racism

Mississippi Masala (1991)

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The 1991 romantic dramedy Mississippi Masala is, to put it simply, a story about two incredibly hot people falling in love despite increasingly thorny circumstances. What Hollywood studios don’t want you to know is that every movie used to be like that, that life was once great. It turns out that all you need to make a lastingly beloved motion picture is to cast a couple nuclear-hot actors with nuclear-meltdown chemistry and then throw a few puny obstacles in the way of their union. It sounds like a simple formula, looking back, but from what I gather studio executives forgot to write it down, and it’s since been lost to time.

Sarita Choudhury & Denzel Washington star as the incredibly hot people in question: the daughter of motel workers in small-town Mississippi and a self-employed carpet cleaner who also does business at local motels, just outside of her periphery. The Indian immigrant & Black American communities they belong to are remarkably similar when compared in parallel, as the young couple angles for alone time between constant obligations to their aging parents. They’re also rigidly separate communities, to the point where it’s just as much of a transgression for them to date as it would be for a Montague to date a Capulet. Only, their worlds are separated by racial & xenophobic bigotry instead of interfamilial beef, which makes it even easier for the audience to root for their success.

The thorny circumstances that keep our incredibly hot would-be couple apart are given more political thought & attention than most by-the-numbers romances of the period. The story starts twenty years earlier in the Indian immigrant communities of 1970s Uganda, just as those communities are being forcibly ejected from the country by dictator Idi Amin. Roshan Seth plays a Ugandan-patriotic lawyer who’s heartbroken by his home country’s sudden rejection of his presence for not being “a real African,” which of course colors his opinions on mixed-race relationships twenty years later when his daughter dares to date a Mississippi local. Interracial bigotry is obviously not an uncommon source of conflict in romance dramas, but it is rare for a mainstream picture to dwell so thoughtfully on the historical, intersectional context of that conflict, let alone to tell a story with no white characters of consequence.

Director Mina Nair was very clear-headed in her mission to Trojan Horse political text into her traditionalist romance, doing on-the-ground research in Uganda while preparing the project. Nowadays, if you want to make a mainstream picture about geopolitical conflict, you have to sneak it into a $100mil superhero action spectacle; if you want to tell a story about small-town racial bigotry, you have to shroud it behind “elevated horror” metaphor. That is, if you want an audience to actually see your movie, as opposed to scrolling past its thumbnail on Netflix. In the 90s, the formula was much simpler. Side-by-side shots of Choudhury & Washington sharing a steamy phone call in their respective bedrooms was more than enough to justify the political substance of the larger text. I didn’t cry when that couple finally beats the odds, signing their romantic contract with a kiss at a highway gas station. I did, however, cry when Rashaan Seth finally returns to Uganda, fully reckoning with his lost home and his lost solidarity with fellow Africans. No one would finance a movie about the latter without indulging a little of the former, though, and Nair played the system perfectly to tell the story she wanted to tell to as many people as possible.

-Brandon Ledet

Imitation of Life (1959)

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Imitation of Life is a weird document. All That Heaven Allows lives and dies based upon your investment in the happiness of its lead character, and Written on the Wind is a narrative about a wealthy American family in slow decline, rent asunder by internal forces of jealousy, desperation for approval, and poor parental love; both are also shot in glorious Technicolor. Imitation of Life, on the other hand, was marketed in much the same way as Heaven, namely that it was supposedly a romantic picture about a widow finding love again, but that narrative is by far the least interesting thing about the film. What it turns out to be instead is an unexpectedly heartbreaking story about a family that is torn apart by societal forces that even an abundance of motherly love can’t overcome, with the emergence of a new theatre star as the supposed primary plot of the film while actually serving as the background to a much more interesting story. 

Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) loses her daughter, Susie, at Coney Island one day, then finds her in the company of another girl, Sarah Jane. Lora, delighted, meets who she first assumes is Sarah Jane’s nanny, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), but learns that Annie is actually Sarah Jane’s mother. Annie describes her late husband as having been “close to white” and that Sarah Jane takes after him, rather than Annie. Upon discovering that Annie and her daughter are essentially homeless, she takes them into her apartment, as there is an extra room off of the kitchen (a common feature of the time, as Lora is essentially putting them up in the maid’s quarters, and their placement there is not an accident). The supposed A-plot features Lora seeking to make it as a star onstage in the big city; she successfully bluffs her way into the office of talent agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) and gets an invitation to a party that same evening where all the movers and shakers will be. When it turns out that this is a prelude to a casting couch situation, she leaves in an understandable huff, although this is all forgiven when Loomis ends up becoming her agent regardless. He gets her an audition for the latest play by David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy), and when she stands up to him about a scene not working as written, he’s likewise impressed with her moxy and gives her an even bigger part. This is counterposed with her budding romance with Steve Archer, a photographer whom she met that fateful day at the beach; he took a photo of the girls balancing an empty can on a sleeping man’s stomach that day and eventually sold it for use in advertisements for beer. (Incidentally, Steve is played by John Gavin, who you may remember as Marion Crane’s afternoon delight stud-muffin in Psycho; try not to let his character being named Sam Loomis there while his character here is romantic rivals with a different Loomis confuse you.) Steve and Lora grow closer until he finally proposes, but his insistence that she give up her career is a non-starter. 

All throughout, the film focuses on Annie and her relationship with her daughter, who is clearly struggling under the weight of her Black identity. When she and her mother first arrive at the Merediths’, Susie tries to give Sarah Jane her newest and most prized doll, which happens to be Black, causing Sarah Jane to resent the younger girl’s innocent insensitivity. When Annie is telling the story of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem at Christmas time, Sarah Jane asks what color Jesus was. Lora tells her that Jesus is whatever color one imagines him to be, and Sarah Jane protests that this can’t be the case since they are being taught he was a real person. Finally, she says “Jesus was white. Like me.” Things really come to a head, however, when Annie comes to Sarah Jane’s school to bring her lunch and learns that her daughter has been passing as white among her peers and the teachers, and the realization among her classmates when they learn the truth bears out much of Sarah Jane’s fears about exposure and the mistreatment she can expect because of the racism of the society in which she lives. When I started that last sentence, when I got to the end of it, I had to rethink my initial plan to conclude that Sarah Jane is mistreated “because of the color of her skin,” because that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening. Sarah Jane is being treated fairly because of her apparent whiteness, and injustice and unfairness enters into the equation when a white supremacist society inexorably forces its way into these dynamics. Annie laments that her heart breaks because she can’t explain to the daughter that she adores why reality is so unfair, because Sarah Jane was “born to be hurt” by the world because of no fault of her own. 

