The Colors of Contagion in JEZEBEL (1938)

Bette Davis won her second Academy Award for Best Actress for the Civil War melodrama, Jezebel (1938), which took advantage of the cultural mania over Gone with the Wind by using many of the same plot elements and beating the 1939 blockbuster to theaters. Like Gone with the Wind, Jezebel tells the story of a spoiled, headstrong Southern belle who pines for the love of a married man, and the two pictures also share problematic visions of the antebellum South and slavery that perpetuate fantasies about happy plantations with graceful ladies in hoop skirts. The films even share the same composer, the great Max Steiner. Gone with the Wind, however, boasts one very important advantage over Jezebel because it had the time and budget to be a lavish Technicolor spectacle, while Jezebel unfolds in cheaper, faster black and white. The lack of color onscreen is particularly ironic for Jezebel as it's very much a story about color, specifically the sexually charged red of the scandalous dress Davis' heroine wears but also the deadly yellow of the fever outbreak that dominates the film's second half. In both cases, Jezebel connects color with contagion, something that spreads and infects the simple black and white world around it and thus should be avoided at all costs.

Davis plays Julie Marsden, a wealthy and temperamental young woman living in New Orleans before the start of the Civil War. Julie loves her prim suitor, Preston (Henry Fonda), but she also loves getting her own way, and she retaliates when Pres chooses business over pleasure by making a spectacle of herself at the Olympus Ball, which causes Pres to break off their engagement. One year later, Pres returns with his Northern bride, Amy (Margaret Lindsay), and Julie is once again torn between her love for Pres and her desire to stir up trouble for the sake of revenge. Julie is finally forced to reckon with her transgressions when Pres becomes one of the thousands suffering from yellow fever and in danger of being quarantined to a desolate leper colony.

The first, and most memorable, contagious color is red, the shade of the inappropriate dress Julie wears to the Olympus Ball, where all unmarried young ladies are expected to wear white. In the movie we can't actually see a red dress, only a dark one, but the characters discuss its vulgarity and shocking color at length. The dressmaker tells Julie and her Aunt Belle (Fay Bainter) that the gown was made for a local woman of ill repute, but this information only strengthens Julie's perverse desire to wear it to a ball intended to celebrate the virginal purity of young ladies of her station. Julie's plan to punish Pres backfires when he grimly insists on parading her around the ball, where everyone recoils from her in horror. The camera looks down from above to show us Pres and Julie dancing while girls in white dresses fly away from them, fearful of being associated with such disregard for convention and the sexual knowledge that the red dress strongly suggests. In this scene, it is Julie herself who is contagious, contaminating the reputation of everyone close to her. She has very literally made herself a scarlet woman, although she is thoughtless and perhaps naive enough not to realize the implications of her appearance. Pres, who understands the extent of her transgression, dares anyone to insult her because he still feels obligated by their social code to duel to the death in her defense, but after the ball he breaks with her and leaves town. Julie is so struck by his rejection and her own humiliation that she becomes something of a hermit for the next year, waiting at home with her white dress ready for the day Pres returns, but Julie doesn't realize how permanently she has contaminated their relationship. 

In the second half of the story, yellow replaces red as the contagious color, this time a color of fever and death. New Orleans and its surrounding areas succumb to a yellow fever outbreak, which people in the 19th century believed to be spread from person to person (as opposed to being spread by infected mosquitos). The film shows the audience that Pres is, indeed, bitten by an infected mosquito in a small but crucial moment at Julie's plantation outside the city, but the other characters only know that yellow fever is highly contagious and terrifying. Their fear is compounded by the city's decree that every known sufferer be exiled to an island normally used as a leper colony, where the chance of survival is almost nonexistent. Julie rushes to New Orleans to tend Pres, even though she might be shot for sneaking across the quarantine lines, but her desire to shake off her moral contamination is stronger than her fear of viral contagion. Julie argues with Amy for the right to accompany Pres to the fatal island; although Amy is Pres' wife, Julie needs the redemption her sacrifice can offer. She begs Amy, "Help me make myself clean again as you are clean. Let me prove myself worthy of the love I bear him." Ironically, one form of contagion counteracts the other; her willingness to embrace death by yellow fever serves to atone for Julie's moral contamination as embodied by the red dress. Julie wins the argument and is last seen in a wagon rolling away toward exile, suffering, and almost certain doom, very like Sidney Carton at the end of A Tale of Two Cities. In many ways it's a conventional ending for a woman who crosses the moral and sexual boundaries of her culture, whether she exists in the 19th century or under the tight control of the Hays Code. Julie, however, makes a triumph of her martyrdom because she believes that dying with Pres is better than living without him, and her sacrifice means that she will be remembered for her heroic final act rather than her many sins. 

