One perfect example of this tendency to strike while the iron was still hot and when the afterglow was still lurid - spurred on by the fad of shooting cheap noirs and thrillers on locations, which started in the mid-40s with Louis de Rochemont productions like The House on 92nd Street and Kazan’s Boomerang - was an even lower budget and sleazier black-and-white crime picture seen in October 1955, shot on location in Phenix City, Alabama. Simply to feel that I was part of the world, meaning just another part, wasn’t enough for me, who had to have his destiny writ large and what could offer a better writing pad in the sky than a crummy movie? The problem is, even if some film-industry folk are currently removing by digital means images of the World Trade Center from forthcoming movies, the best movie slime merchants of the 1950s were more bent on exploiting rather than censoring all the tell-tale traces of their audience’s traumas - and, to the best of my recollection, no one ever croaked as a consequence. Was my desire to see my life blown up to the size of a wall really nothing but the urge to have my Southern existence vindicated? Apart from five Elia Kazan features that took some trouble to have its actors speak with proper Southern accents - Panic in the Streets (1950, New Orleans), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, “New Orleans” as conjured up by studio sets), Baby Doll (1956, rural Mississippi), A Face in the Crowd (1957, Memphis and environs), and Wild River (1960, the Tennessee Valley, my own stomping ground) - the overall record of Hollywood depicting the South with some fidelity was generally abysmal. In crude fantasy terms, it entailed starring in an epic that played on Times Square. Metaphysically speaking, the desire to see Alabama on the big screen was really nothing but the desire to feel that I existed in the wider scheme of things. Just the same, I would have appreciated movies that showed something about where I lived - movies that authenticated Alabama by showing the rest of the world what it was like. But even before I figured that out, one reason why I saw so many movies at my grandfather’s theaters was that they took me out of my surroundings. It was years before I conclusively decided that Florence, Alabama and I weren’t much of match. I should have added that the only overt prejudice I ever encountered at that point came from Yankees, for being a white Southerner - or from other white Southerners, for hanging out with blacks. My grandfather ran a small chain of movie theaters in the northwestern corner of the state, and my father worked for him my mother, a model from New York, set about acquiring a Southern accent long before I started divesting myself of my own, pretty much for the same reason. They also often seemed to think that being Jewish in the South was difficult, not understanding that your family’s class could function as a form of protection. At parties in New York, I would be asked from time to time whether I felt ashamed of coming from Alabama, which would tick me off no end. Especially during the Civil Rights Movement, already in full swing by then, having a southern accent, if you were white, made you sound like a racist to some people, regardless of what you said or did. The fact was - and is - that Alabama accents sound stupid to Yankees and since I was both a teenager and trying hard to become a Yankee, they eventually began to sound stupid to me. He has a tawdry streak (there’s an exploitation sequence with a nude prostitute being whipped), and he’s careless (a scene involving a jewelry salesman is a decrepit mess), but in the onrush of the story the viewer is overwhelmed….One would be tempted to echo Thelma Ritter in All About Eve –”Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end” - but some of the suffering has a basis in fact.Īs an Alabama expatriate who fled north the first chance I could get, I didn’t keep my southern accent for long it fell away, in a matter of months, like dead skin. He can dredge up emotion he can make the battle of virtuous force against organized evil seem primordial. Karlson pushes and punches, but he’s good at it. From The Oxford-American, issue #42, Winter 2002.
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