Things are even worse for Sarah Jane when there’s a time jump from 1947 to 1958, the passage of time represented by continuously superimposed images of Lora’s name on various marquees and the accompanying year. Her newfound wealth has afforded them a manse in the countryside, where Annie and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) continue to live with Lora and Susie (Sandra Dee). It’s unclear what exactly Annie’s role in this new house is, as there are other servants now. A charitable read of the situation is that Lora and Annie have essentially been coparenting both of the girls since Annie and her daughter first came into the Meredith household, with Lora in the breadwinner role and Annie as the housewife, but even if that’s what’s happening here, it ignores all of the power dynamics at play. It’s also clear that Lora has been paying Annie in addition to housing her, as Annie mentions having saved up enough to send Sarah Jane to college. I’m not sure, but how you read this situation can have a lot of bearing on how you feel about its participants. If we choose to read Annie as co-head of household, as she’s mostly treated, then her oversight of the house and meals feels a little funny but isn’t ultimately demeaning. If we choose to read that the relationship between Annie and Lora has changed from being two women trying to make it in the big city together to one that feels familial but is nonetheless employer-employee, then Lora becomes much less sympathetic. My ultimate reading boils down to how Lora reacts when the two are parted by death, and that although she truly loved Annie and considered her a partner in life and not a servant, she nonetheless found herself occasionally acting in the patronizing manner of the era despite her affection and devotion. 

Sarah Jane, for her part, is having a rough go of things, continuing to seek inroads to the life of privilege to which she feels entitled and which her perceived whiteness gives her just enough ingress to see how things are on the other side. This reaches a point of harrowing violence, when she goes to meet up with the boy who’s talked about running away together and getting married, only to find him sullen and unable to look her directly in the eye. He demands to know if what he’s learned—that Annie is her mother and that Sarah Jane is Black—is true. Sarah Jane denies it, but he nonetheless beats her savagely. Meanwhile, she’s having to deal with all of Susie’s stories about finishing school and watching her not-quite-sister get a pony as a graduation gift; to get out, she claims to be working at the NYC library, but Annie discovers she is actually working as a sort of sexy lounge singer where men leer at her, and when Annie’s appearance once again outs her as non-white, she loses the job. This prompts her to flee even further, finally ending up as a chorus girl out west, but when Annie comes to see her one last time, she tells Sarah Jane that she has come to say that she won’t chase her anymore, and that she loves her daughter enough to accept her choices. When one of the other chorus girls finds them together, Annie pretends to be no more than Sarah Jane’s old nanny in order to preserve her daughter’s concealment of her true identity. 

It’s this that serves as the film’s climax. Sure, there are other things going on. Lora and Susie are distant because Lora always put her career first. Steve re-enters the picture, and he and Lora make plans to travel together and get to know one another again that she immediately reneges upon when offered a part in a new film from an Italian art director. Steve keeps Susie busy that summer and she falls madly in love with him (who wouldn’t?). Susie tells her mother to just be with Steve, and they get together. All seems kind of rote and pale in comparison to what’s happening with Annie, doesn’t it? That’s clearly intentional, and even though there’s a kind of going-through-the-motions energy of everything happening with the Merediths, I was never bored by any of it. Everything happening with Annie just overpowers it, as she ultimately succumbs to (perhaps literally) a broken heart from losing her daughter, spiritually if not literally. Her funeral service features a performance of “Trouble of the World” from Mahalia Jackson, and it’s beautiful. 

In many ways, this is one of director Douglas Sirk’s finest hours. Annie’s story is beautiful, thoughtful, and tender, while Lora’s is perfectly serviceable. It may be that the DVD I saw of this didn’t have a very colorful transfer, but where this one is lacking is in its visual panache. You can almost feel the chill of the blue snow in All that Heaven Allows, but the colors here seem muted, although that may be due to the fact that this was a Eastmancolor production, not a Technicolor one. Susie’s room in the country manse stands out for this reason, as her bubblegum pink room should really pop, but it feels rather dull. Infamously, a publicity stunt surrounding this film was that half of its two-million-dollar budget was spent entirely on Lana Turner’s wardrobe, and while there are many fine pieces, it feels like they’re lacking in some razzle dazzle that one of Sirk’s other pictures would have more effectively conveyed. There are also some places where the narrative seams are less than flush. For instance, the extended sequence of Sarah Jane doing a musical number at the NYC club seems to be a leftover sequence from when the film was conceived as a musical. Both Steve (demanding that Lora forsake the stage in 1947) and Susie (realizing that her infatuation with Steve is childish and relinquishing her mother of any guilt in pursuing him in 1958) make decisions that feel more narratively convenient than true to the characters. Nonetheless, this one is definitely a contender for Sirk’s greatest work.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2025)

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Nearly ten years ago, a trove of presumed lost photographic prints and negatives belonging to the late exiled South African photographer Ernest Cole was discovered in several Swiss bank deposit boxes. Cole, born in 1940, was a critical component in the eventual overturning of the policies of apartheid in South Africa, as the 1967 release of his photobook House of Bondage was one of the first pieces of media to expose the inhuman cruelties occurring in South Africa under the hand of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (the “architect of apartheid”). Exiled as a result of this act of activism, Cole ended up in the United States, where he ultimately died—essentially homeless—in 1990. At the time, much of his work, which he had stored in a boarding house storeroom and had been unable to regain access to, was assumed to have been tossed out and lost forever, until the 2017 Swiss bank discovery. One of Cole’s last living relatives, a nephew, was flown into the country to collect these items, and found himself unable to get any information about why his uncle’s work had ended up in the safe at this bank, who had deposited it, or how they had paid for it. 

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found spends some time on this Swiss mystery, and I want to get that out of the way first since it is, to me, the least important aspect of this documentary. When it was first mentioned that Cole’s assumed-lost work had been found intact and preserved in the SEB vault, I considered this a cause for joy, and it didn’t occur to me to presume malice on the part of whoever put it there. Surely, it would have to be someone who wanted to keep that material safe and preserved. If someone wanted to get rid of his documentation of social injustice, they would just destroy it, right? Once we learn later in the documentary that Cole’s mental (and physical) health had degraded to the point that he was unable to regain possession of his work before his death, one could almost imagine some Good Samaritan rescuing the work from being hauled away in the back of a sanitation truck, although this doesn’t explain how it ended up on the other side of the Atlantic. When the doc revealed that there were a remaining 504 photographs that the Swiss government was still fighting for possession of with Cole’s estate, I was a bit more convinced of the possibility of malintent on the part of whomever had spirited away Cole’s work. It was only after I started to write this paragraph that it struck me that I might be failing to inspect the colonialism of the idea altogether since any preservationist instinct that removed art from Africa to “protect” it by storing it in Europe is, well … colonialist by default. We may never know how a collection of Cole’s work ended up there, but its return to Cole’s family prompted filmmaker Raoul Peck to create Lost and Found, and it’s an unequivocal good that this film exists. 