While neither color actually appears on the screen, red and yellow dominate the imagination of the viewer as Jezebel unfolds, and both signal danger and contagion to the inhabitants of the film's world. Director William Wyler and cinematographer Ernest Haller skillfully evoke the effects of the red dress and yellow fever, but it would have been fascinating to see how those two fatal hues could have been used in a color production. One need only think of the iconic use of red in Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) or the way that color enhances every shot in Gone with the Wind. For more of Bette in black and white, watch Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940), and Now, Voyager (1942). If you're interested in seeing period melodramas in lavish color, check out Blanche Fury (1948) or Raintree County (1955). According to an interview with Robert Osborne, Bette Davis herself preferred black and white to Technicolor, but you can see her in color in movies like The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Virgin Queen (1955), and The Whales of August (1987).

 

* If you like my posts here, you can read more in my Silver Screen Standards column for Classic Movie Hub!

I Feel It in My Bones: My Favorite Star Trek Character

With Star Trek Beyond out in theaters just in time for the 50th anniversary of the original show, I find myself thinking back about my lifetime of Trek experiences. I first saw the show as a little girl, when it was on in re-runs during the 1970s. I have been a fan ever since, seeing every movie and every new television series (although Enterprise never quite captured my attention like everything else). There's a lot to love about Treks old and new, from the progressive vision of humanity's future to the deep love of literature that balances its more obvious focus on science and engineering. Every fan, of course, has his or her favorite episode, movie, and character, and for me that character has always been the irascible Dr. Leonard McCoy, particularly as played by original series star, DeForest Kelley.

I've had some trouble adjusting to the new McCoy, played by Karl Urban, but mainly because my devotion to the original ran so deep. Urban finally won me over with his performance in Star Trek Beyond, thanks largely to his wonderful banter with Zachary Quinto's pitch-perfect Spock. Still, Kelley will always be the "real" McCoy as far as I'm concerned. His depiction of a future Southerner struck home for me as a little girl growing up in the Deep South; he was one of the only truly positive representations of Southern people I had seen. Usually Southerners were hicks on television; The Dukes of Hazzard was the worst offender, but even The Andy Griffith Show had a folksy, aw-shucks sensibility that galled me. I was a voracious reader, a bookish kid who loathed sports, but I was also defined by a distinctive drawl and a childhood spent on a farm. I never saw anybody like me on TV.

Something about Bones, though, spoke to me. He was cranky but humane, the voice of the heart to balance Spock's voice of the head. He didn't relish adventure and being transported across space, but you could rely on him in a pinch. He never gave up his drawl or his Southern manner, but he worked on an integrated starship where everyone was judged by his or her individual merits. He knew Shakespeare just as well as Kirk and Spock. He was instantly familiar but so different from any Southern TV character I had seen before. Most of all, his Southern identity felt authentic, and that's because it was. DeForest Kelley was born in Georgia, where he lived until he left for California to become an actor. His accent wasn't forced or feigned; it sounded like the people I grew up with and knew. I've talked about Southern identity in classic films and television before; it's rare to see an actual Southerner play a positively depicted Southern character. It means a lot to young people in particular to see someone like them get to be smart, forward-thinking, and part of the in-crowd of heroes and pioneers.

Bones was a doctor, damn it, as he often liked to say, but to me he's still the heart of Trek. I'm pleased to see the character continue in the new series, even if I'll always hold a special place in my heart for Kelley's original version. Do you have a favorite Star Trek actor or character? I'd love to hear about it in the comments section!

