with the Natuilus machine out back. Maybe parole but probably not. For someone whose therapy is to have their existence wrung-out and zeroed, the submersion that comes with Method Acting is less an artistic choice and more a canny attempt at self-preservation.

Other documentaries of Kentucky content that made the list are Country Boys, Harlan County, U.S.A, and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia. I’ve seen Country Boys but couldn’t get engaged in it. The other two will go on my Netflix list, especially the one about Adams, whose photography stirs some controversy, even here on these quiet pages.

The newstand price of this issue (#56) of the Oxford American is a steepish $9.95. Worth it.