Nearly all of the footage within the film is Cole’s own, as are the words; LaKeith Stanfield provides voiceover that is taken from Cole’s correspondence and other writings, weaving together the narrative of a life. Cole talks about where he grew up, how a racist campaign of term-redefinition and expansionist neologisms led to the destruction of homes, communities, and families of native Africans under European rule. He escaped with his negatives and published House of Bondage, and as a result of his political exile, found himself adrift in a world that he had no hand in making and in which he could find little purchase. An attempt to expose the racism of the American South as he had the racism of South Africa was mounted, with Cole being sponsored by publishers to travel, but contemporary critics were less receptive to this work. Whether this is purely a matter of Western tendencies to find depictions of injustice abroad moving and empathy-inspiring while bristling when we see it in the mirror, or if there is some validity to the idea that his artistic eye was less capable of capturing the emotion of his subjects because of the cultural differences between the kind of racism that they experienced, I shall leave to your discretion. Despite the horrors of what he saw at home, his exile had a profoundly depressive effect on Cole, leaving him constantly in search of work and making it nearly impossible for him to keep a residence for long. Changes in leadership at publishing houses would mean that he was only half paid for a job and thus never finished it, and the discrepancies between how Cole would describe himself in his journals (not depressed) versus how his friends remember him to have been at the time (severely affected by depression) reveal a man who was lost, alone, and who never fully recovered from what he witnessed in his youth. Ultimately, he never did return home, although his aged mother was able to be at his bedside in New York when he died on February 19, 1990, just eight days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in one of the defining moments in the collapse of the apartheid regime within the next few years. 

This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel. One feature that stood out to me particularly was the frequent appearance of filmed political speeches and U.N. forums that, for decades, repeated the same tired canards justifying a lack of embargoes or sanctions against South Africa. “It would only harm those we are trying to help” says the U.N. president in grainy black and white footage from the 1960s, and which is said again by his successor in the 1970s, before being repeated almost word-for-word in vibrant color video of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I have to be honest with you; it’s bleak, and the portrait it paints of what’s in store for us in the coming years is even bleaker. When House of Bondage was released, it created a sense of moral outrage in the populace that, even at full force, was completely incapable of causing national and international leadership to take any action to end apartheid. We’ve spent the last 15 months with constant, new images of harrowing, monstrous, evil violence enacted by an apartheid state that currently exists, and the modern American is so inured to this kind of wickedness that the coalition of those who are rightly horrified is mocked, belittled, shouted down, fired, and legally silenced by conmen, grifters, and empowered bigots. If it took two and a half decades for apartheid to fall despite international (citizen-level) support for its abolition, then it does not bode well for the end of any current campaign of government terror, when people are unmoved by the plight of their fellow man. The past is never dead. It is not even the past. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Coonskin (1975)

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The 1928 animated short “Steamboat Willie” entered the public domain last month, which has inspired a lot of speculation about what perverted things people are going to do to and with Mickey Mouse now that his copyright protection is loosening up.  Unfortunately, there isn’t likely to be much great cinematic payoff to this historical pop culture moment, at least not if last year’s dreadful slasher Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is any indication.  There might be a couple “Steamboat Willie”-inspired public domainsploitation horrors released in the near future, but it’s likely that our imaginative play with Mickey Mouse’s image will stop there.  That’s what makes it so wild that animator Ralph Bakshi already warped & perverted the cursed rodent’s image 50 years ago in his ironic minstrel cartoon parody of Disney’s Song of the South.  The brief appearance of a disc-eared rat might not rank among the top 100 wildest things about 1975’s Coonskin, but it’s still indicative of how limited our imagination has been as icons like Mickey & Winnie have entered the public domain recently – not to mention our litigious cowardice when it comes to playing with fair-use parody (The People’s Joker innocent).

Given that Coonskin was produced three decades after The Song of the South, it cannot be totally contextualized as a direct response to that nostalgic Disney apologia for slavery-era racism in the American South.  Rather, the film ties a long history of racial caricature in American media together for one confrontational comedy of discomforts, with Song of the South standing as the nexus.  Coonskin is effectively an animated take on blacksploitation cinema, both mocking and indulging in the Black action filmmaking aesthetics of its own era.  The broad-stereotype caricature of 1970s blacksploitation tropes is emphasized here as a revival vintage blackface iconography, sometimes literally so in archival photographs that provide the animation’s multi-media backgrounds.  Song of the South was far from the only animated continuation of that racist iconography into the 21st century; it just happened to be the most racist.  You can also see classic minstrel imagery reflected in the white gloves and blackface mugging of classic Looney Tunes character designs (which are also alluded to in Coonskin through the repurposing of the classic “That’s all folks!” Merry Melodies backdrop) as well as the original design of Steamboat Willie himself.  Bakshi’s nightmare perversion of “Mickey Mouse” may only materialize for a brief few seconds of screentime (as a rat who is executed by gunfire from an unnamed character, mid-anecdote) but his ugly, racist legacy as Disney’s mascot is a specter that haunts the entire picture.

The question of whether white men like Bakshi (namely him & contemporary Robert Crumb) were doing anything politically valuable by resurrecting this incendiary racial iconography has been debated since they first started on the 1960s underground comics scene.  I first encountered that moral grey area in the 2001 high school drama Ghost World (directed by R. Crumb documentarian Terry Zwigoff), which includes a climactic art show controversy about whether it’s more racist to dredge up these vintage minstrel-show images for fresh debate or to pretend they never existed in the first place – effectively locking them away forever in the Disney Vault.  I felt no more comfortable with that question watching a Ghost World VHS rental as a teenager in the early 2000s than I did watching a repertory screening of Coonskin with a live crowd in my 30s.  Hell, I felt deeply embarrassed just saying the title aloud at the box office.  Bakshi’s film is transgressive in a way that truly feels dangerous & subversive half a century later, which I can’t honestly say about most Cult Cinema provocations of its kind.  It can be a productive discomfort at times, at least in its willingness to acknowledge that America is a racist country with an even more racist past (something politicians have been struggling to avoid admitting to news cameras this year).  At other times, it just feels like Bakshi regurgitating the racist iconography of his youth without much purposeful subversion of the tropes.  Often, it’s both.

There isn’t much plot to hang onto here, as Bakshi films are more about experiment in form than coherence in narrative.  A live-action jailbreak sequence provides a framing device for a narrated parody of Song of the South, chronicling the many adventures of an animated rabbit, fox, and bear in 1970s Harlem.  The three animal friends go on the lam, Sweet Sweetback-style, after killing a white Southern sheriff and hustle their way up the Harlem hierarchy to local positions of power – outmaneuvering phony preachers & activists, grotesque mobsters, and an endless supply of even more racist cops during their ascent.  Like the cartoon animals of the famous “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence in Song of the South, Rabbit, Fox, and Bear are animated on top of live-action cinematography; only, Bakshi pushes that mixed-media style to point of experimental psychedelia.  Sometimes the background is a still image.  Sometimes the camera spins in a nauseating circle.  Sometimes the real, hip citizens of Harlem mix with the vintage-minstrel cartoons that reduce them to stereotypes.  The only constant is that every hand-drawn character is a grotesque exaggeration of an American cliché, from the racial caricatures of the main protagonists to the scrotal monstrosities of their white oppressors to the homophobic condemnation of the ninnies who play both sides.  The only exception to that treatment is the personification of America herself: a buxom blonde who seduces the Black men beneath her to their peril, releasing machine gunfire from between her legs.