Southern Voices on the Silver Screen

Hollywood has always had a complicated relationship with the American South and its inhabitants. In so much of the classic movie era, the South seems to exist only in the context of the Civil War; almost nobody appears as a resident of the region as it actually existed in the 1930s and 40s. Sure, the occasional hick or drawling belle shows up as an easy joke, but if you see Southerners represented in old movies you are usually watching a period piece with hoop skirts and cotton fields. Even then, the actors playing the Southerners weren't typically from there; Gone with the Wind was populated by Brits, not the sons and daughters of Dixie, and even Georgians who love the movie cringe at its tone-deaf, Tinseltown interpretations of a Southern accent (or Leslie Howard's refusal to attempt one at all).

Hollywood, however, became home to many native Southerners, people who might have given Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard some much needed dialect coaching on the subtleties and diversity of Southern speech. We don't always recognize them as Southerners because success in show business often required the erasure of regional distinctions like accents. Actors from many parts of the world acquired voices to match the industry's homogenized image of Anglo-American whiteness just as they acquired new names and even new biographies. Southern accents were particularly undesirable for leads, since they connoted ignorance and backwardness instead of cosmopolitan sophistication or even all-American integrity. Character actors and comedians could get away with their native dialects to a greater extent, but sometimes they ended up feeding the negative attitudes audiences had toward Southern speech. It was a circular trap well known to actors from any kind of ethnic or racial minority.

Tallulah Bankhead

I know something about how all of this works from personal experience. I grew up in rural South Georgia, where nobody ever told me that I had a strong Southern accent because everyone else sounded exactly the same. When I left the South for the first time, I was in high school, and I was stunned to be confronted by people who laughed at the way I talked, called me "Scarlett," and asked me if people where I came from wore shoes. The same thing happened, though to a lesser degree, when I went to college. In urban Atlanta, nobody sounded like me; peers and professors heard my accent and assumed that I must not be very bright. My History of the English Language class voted my speech "Most Pronounced Dialect" - I was actually asked to go to the professor's office and record it for the class to study. Embarrassed and determined to fit in, I quickly learned to change the way I talked, much to my mother's dismay, but I wanted people to hear what I had to say and not just the way that I said it. Today, you can still tell I'm from the South, but the voice of my childhood exists only on old cassette tapes. I have my own complicated relationship with my identity as a Southerner and the speech that comes with it.

Miriam Hopkins

That experience makes me listen carefully to Southern actors - and actors pretending to be Southern - in classic movies. Modern actors from the South do not feel pressure to change their natural speech except for specific roles (think of Reese Witherspoon or Channing Tatum), but the old studio system dictated actors' public personae to a far greater degree. This month I have been watching movies starring Savannah native Miriam Hopkins and trying to figure out how Southern she sounds. Sometimes I can hear it, especially if she's in a comedy, but in the dramas it seems fainter and less distinct. She sounds more like the other leading ladies of her era than someone who spent her childhood in Bainbridge, GA, where my uncle once pastored a church. In Tallulah Bankhead's dripping voice, however, I can always hear the tones of a moneyed Alabama upbringing, in spite of all the tobacco, booze, and globe-trotting for which the Huntsville born actress was known. I actually laugh out loud when her character claims to be from Chicago in Lifeboat (1944). Not with that accent she isn't! Like Dietrich and Garbo, Bankhead makes the otherness of her speech part of her allure, but she's an unusual example of the Southern type, and she never had a lot of success in Hollywood. Bankhead's costar in Lifeboat, Mary Anderson, was also from Alabama, but you'd never know it listening to her in that film.

Una Merkel

The character actors are more interesting to listen to because their Southern voices tend to be more noticeable. Charles Coburn, also from Savannah, makes good use of his rich, refined Southern voice, and I absolutely love to listen to Una Merkel's snarky drawl. A Kentucky native, Merkel never became a leading lady, but she did make a Southern voice sound funny and street smart, and I wish I had known about her when I was young and painfully self-conscious about the way I talked. When she died in 1986, the Los Angeles Times obituary described Merkel's accent as "grits-thick," which doesn't sound like a compliment but I guess evokes some essential Southern quality in regions where people don't actually eat grits. I'm still partial to Star Trek star DeForest Kelley, whose film career started in the 1940s, because he sounds like a real Georgian. Of course, he was one, just like his most famous character, Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy. When I was a kid, hearing him on Star Trek filled me with joy. His was the first smart, authentic Southern voice that I remember from the popular culture of my youth.

The fake Southern accents in classic movies usually sound awful; they grate on my ear the way Dick Van Dyke's bad attempt at Cockney irks actual Cockneys. For one thing they tend to obliterate all regional variation, and in reality there are as many distinct Southern accents as there are types of BBQ sauce (seriously, we have a lot of types of BBQ sauce, but the only true one ordained by God is mustard-based, and I will fight you to the death in defense of it). Even in 1944 Hollywood knew it wasn't doing right by Southern voices, as this article in The Evening Independent makes clear. The whole thing has the air of a joke, but of assumed Southern accents Tallulah Bankhead is quoted as saying, "I've never heard one on either stage or screen that did justice to southerners." Bette Davis and Henry Fonda try it in Jezebel, Gary Cooper attempts it in Sergeant York, and Leigh does her honey belle thing in both Gone with the Wind and, later, A Streetcar Named Desire, but they all achieve about as much authenticity as a Bugs Bunny cartoon (like this one, which is all kinds of problematic, and I'm warning you now not to read the comment thread.)

Today things are different in the movie industry. Stars like Andy Griffith and Elvis helped to make genuine Southern voices more familiar to viewers, and the modern South shows up a lot more often in films and television shows. Still, our larger cultural sense of the South and its voices remains complicated. It's true that the South can be its own worst enemy in terms of the rest of the country's opinion of it (I'm looking at you, North Carolina and Alabama; you've both been busy lately). However, there are plenty of progressive Southern voices trying to be heard, with or without a "grits-thick" drawl. I have to wonder, when I'm listening for Southern speech in classic films, how those voices are reflecting, obscuring, and shaping a culture's identity. Maybe you will, too, the next time you sit down to Show Boat or Tobacco Road.

If you're really curious, you can hear my voice on this episode of BBC Radio's Last Word, where I'm talking about Jane Henson. My segment starts around 22.08 minutes into the broadcast.

Harper Lee Talk at the Smyrna Public Library

I had the great pleasure of being the guest speaker at a celebration of Harper Lee held at the Smyrna Public Library on Monday, July 13, 2015, and it was just about the nicest event a person could possibly imagine. We had a wonderful crowd of fifty people - four of whom actually bought copies of Beyond Casablanca! - and a fabulous spread of Southern treats made by the library staff. My talk was called "Maycomb, Past and Present: Reading Harper Lee in 2015." In it I discussed the ways in which To Kill a Mockingbird addresses tough issues that are still very much with us today, including racial prejudice, a biased legal system, class divisions, and mental illness. I had a lively audience with lots of good questions and comments, so I was glad that I had planned the talk as a conversation rather than a prepared lecture. Of course, we talked some about the 1962 film, Gregory Peck's performance as Atticus Finch, and how we think a film adaptation of Go Set a Watchman might approach the major characters in the new story. We also speculated about Go Set A Watchman and how it might change readers' feelings about the original novel, although most of the people in attendance were eager to read the new book for themselves. I'm sure the next few weeks will see a flood of reviews and commentaries as people digest the new novel's content.

Huge thanks to my friend, Mary Wallace Moore, for inviting me to speak and spend some time with her excellent staff and delightful library patrons. If you happen to be in the neighborhood of Smyrna, GA, do check out the lovely library facility and the nearby shopping village, especially The Corner Taqueria, where I had a very tasty lunch. You can read more about the Harper Lee event in this article from the Marietta Daily Journal.

Classic Films in Focus: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962)

To Kill a Mockingbird is iconic as both a literary and a cinematic work, to such an extent that it's hard to say which version enjoys greater acclaim today. The 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee's enduring story remains widely popular with viewers more than fifty years after its release, and for its star, Gregory Peck, the role of Atticus Finch proved a defining moment. Although Horton Foote's screenplay makes many changes to the original material, the essence of the story remains, and Peck's Oscar-winning performance is enhanced by the skillful direction of Robert Mulligan and the support of a very convincing cast, which includes Brock Peters and a very young Robert Duvall.