The more I think about it, the only truly subversive thing artists could do with the Steamboat Willie image at this point is to return Mickey Mouse to his racist minstrel-show roots to expose how rotten American culture is at its core.  Maybe that approach is better suited for a quick Robert Smigel gag in a TV Funhouse sketch than it is for a feature-length comedy, but Bakshi still gets major credit for fearlessly getting to the punchline early and punching it harder than he really had any right to.  I’d also like to give major credit to WW Cinema (the local screening program formerly known as Wildwood) for daring to publicly exhibit this film in the 2020s, which in some ways feels even more dangerous than if they went straight to the source and screened Song of the South.  It was an uncomfortable night at the movies, productively & memorably so.

-Brandon Ledet

The Giverny Document: Single Channel (2020)

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The first feature I watched at this year’s virtual-edition New Orleans Film Fest was a 40-minute “experimental documentary” (read: essay film) about Black women’s cultural identity, a project that started as an art gallery instillation and an act of small-scale political protest. I gotta say, it felt nice to get back in the swing of things. The Giverny Document (Single Channel) is a little uneven & impenetrable in a way a lot of experimental art-project cinema can be, but its contextual positioning within a film festival environment made those qualities almost warmly familiar instead of cold or alienating. The Giverny Document packs a powerful emotional/political wallop when it feels like going for the jugular, but much of its runtime is a loose, dissociative experience that’s much more about puzzling through What It All Means than it is direct, clear messaging. As COVID has severely limited my access to film festival offerings of its kind this year, I found myself just as warmly nostalgic for this type of deliberately bewildering Art in general as I was affected by what this particular work was striving to say.

The Giverny Document is a conceptual art piece about Black women’s relationships with their own bodies and the meaning of “feeling safe.” These topics are clearly announced in plain dialogue & text so that the audience is at least grounded in terms of subject, even if the tools it explores that subject with are much more abstract. The “Single Channel” subtitle refers to the film’s nature as a synthesized work comprised of many smaller, disparate parts. In an art gallery setting, The Giverny Document is a three-screen instillation piece that simultaneously runs loops of multiple short films comprised of alternating, contrasting images: nature, police brutality, drone strikes, dancing, self-portraiture, etc. This distillation of that project combines all these opposing elements into a single montage, occasionally interrupted by people-on-the-street interviews fit for a local 1990s news broadcast and a stunning Nina Simone performance of the song “Feelings.” It’s a messy, provocative collage that attempts to make sense of the simultaneous, dizzying ways Black women occupy the world: from the personal & internal, to the globally political, to the spiritual & Natural. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a mere 40min stretch, which director Ja’Tovia Gary tackles by keeping its various thematic connections loose & poetic.

I don’t mean to contextualize The Giverny Document as A Film Festival Movie as a means of dismissing its artistic merits or political message. The film intentionally anchors itself to that Experimental Cinema niche by directly, cyclically referencing Stan Brakhage’s famous short Mothlight, which created a crudely beautiful form of animation by running actual insect wings through a film projector. This movie knows exactly what kind of Art World territory it’s trafficking in. It’s not all headscratching obfuscation, though. Often, the 90s-style news reporter will announce to potential interviewees that the movie is “about being a Black lady” to lure them in front of the camera, or police brutality footage will be interrupted by plain block text announcing “WE DON’T DESERVE THIS” as a direct plea for relief. Ja’Tovia Gary’s ambitious, poetic explorations of Black femme identity in both personal & political arenas is very much worth engaging with inside its own confines, which can alternate between disorienting & alarmingly direct the way its imagery alternates between Nature & culture. The experience just also made me consider how much I missed attending in-person film festivals over the past eight months of social distancing, since they’re one of the last places you can still encounter & enjoy this kind of Experimental Cinema provocation (outside the walls of an art gallery, at least).

-Brandon Ledet

Tongues Untied (1989)

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The most impressive, inspiring films are always the ones that achieve a transcendent artistic effect with subprofessional resources or distribution. By that metric, Tongues Untied is one of the most impressive films I’ve seen in a long while. Its means are severely limited by its VHS aesthetic & camcorder-level resources, which makes it initially register more as D.I.Y. video art than legitimized Cinema. Still, it pushes through that financial gatekeeping barrier to achieve a fantastic poetic effect that’s frequently surreal, furious, grief-stricken, hilarious, and erotic, sometimes all at once. The film’s distribution was controversial to the point of near-extinction, sparking a highly-publicized national debate about whether or not it should be allowed to be broadcast on the PBS network because of its explicit sexuality (no doubt largely due to that sexuality’s homosexual orientation). Still, it lives on decades later as one of the most vital, fearless documents of American gay life in its era, legendary on the same level as more frequently canonized works like Paris is Burning & The Queen. Tongues Untied is D.I.Y. filmmaking at its most potent and least timid, throwing stylistic & political punches far above its budgetary weight class and landing each one square on America’s crooked jaw.

At its core, this is an essay film about black gay life in the United States during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. Building off the thesis that “Black men loving Black men is a revolutionary act,” a small sample of interviewees (including director Marlon Riggs himself) intimately share their life experiences as a kind of collective Oral History. They start by explaining how they’re outsiders in every community they inhabit, demonized & othered either through racism or through homophobia in every direction they turn. These confessionals gradually give way to an overt call to action as the film continues. They demand that more queer black men untie their tongues and become vocal about their own sexuality, so that their shared identity can become more normalized and less of a shamefully hidden peculiarity. The direct-to-the-camera messaging, photoshoot backdrops, and VHS patina of these interviews often recall a 90s anti-drug PSA or a local doc from a PBS affiliate, but the raw pain & sensuality of their stories smash through any potential aesthetic roadblocks. This is a doubly marginalized group who have to muster all of their collective strength just to be able to proclaim “We are worth wanting each other,” a revolutionary act after centuries of being told from all sides that they are worthless.

Even if it were just limited to these oral history interviews & editorials, the film would still be an essential document of black homosexual identity in late-80s America. Marlon Riggs pushes his work far beyond that humble act of self-anthropology, though, and instead aims to achieve pure cinematic poetry. Collaborating closely with the poet Essex Hemphill (who appears onscreen just as often as Riggs), he abstracts the interviews & essays at the core of the film by warping them into a layered, rhythmic vocal performance – as if all onscreen subjects were sharing the same artistic voice. The effect can be surreal or literary, making direct allusions to Ralph Ellison & Langston Hughes to tie the film into a black poetic tradition, and using a Gertrude Stein-style punishing repetition of phrases like “Brother to brother, brother to brother” to completely obliterate the audience’s senses. It can also be hilarious in a sketch comedy way, allowing for out-of-nowhere tangents into the sassy art of snapping or the playful sleaze of 1-900 dial-up phone sex. Most importantly, it unlocks the film’s full potential so that it’s not just a vocal diary of black gay men’s lived experiences but rather a soul-deep expression of all the pain, anger, lust, and joy they feel all at once within a society that would prefer they didn’t feel anything, or exist at all.

Tongues Untied uses the vocal rhythms and subliminal associations of poetry to crack its videotaped oral histories wide open, unlocking something much greater and more resonant than its means should allow. It is a transcendent work of art just as much as it is an anthropological time capsule, which makes it uniquely valuable to both cinephiles & political academics. There are plenty of examples of video art that pushed past the boundaries of fringe D.I.Y. experimentation to genuinely achieve cultural significance. However, I doubt there are many that could legitimately claim to be one of the greatest films of all time the way this scrappy, urgent VHS poetry relic could.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Hanna, Brandon, and Boomer watch Fried Green Tomatoes (1991).

Britnee: Growing up, my main sources of movies were cable TV, Debra’s Movie World (a local video rental store in my hometown), and the local public library.  The highlight of my weekend was checking out the TV guide in the newspaper to see what movies were going to be on TV (mostly the TNT, TBS, and USA channels) and taking a trip to Debra’s or the library to browse through the racks of VHS tapes.  When borrowing movies from the library, I was limited to two.  My first pick was always a film I had never seen before, and my second pick was always reserved for one of my go-to movies.  Almost every time, that go-to movie was Fried Green Tomatoes.  The film is adapted from Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which I was also a fan of.  I even did a book report on it when I was in the seventh or eighth grade!  I was, and still am, very much in love with this movie, and I’m so excited to share it with the Swampflix crew for our April Movie of the Month.

Fried Green Tomatoes is a heartfelt, hilarious, tearjerking masterpiece that focuses on the relationships and lives of Southern women.  Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) is a housewife in early 1990s Alabama.  She’s riddled with low self-esteem and is desperately trying to add life back into her dull marriage.  One of the most iconic scenes in the movie is when Evelyn fantasizes about wrapping herself in a cellophane dress to seduce her husband but, sadly, he’s even just as boring in her fantasies as he is in real life and isn’t into it.  While visiting her husband’s aunt at a nursing home, who really doesn’t enjoy Evelyn’s company,  Evelyn meets Ms. Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy).  Ms. Threadgoode begins to tell her stories about the lives of the residents of a small town named Whistle Stop during the Depression Era.  The two stars of her stories are Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker), two women who are in an obvious lesbian relationship even though it’s never blatantly stated.  Evelyn becomes obsessed with hearing these stories and starts making regular visits to the nursing home to hear Ms. Threadgoode tell them.  The stories bring Evelyn back to life and inspire her take control of her life, all in the name of Tawanda!

The relationship between Idgie and Ruth is both beautiful and tragic.  The two women are soulmates who are known throughout the town of Whistle Stop as “really good friends” beacause, well, this is the South in the 1920s.  Both women run The Whistle Stop Cafe (yay for female business owners!), serving pies, BBQ, and you guessed it, fried green tomatoes.  Fun Fact: The Whistle Stop Cafe building used for the film was actually turned into a real restaurant Juliette, Georgia.  It still looks just like the restaurant in the movie and serves up fried green tomatoes and BBQ (hopefully not like the “secret sauce” BBQ in the movie).  Prior to the cafe, Ruth was in an abusive marriage, and when Idgie discovers Ruth is both pregnant and being beaten, she rescues her.  The two women start their own life together, and Idgie helps Ruth raise her child.  Everything seems to being going okay for the two until Ruth’s husband goes missing, and Idgie is a suspect for his murder.

Boomer, this film has received criticism for glossing over the lesbian relationship between Idgie and Ruth.  What are your thoughts on this?

Boomer: I was really excited when Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for Movie of the Month, because I just read the book last October and was itching to talk about the book with pretty much everyone I knew.  The film was also a treasure of a different kind, albeit one that made me turn to my friend with whom I was watching it and say “In the book . . . ” at least twenty times.

The nature of film is different from that of literature, and some excisions are to be expected.  For one thing, the novel is much more realistic in its presentation of period accurate language, which is a polite way of saying that I’m completely comfortable with the fact that studios decided it wouldn’t be much fun to watch beloved actors and actresses say the n-word with the frequency it appears in the novel, even in the mouths of characters we otherwise like and admire, simply to be more historically correct.  Those who have only ever seen the film would also likely be surprised to learn just what a large part of the novel focuses on Sipsey’s family, including grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the hardships of the pre- and post-King civil rights movements as seen through their eyes.  Of particular note are Big George’s two sons, one of whom is light-skinned and other darker, and how life is harder for the latter than the former despite their identical lineage; one becomes a train porter who lives long enough for his modern grandchildren to be critical of his attitude towards white people (remarking behind the old man’s back that his “bowing and scraping” to white people is “embarrassing”) while the other lives a shorter, more tragic life that involves a self-perpetuating cycle of incarceration following an initial arrest that is extremely unjust, even for its time.  This excision also leaves out, as a consequence, one of my favorite little touches of the novel: Evelyn’s visit to the black church in the novel (unaccompanied by Ninny) involves her sharing a pew with and shaking the hand of one of Sipsey’s great-granddaughters, with no one but the omniscient voice of the author to recognize this serendipitous connection and meeting.

Even though Fried Green Tomatoes was hailed as such a breakthrough that it received the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film in 1992, it’s surprising how understated the romance between Idgie and Ruth is, although it is explicitly and openly queer in a way that I’m surprised to see in such a mainstream film of the time (and which was such a big hit, grossing nearly $120 million against its $11 million budget).  Even more surprisingly, this isn’t that different from the book, which never uses the word “lesbian” or any derivatives – which is for the best, as I would hate to have had to watch a scene of aged Jessica Tandy telling Kathy Bates “They were lesbians.”  The closest the text gets is in a scene between Ruth and Idgie’s mother in which the latter begs Ruth not to leave at the end of the summer in which she and Idgie first meet, with only Mama Threadgoode tells her that Idgie loves Ruth in her own Idgiosyncratic (sorry) way.  What the film adds is Ruth’s earlier love of Buddy, which layers on a Schrodinger’s Sexuality element that allows a more conservative audience to dismiss the queer undertones that discomfit them, getting them to unwittingly cheer a queer romance.  That Ruth and Idgie are in love is evident, both to the others in their town and to the reader and audience, without ever having to verbalize or label it, which is beautiful in its way.  It’s also not shot for the male gaze at all, either; although Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker are beautiful women, but there’s nothing salacious or sexualized about them.  I’d consider it a win across the board . . . were it not for that Buddy/Ruth added element.

So, uh, one thing I didn’t know about this narrative before reading the novel is that unwitting cannibalism is arguably the crux on which the entire story rests.  That was unexpected.  Brandon, what did you think of this development?  Did you foresee it at all; did it take you completely by surprise?  Do you think that a great and grievous wrong was committed against the people of Whistle Stop by feeding them human flesh without their knowledge?