The story follows young Scout Finch (Mary Badham) and her brother, Jem (Phillip Alford), through the more eventful moments of their childhoods in the small Alabama town of Maycomb. Scout, Jem, and their friend, Dill (John Megna), spend their free time wondering about their mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall), but their lives are changed when their father, Atticus (Gregory Peck), is assigned to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman. Their friends and neighbors reveal the ugliness of racial prejudice as Atticus is criticized for doing his best to defend Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) in court, even though his guilt is far from certain.

Although Scout's first person narration makes her the obvious protagonist of Harper Lee's novel, the film shifts the focus to Atticus, and in some scenes Scout is not even present. The change puts the heavier acting burden on Peck but also lets him develop the character more fully. More than anything else, the film version of the story becomes a paean to the upright patriarch and champion of decency, which might help to explain why a movie about racism, rape, an egregious miscarriage of justice, an attempted lynching, and attempted murder leaves most viewers feeling uplifted instead of depressed. Atticus does not even enjoy the success of Henry Fonda's juror in 12 Angry Men (1957), but he inspires both his children and the audience to feel that the good fight is worthwhile, even when one is bound to lose it. Peck embodies these qualities perfectly, and it's fascinating to compare his idealized Atticus with the more complicated Southern lawyer family man he plays in the same year's Cape Fear. The movie also creates more conflict between Atticus and Bob Ewell (James Anderson), the man who accuses Tom Robinson of raping his daughter, partly to play up the contrast between these two fathers. Every ounce of integrity in Atticus has its equal opposite measure in Ewell's despicable, hateful character, and James Anderson, who worked mostly in television and Westerns, gives the single most memorable performance of his career.

Despite playing second fiddle to Peck, the children in the film are excellent representations of the novel's trio of youngsters, with Mary Badham especially winning as the tomboyish Scout. Her performance earned her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, a category that highlights Scout's diminished importance in the film. Both Badham and Phillip Alford were Alabama natives making their first screen appearances; their Southern accents are natural, not coached, which helps the picture tremendously, and they behave like real, rough and tumble children rather than Hollywood imitations. John Megna, a New Yorker, was the professional of the group, but he catches the hyperbolic, eager nature of Dill, who makes up wild tales to impress his friends and cover for his lack of a father. The children's scenes with African-American characters advance the story's underlying message about racial equality and the changing attitudes of a new generation. We see them at home with Calpurnia (Estelle Evans), the only maternal figure Scout has ever known, and at the trial with the kindly Reverend Sykes (Bill Walker), with whom they sit in the balcony designated for the court's black spectators. Jem's brief scene with Tom Robinson's son, in which they wave tentatively at one another, eloquently expresses the way in which white and black children in the South were so close, and yet so far, from each other at every moment of their lives.

To Kill a Mockingbird won three Oscars and earned eight additional nominations, a very good performance in a year that included Lawrence of Arabia and The Miracle Worker as significant competitors. Robert Mulligan also directed Gregory Peck in The Stalking Moon (1968). For more of Peck, see Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Roman Holiday (1953), and Cape Fear (1962). Although neither Brock Peters nor Robert Duvall appears much in the film, each contributes to it powerfully; see Peters in Carmen Jones (1954), Porgy and Bess (1959), and then Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) to see how his career evolved over time, and don't miss Robert Duvall's performances in The Godfather (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Tender Mercies (1983).

History, Hollywood, and a Famous Train: THE GENERAL and THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE

In The General (1926), Buster Keaton plays a Confederate train engineer who doggedly pursues his beloved locomotive when Yankees make off with it. Thirty years later, The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) tells basically the same story, this time with Jeffrey Hunter as the Southern engineer and Fess Parker as the Yankee spy who steals the train. Both the silent comedy and the Disney live action picture take their inspiration from a real event during the Civil War, when a group of Union spies stole a locomotive named The General in Kennesaw, Georgia, and drove it north, sabotaging rail lines and telegraph wires behind them. While both of the movies naturally take liberties with the historical record, classic movie fans can get the true story that inspired the films by visiting The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw, where the famous train from the 1862 incident is the star attraction.

The museum, which is an affiliate of the Smithsonian, sits just off the railroad tracks in a quiet section of Kennesaw, not far from Interstate 75 but seemingly worlds away from the bustle of the metro Atlanta area. Trains roaring down the line are the most exciting spectacle outside the museum, where the enticing aroma of freshly cooked burgers wafts across the tracks from the nearby Burgerfi location. Around the grounds, visitors will find a handful of historical markers noting the starting point of The Great Locomotive Chase and Kennesaw's former identity as the town of Big Shanty. The General has its own marker, but inside the museum guests can see the real deal, a huge and meticulously restored locomotive that toured the country under its own power during Civil War anniversary years until it came to stay in Kennesaw.

While the engine is undoubtedly the crown jewel of the museum, other exhibits give visitors an in-depth look at the role played by railroads during the Civil War and the aftermath of Reconstruction. The Glover Machine Works section shows how industrial locomotives were assembled, while other displays reveal the Union's strategy for crippling the South by destroying the critical rail infrastructure. It's a must-see facility for train nuts of any age, but for cinephiles the engine itself and the display cases around it are the big draw.

The museum is well aware of the movie history associated with The General. Near the locomotive, cases hold posters and other items from the 1926 and 1956 movies, including the coat worn by Fess Parker in The Great Locomotive Chase. Segments of the Disney film dominate the museum's movie about the events, with local footage spliced in to tell a shorter and more historically accurate version of the adventure. Both classic movies are for sale on DVD in the small gift shop, where a television runs one or the other throughout the day. Sadly, you won't find much other merchandise related to the films, but you will find generic train items and Civil War themed gifts of all sorts.

Getting a sense of the real story gives film fans a chance to assess the two movies and their different takes on the events. Keaton's picture makes the Confederate character a true hero, battling some rather shady Yankee saboteurs who not only steal his train but also kidnap his girl. The Disney production casts the Union in a more positive light, with Fess Parker as a doomed war hero (the real James J. Andrews was captured and ultimately hanged by the South). Jeffrey Hunter, best remembered today for his role in The Searchers (1956), plays William A. Fuller, the Southern engineer determined to recover his stolen train. It's interesting to note that Hunter appeared in both the Western and the Civil War adventure in the same year. Other actors of note in the Disney film include Harry Carey, Jr., Slim Pickens, and Kenneth Tobey. As entertaining as both movies are - The General in particular is a cinematic masterpiece of the first order - the truth turns out to be just as fascinating, with a story full of courage, action, and daring risks on both sides. Fuller and Andrews both strike us as heroic characters, despite the great divide between North and South, and it's easy to see why Hollywood would find their stories so compelling.

If you happen to be traveling along I-75 at some point in the future, stop in at The Southern Museum in Kennesaw and see The General for yourself. It is definitely worth a visit for history buffs, train lovers, and classic movie fans.

Classic Movie Tourist: The Margaret Mitchell House

The Atlanta area includes several places where devotees can get their Gone with the Wind fix: the Road to Tara Museum is in Jonesboro, and Marietta is home to the Gone with the Wind Museum. In the heart of the city, however, you'll find the Margaret Mitchell House, where the author lived for a number of years and where she wrote much of the novel after an auto accident left her housebound. The restored house is part of the Atlanta History Center, and for $13 ($10 for seniors and students), visitors can enjoy a guided tour of the apartment where Mitchell lived as well as several exhibits about her life, the novel, and the blockbuster film that premiered in Atlanta in 1939.

For most people, the book and the movie are inextricably entwined. It's fair to say that more people have seen the 1939 picture than have actually read Mitchell's lengthy saga. When Scarlett O'Hara appears in the cultural consciousness, she is inevitably played by Vivien Leigh, and Clark Gable fully occupies the role of the roguish Rhett Butler. The other major actors in the film have also become part of the GWTW legacy, including Olivia de Havilland, Hattie McDaniel, Leslie Howard, and even Butterfly McQueen. The exhibits at the Margaret Mitchell House reflect this aspect of the story's history; many of the displays focus on the film adaptation, which makes the museum a great destination for fans of the stars involved.

"The Making of a Film Legend" section features video about the picture's production history and a large portrait of Scarlett O'Hara that was seen in the movie. Another highlight of the exhibit is the actual door to Tara used in the film; visitors can stand in front of it and imagine themselves waving from the plantation mansion's steps. In the "Stars Fall on Atlanta" exhibit, there are photographs and keepsakes from the movie premiere, which Atlanta society turned into a huge series of parties with celebrity guests.