Brandon:  I felt fully prepared for the cannibalism by the time it arrived in the story, but only because the movie trains you to be prepared for anything.  Fried Green Tomatoes looks & acts like a Normal movie on the surface, but it constantly veers into absurdist humor, grisly violence, and straight-up Gay Stuff that you don’t normally get to see in a Hollywood picture of this flavor.  Before starting the film, however, I never would have guessed that cannibalism would play such a central role in the story, since it looked from the outside to be a good-ol’-days, Simple Southern Living melodrama along the lines of Driving Miss Daisy or Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.  I even remember chuckling about how adorably quaint the tagline on the poster felt: “The secret of life?  The secret’s in the sauce.”  In retrospect—now knowing that the sauce’s recipe sometimes includes human flesh—that tagline is absolutely horrific, which is a perfectly illustrative example of how subtly bizarre this movie can be.

By the time the cannibalism arrives in the story, we’ve already been thrown for so many loops by Kathy Bates’s cellophane lingerie fantasies & mirror-squatting vagina workshops, the nearby train’s bloodthirsty quest to crush all children, and the local sheriff’s side hustle as a barroom drag queen that I was game for pretty much anything.  I wasn’t even especially aghast that they fed the beautifully barbequed corpse to their clientele, since the only customer we see chowing down on the stuff (in the movie, at least) is an evil cop we’ve been prompted to hiss at every time he appears at the café.  I love how the mystery of who among the main cast killed the KKK member that winds up on the Whistle Stop’s menu is given tons of breathing room to loom large over the plot, but the cooking & consumption of that monster’s body is practically a throwaway punchline.  It’s that exact emphasis on the conventional vs. underplayed indulgence in the bizarre that made Fried Green Tomatoes such a treat for me overall.  It’s both proudly traditional & wildly unpredictable, paradoxically so.

While the murder mystery eventually gets settled (both in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the audience), I think there’s a much more inconclusive mystery the movie leaves open for interpretation: Who, exactly, was Jessica Tandy playing?  From what I understand, the book is explicitly clear about who the old woman was at the periphery of the central romance (Idgie’s sister-in-law), but I think the movie is a little more ambiguous.  There’s enough evidence onscreen to implicate that the elderly Ninny Threadgoode was actually Idgie Threadgoode all-growed-up, not just some tertiary family member who watched Idgie’s life play out from a distance.  Hanna, how did you interpret Ninny’s identity?  Did you take her word at face-value that she was a distant relative of Idgie’s, or did you suspect that she might be Idgie herself?

Hanna: I was one thousand percent convinced that Ninny was Idgie.  In fact, part of my brain is still refusing to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary that may be provided in the book.  It would have been pretty easy to establish Ninny’s selfhood outside of the Idgie’s story (e.g., “Idgie’s sister told me … ” “I was visiting my brother when I heard …”), especially considering that Ninny’s identity is made clear in the source material. More than that, I would like to keep myself blissfully ignorant because I like the idea of Idgie telling her own story disguised as a secondary source; I feel like that mischief is in keeping with Idgie’s character in general.

I also have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the presence of the queer romance. I really didn’t know that much about Fried Green Tomatoes except that “Were Idgie and Ruth lovers in Fried Green Tomatoes?” is apparently a popular question on Google. Based on the need to ask the question, I assumed that the love would be purely subtext, projection, and wishful thinking; I was surprised by the tender sensuality between the two, especially in that bee scene!  I do wish the relationship had been pushed further, I think it was a pretty perfect depiction of what a lesbian love would look like during that period of time.

Besides the queer Southern lady romance, the mythos of Whistle Stop is one of my favorite aspects of the movie: the shadow of the ever-present Trauma Train, for example, or the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Ruth’s horrific ex-husband.  Idgie is nestled at the center of all of these myths, and she weaves her own, too: she robs trains and Robin Hoods the spoils away!  She is a friend to bees!  She’s a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, Southern lesbian!  She’s like a considerate version of Tom Sawyer, embodying the spirit of wildly compassionate independence; her unconventional bravery raises her as a kind of folk hero in the eyes of her community, and just as much in Ninny/Idgie’s stories for Evelyn decades later.  I think this is another reason I’m prone to believe that the sisters-in-law are the same person: I am in love with the idea of an elderly Idgie leaving an offering of honey for her lady and disappearing into the woods at the end, cementing her status as the grand ghost of Whistle Stop.


Lagniappe

Brandon:  I also found it incredibly refreshing how open this film was about the romantic spark between Idigie & Ruth . . . up to a point.  There’s an early scene where Idgie takes Ruth on a picnic to pull honey for her directly out of a beehive (a total show-off move that invites horrific My Girl flashbacks) where I thought “Is this a date?,” but I initially brushed it off.  Later, when Ruth kisses Idgie on the cheek after a round of drunken nightswimming, I was astonished that we were actually Going There.  And then the movie just kinda drops it.  The two women eventually establish a Boston Marriage version of domesticity while running the Whistle Stop Cafe, but we never get to see them share that kind of intimacy again after the kiss.  The closest we get is some light sploshing during a flirty foodfight scene in the Whistle Stop kitchen.  Otherwise, their daily routine mostly consists of Ruth looking after her baby at home while Idgie tends the store, together but separate.  I’m not saying that I was aching for a passionate on-screen love affair, but over time I did come to miss the private, intimate conversations between the two women, since their connection was one of the main anchors of the story (before it evolves into a murder mystery, at least).

Speaking of Lesbian Content, I was not at all shocked to learn that Fannie Flagg was at one time in a relationship with feminist author Rita Mae Brown.  Brown’s landmark lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle is not as wildly chaotic as Fried Green Tomatoes in tone or narrative, but their settings & thick Southern drawls are remarkably similar.  I suspect that a movie adaptation of Rubyfruit Jungle would resemble this film a great deal; it would just have to swap out the cannibalism for explicit lesbian sex.

Hanna: Usually in these Present/Past movies, one of the two storylines drags a little bit, and it’s typically the present (e.g., Big Fish, although the final with the father still gets me).  Evelyn’s story, on the other hand, is just as delightful as the Idgie storyline.  I would watch a whole movie about Evelyn ramming the cars of youngin’s in the parking lot, attempting to familiarize herself with her vagina, and bashing down the walls of her own house in the name of Towanda (decked out in her fabulous 90s prints, of course).

Boomer: (Content Warning: mention of Sexual Assault)
My favorite thing that was in the novel but not in the film is the fact that Frank Bennett (Ruth’s abusive husband, who is also a gangrapist in the novel) has a glass eye.  It’s so well made that he makes a habit of challenging strangers to a bet to see if they can guess which one is real, and he never loses.  Until, that is, a homeless man correctly identifies the glass eye; when asked how he knew, he admits that the manufactured glass eye was the only one of the two that had a glimmer of humanity in it.  It’s as poetic an indictment of a character as I’ve ever read.

I also love that, in the novel, the judge presiding at the trial is actually Curtis Smoote, who had years before been the one investigating Bennett’s disappearance.  He sees straight through Idgie and Company’s ruse from the very beginning, but the omniscient narrator tells us that his own daughter had been a victim of Bennett’s, even fathering a child with her and then beating her when she came to him for help for the baby, so he lets the farce play out.  The world won’t miss an asshole like Frank Bennett, and there’s a kind of justice that supersedes the law.