Of course, classic movie fans will want to browse the gift shop, where GWTW items of all sorts can be found. The shop also offers prints of production stills and promo photos depicting Gable and Leigh as well as posters for the film release. Hattie McDaniel magnets, Tara Christmas ornaments, and books about a variety of GWTW related subjects are also available. I was pleased to find Kendra Bean's new book, Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait, prominently displayed on the front table.

If you're headed to Atlanta any time in the near future, the Margaret Mitchell House is definitely worth a visit. It's located at 979 Crescent Avenue NE in Atlanta, not far from many of the city's other major tourist attractions. The museum is open 10 AM to 5:30 PM Monday through Saturday and noon to 5:30 PM on Sunday. House tours are included in admission and are offered regularly throughout the day.

Classic Films in Focus: THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915)

D.W. Griffith's silent Civil War epic is one of those films that every serious student of film probably feels obligated to sit through at some point, but for the modern viewer The Birth of a Nation (1915) is a very hard pill to swallow. Lauded by film critics who praise its technique while deploring its politics, Birth is regarded as a landmark in cinema history, and it's true that the movie was a huge success in its own day and offers a number of visually striking sequences that have become part of film's larger vocabulary. It also more or less single handedly revived the KKK, and it's hard to watch the movie with this knowledge and not wonder how much blood was spilled thanks to the pernicious ideals paraded before viewers' eyes.

Based on Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, The Clansman, The Birth of a Nation follows the fortunes of two families during and after the Civil War. The Stonemans are the Northern family; their patriarch (Ralph Lewis) becomes a powerful advocate for abolition, partly because of his dangerous relationships with biracial opportunists. The Camerons hail from the South, and the two families are entwined by the love affairs and shared sufferings of their children, including the troubled courtship of Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) and Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish). After the war ends, racial conflict leads to violence and upheaval, leading to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan to help whites reassert their power over the former slave population.

I'm not particularly interested in acting as an apologist for Griffith or Dixon for this maddeningly racist fairy tale of white paradise lost and regained. Many other film critics with much greater credentials, including Roger Ebert, can list the virtues of Griffith's story-telling and his use of cross-cutting, set pieces, and other important machinery of the medium. Yes, the action sequences are well-made and exciting, although at a good three hours the movie is long by anybody's standards, and some of the re-used shots in particular might have been edited to pick up the pace. Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh are lovely and effective, and the other younger characters are also interesting, but the elder Stoneman and the antagonists often devolve into mere caricatures.

Beyond these considerations, however, lies the real problem. Griffith presents a story in which the KKK are the heroes, riding to the rescue of terrified whites as savage, subhuman blacks run riot. If you aren't a member of a white supremacy group, it's horrifically uncomfortable to be asked to cheer, "Here comes the Klan!" when the riders turn up, their white sheets billowing out behind them. One might laugh nervously at the ridiculous situation, or turn the film off in disgust, or watch on with a sick sinking feeling in the pit of one's stomach. At that point, the technical merits of the movie disappear from the equation. The message overrides them.

Griffith might not have meant for it to happen, but it remains important that The Birth of a Nation brought the KKK back into the South with a vengeance. It had died out towards the end of the 19th century, and perhaps it would have stayed dead if not for this one picture. That's a terrible example of the impact a film can have on history, given that the rebirth of the KKK certainly led to the deaths of many African-Americans in the South in the first half of the 20th century. According to this PBS article, "In Mississippi alone, 500 blacks were lynched from the 1800s to 1955." Across the South, two to three African-Americans were lynched every week, not in fiction or on movie screens, but in real life, by real men who saw themselves as the saviors of their race. Beyond its offensive stereotypes and blackface antics, Birth has blood on its reels, and no amount of technical innovation can make up for that.

I can't really recommend that you watch The Birth of a Nation unless you are just very committed to checking that box in your film education. You can see a shorter, less repulsive example of Griffith's style in Broken Blossoms (1919), which also stars the luminous Lillian Gish. If you really want to explore the evil side of cinema, you might also subject yourself to Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935). For a silent Civil War film that avoids these thorny issues while still romanticizing the South, try Buster Keaton's The General (1927).