I only get five channels clearly with my TV antenna, and one of them is Buzzr, a game show whose most up-to-date regularly aired program is Supermarket Sweep.  I’ve seen many an hour of The Match Game and author Fannie Flagg is consistently one of the funniest contestants.  Nobody asked, but my dream Match Game lineup is  Scoey Mitchell, Brett Somers, and Charles Nelson Reilly on the top row and Marcia Wallace, Dick Martin, and Fannie in the bottom row.  I swear that I am in fact 32 and not actually in my 80s, and I will be taking no follow up questions on this subject at this time.

One of the caveats of Movie of the Month selections is that the film has to be one that no one else in the group has seen before (it’s right there in our charter), and I was positive I never had, but there was one scene that I had seen some time in my primordial memory was Buddy getting stuck in the train tracks.  That scene imprinted on me pretty heavily, and over the years I folded that memory and the scene in Stand By Me when the kids run from a train into one and “stuck” this scene there in my mind.  When I rewatched Stand By Me recently, I was struck by the fact that I had fully inserted a scene in it which did not exist, and thought, “Well, that must have been in The Journey of Natty Gann.”  But nope!  Here it was, waiting for me to rediscover it in Fried Green Tomatoes after all this time.

Britnee: One of the most beautiful scenes in Fried Green Tomatoes is when Idgie retrieves honey from a tree for Ruth.  This is how she gets her romantic Bee Charmer nickname.  Mary Stuart Masterson actually did the bee scene 100% herself without a stunt double.  Her stunt double quit before the bee scene because she was too afraid to do it, so Masterson performed the stunt herself.  There’s a great article about the scene from the blog of the Asheville Bee Charmer honey shop where they speak with one of the location scouts from Fried Green Tomatoes.  The shop is owned by a lesbian couple, and the name of the shop was inspired by the film.  Fried Green Tomatoes lives on!  Tawanda!

Upcoming Movies of the Month
May: Hanna presents Playtime (1967)
June: Brandon presents Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)
July: Boomer presents Marjoe (1972)

-The Swampflix Crew

Jezebel (2019)

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I first heard of the new memoir drama Jezebel when the writer-director-star of the film, Numa Perrier, was interviewed on an episode of the Switchblade Sisters podcast this summer, discussing how the deeply personal project came to be. It’s near-impossible to resist the film’s premise as “a true story” wherein Perrier looks back to her teen years in the late 1990s, when her older sister roped her into being a camgirl in the early days of online sex work. The context & conflict of that premise is only made more intriguing by the fact that Perrier performs in the film herself as that older sister character, making the project as personal & intimate of an account as possible. What surprised me most about the film when it screened at the New Orleans Film Fest after months of anticipation was how sweet & delicate it was willing to be with its subject despite its creator’s obvious closeness to its emotionally raw context. Perrier doesn’t shy away from the exploitation or desperation that fueled her sex work as a cash-strapped, near-homeless teen, but she’s equally honest about the joy, power, and self-discovery that line of work opened up to her at the time, making for a strikingly complex picture of an authentic, lived experience.

Thematically, Jezebel falls somewhere between the poverty-line desperation of The Florida Project and the tense online sex work fantasy realms of Cam, but it’s not nearly as aggressive as either of those predecessors in terms of style or sensibility. Mostly, we follow the fictional Tiffany (who performs under the titular stage name Jezebel) as she ping-pongs between two suffocating, cramped locales: an extended-stay hotel room in Vegas and a nearby office space that’s been converted into an online pleasure dome. She has zero privacy in either her work or home life, where her “alone time” & her professional sex acts are quietly under surveillance by authority figures in just the other room. Understandably, a lot of the emotional drama is centered on her relationship with her older sister, who’s ultimately doing the best she can to equip the youngster with a self-sustaining skill (one the sister picked up herself over years of working dial-up hotlines). What’s more striking than that increasingly tense relationship, however, is Tiffany’s relationship with her own body & inner desires. The circumstances of how she got roped into sex work are far short of ideal, but she quickly comes to enjoy the freedom, power, confidence and expanding sexual passions the profession offers her – in a relatively low-stakes form of sexual labor she’s careful not to escalate. That conflict between desperation & autonomy rages throughout the movie, but it is mostly contained under a wryly humorous, surprisingly sweet surface.

While it’s nowhere near as deliberately horrifying as the chat sessions in Cam, Jezebel does a great job of distinguishing both the dangers & escapist fantasies inherent to working as a camgirl. The flood of unfiltered, hedonistic comments from anonymous men online are an overwhelming menace here, something Tiffany is especially vulnerable to as the only black girl working at her jobsite. There’s also just something horrific about how devastatingly young she looks as a 19-year-old babe in the woods who’s treating this incrementally risky line of work as a self-discovery playground. Watching her learn to wield power over her clients (one of them voiced by eternal sleazebucket Brett Gelman) or developing an internal sexual persona of her own, you can tell that working as a camgirl has overall been a genuine good in her life, but it’s impossible to lose sight of the fact that you’re watching a vulnerable child navigate potentially dangerous waters that are gradually rising above her head.

Perrier’s experience in the field is fascinating for the period-specific details of how early webcam lag, lack of audio, and chatroom etiquette informed the first wave of camgirl artistry (which mostly amounted to pantomimed sex acts instead of The Real Thing). Where Jezebel really shines, though, is in how the complexity of larger themes like familial politics, racial othering, financial power dynamics, and self-discovery are effortlessly, subtly weaved into a story that could have so easily been played for flashy shock value. Few things about this scenario are easy or fair, but Perrier finds plenty of room to convey a full inner life for her semi-fictional teenage surrogate, including touching bouts of joy, tenderness, and self-fulfillment despite the subject’s potential for pure exploitation and despair.

-Brandon Ledet

Shock Corridor (1963)

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It’s rare to find films of a certain age that take an honest look at mental illness, racism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other psychiatric issues with sympathy, and fewer still that take a deft approach to the subject. Anything that predated 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest generally treated those with these illnesses as villains or obstacles, portrayed asylums as bedlams that protected society from vagrants rather than places where one could ever hope to become well again, and if the protagonist was unwell of mind, such sickness was something that could be overcome with machismo or the love of a good woman, not through medical practice or therapy. Not so in the case of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (released 1963, one year after the publication of Cuckoo’s Nest, although Fuller had been shopping the original screenplay around since the 1940s), in which mental patients are presented as objects not of derision but as people deserving empathy, not as evil madmen but as victims of society who were pushed to the psychic breaking point and beyond.

Reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) has spent the past year training with Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) in order to accurately portray an incestuous fetishist and be committed to a local mental hospital. His goal: to earn a Pulitzer by solving the murder of a patient who was killed by meeting the three witnesses, also patients there. His editor Swanson (Bill Zuckert) is behind this plan, but his exotic dancer girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers) objects, worried that Barrett’s time among the madmen will break him psychologically as well. She eventually relents and poses as Barrett’s sister in order to have him “involuntarily” committed. Once inside, Barrett must maintain his cover under the observation of Dr. Menkin (Paul Dubov) and kindly orderly Wilkes (Chuck Roberson). He is placed in a room with a patient known only as Pagliacci (Larry Tucker), whose operatic exultations occur day and night, and he sets to work making contact with the three witnesses: Stuart (James Best), Trent (Hari Rhodes), and Boden (Gene Evans).

Each man has been institutionalized after their psyches were fractured by manifestations of America’s social and political failings, representing the dark underside of the American dream. Stuart was the son of a poor, abusive, racist father. When Stuart was captured while serving in Korea, he came around to their way of thinking easily, as they showed him the first kindness he had ever experienced in his life. When he was returned to the U.S. as part of a prisoner exchanged, he was denounced as a traitor and treated as a pariah; despite being brainwashed, his countrymen had no sympathy for him and instead debased and abused him. As a result, he has retreated into a delusion wherein he is Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, still fighting the war.

Trent was the first black student in a segregated university in the American South, who suffered such harassment and hatred at the hands of his classmates that his mind has broken. He is introduced as a thief of pillowcases, and we quickly learn what that means: he steals these from other patients and cuts holes in them to create a makeshift Klan hood. Trent no longer sees himself as he is but as white, and he stirs up the other patients in the ward by shouting racist, white nationalist invective, including inciting violence against other black patients. Finally, Boden was an atomic scientist who, upon realizing the earth-shattering power of the atom bomb and that he had contributed to the scientific “progress” that gave mankind the ability to wipe itself from the face of the earth, broke down and regressed to the mentality of a child. Once a talented artist, he now spends his days wandering the titular corridor, where patients are allowed to congregate and socialize, drawing crude renderings of his peers.

Barrett’s time on the inside begins to have a profound effect on him. As his own mental state begins to deteriorate, the film becomes a race against time to get to the truth before Barrett’s faculties diminish beyond the breaking point.

When looking at the release date and the subject matter, one couldn’t be blamed for jumping to the conclusion that the film would be heavy-handed or unsympathetic, but not so. And even if one knew the film was sympathetic, it would likewise be easy to assume that it would be have the moralistic and paternalistic “eye” prevalent in propaganda of the time, but that is not the case here either. Instead, the tone is like the film overall: a mixture of documentarian distance and character study, which echoes the (color video, in contrast to the B&W film that makes up the plot of the movie) documentary inserts of Japan in Stuart’s psychic break and the indigenous dances and rituals that constitute Trent’s breakdown. Although there are some dated moments, most notably the attack on Barrett by a ward full of glassy-eyed women identified only as “nymphos,” they are few and far between, and do not detract from the film’s overall thesis: mental illness may be “invisible” in ways that physical illness isn’t, but it can be no less debilitating or life-altering, and the key to healing is sympathy, not criticism. Sadly, over half a century later, this is a lesson that still needs to be reiterated, but it renders the film no less potent now than it was in its day.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

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As monumental as the 1930s King Kong was in influencing special effects innovation in early cinema, there was a nasty undercurrent of racism that flowed from that picture & dispersed into the larger cultural pool. Many ape-themed B-pictures that followed in King Kong’s footsteps preyed on societal discomfort with interracial romance, horrifically coding their villainous primates as African or South American invaders stealing square-jawed Americans’ refined white women. It’s not a genre I tend to pay much attention to as a result, despite my bottomless appetite for schlock, unless there’s a hook like witnessing Bela Lugosi’s decline into poverty row Hell in The Ape Man. 1951’s Bride of the Gorilla is a strange exception to the rule. It’s a deeply racist picture, to be sure, but its avoidance of the usual tropes & grooves of the genre makes it a bizarre, fascinating work as an outlier. More of a melodrama than a B-grade horror and a complication of the way its villainous ape is coded as a racial Other, Bride of the Gorilla surprises & subverts in its participation in a genre that doesn’t deserve the effort. It’s a morally repugnant, but oddly compelling as a cultural artifact.

Presented as a story about “how the jungle itself took the law into its own hands”, this is a tale of adultery, guilt, and the white man’s sense of displacement in the Amazon. A rubber plantation owner’s young wife falls in love with one of his workers. The pair consummate this passion after a fight over their affections leads to the old man’s accidental death. Haunted by their own guilt and a criminal investigation from the Amazonian country’s police commissioner (?) & audience narrator (horror cheapie veteran Lon Cheney, Jr.), the new union is cursed & ultimately tragic. This is compounded by a local witch who poisons & gaslights the new husband/former employee into believing he’s turned into a gorilla. He hallucinates that his body is changing and he is losing his humanity to the jungle, where he begins to spend most of his time instead of comforting his new, wealthy bride. There isn’t a lot of gorilla action in the picture; it’s mostly colonialist melodrama. Still, the psychological horror of this transformation (which is never confirmed to be real) has interesting thematic implications & moments of dread.

Bride of the Gorilla’s thesis that white people don’t belong in the Amazonian jungle is a technically accurate conclusion derived from deeply faulty reasoning. According to the film, “White people shouldn’t live too long in the jungle,” because it “brings out their bad side.” The transformation horror at the center of the film brings into question the sexual threat of the Other that usually permeates its genre. The movie practically functions as a horror of racial transformation, where a white man loses his privilege & civility as be becomes more in tune with the “primitive” culture of the jungle. Because this is a poverty row cheapie rapidly fired off to fill out a double bill, there likely wasn’t much intentional thought put into how the film would participate in, complicate, or subvert the racist tropes of its genre, but the results are fascinatingly muddled all the same. The movie takes an unintended anti-colonialist stance and breaks down the barriers that separate its white man lead from the jungle community he fears. It even does so with an almost exclusively all-white, American cast, which makes it all the more bizarre.

For all of Bride of the Gorilla’s grotesque, Darwinist implications as a racist participation in colonialist narratives, it does have occasional moments of genuine psychological terror. Raymond Burr (of Perry Mason & Rear Window fame) sells the fear of his primitive de-evolution nicely, especially in a scene where he punches in the glass of a mirror that displays a gorilla’s reflection. Late in the film his gorilla form stalks his titular bride through the jungle and the movie takes his first-person POV. It’s a decision that’s intended to mask the truth of his transformation, but accidentally telegraphs the aesthetic of an 80s slasher in the process. Most of Bride of the Gorilla works this way. Its indulgence in prolonged melodrama is likely an effort to limit its special effects budget, but makes it an interesting B-horror outlier in the process. Its subversion & complication of racist ape movie tropes was likely a thoughtless act in the pursuit of a quick, cheap-to-shoot script, but makes for an fascinating discussion anyway. The psychological & bodily horrors of its central transformation, which likely isn’t even “real,” shines through despite the many faults holding it back. I wouldn’t normally recommend anyone explore this particular B-movie territory, but if you find yourself doing so, Bride of the Gorilla is an interesting outlier within a cursed genre.

-Brandon Ledet