A related theme that students readily detect is Appalachians’ strong attachment to land. August King, Alvin York, and Gertie Nevels seek to own it. (“I know a piece of bottomland to be had and I’m a gonna’ git it,” says York; Nevels declares to her youngest son, “You ain’t goin’ work your life away plowing another man’s land”). The plots of both Wild River and Foxfire are driven by desperate struggles to hold on to land already owned. In both cases, elderly widows are forced to defend their property against forces far more powerful than they are: TVA officials and real estate developers, respectively. A somewhat vaguer, but equally pervasive, sense of loss is evident in Deliverance. As in Elia Kazan’s Wild River, the damming of a river is the impetus for the threats felt by its central characters, though the losses they fear couldn’t be more different. While Ella Garth has far more at stake in defying the TVA, which is about to flood her island home and destroy her way of life, the suburban adventurers on the Cahulawassee are merely interested in “doing the river” one last time before it is turned into a lake. Yet Deliverance director John Boorman suggests that more than a wild river is about to be destroyed. Perhaps borrowing from Kazan’s film, the final scene of Deliverance depicts graves being dug up prior to the cemetery’s flooding, a ritual no doubt reenacted many times during TVA’s incursion throughout the region, and a major point of concern to Ella Garth.
The moral dilemmas that stem from these conflicts are often obvious in these films, with right and wrong, and good and evil, characterized in fairly simplistic form. Yet closer examinations often reveal more subtle and complex factors that defy such easy judgments. August King (portrayed by Jason Patric) is obviously on the side of angels as he facilitates a slave’s escape and makes increasingly bigger sacrifices to protect the seventeen-year-old girl, Annalees, as she eludes her brutish master. No question of good guys or bad guys here, but students enjoy discussing the sexual attraction that might well have been behind King’s willingness to give up so much to protect this alluring young woman (played by Thandie Newton). Would he have risked as much for a male fugitive, or for an elderly or unattractive woman?5 And while students recognize the strong antiwar message of Cold Mountain, the movie strips any moral ambivalence from the internal strife that plagued Carolina highlanders: Home Guardsmen are consigned the roles of villains in far too simplistic a take on the realities of guerrilla warfare that so wracked much of that society from 1861 to 1865.
Much of the effectiveness of Kazan’s Wild River lies in the moral ambivalence of the protagonist, TVA agent Chuck Glover (Montgomery Clift)—who fully recognizes that the TVA and the New Deal will improve the lives of East Tennesseans but also develops increasing sensitivity to and admiration for Ella Garth (Jo Van Fleet), the elderly woman who refuses to abandon her island farm. In an interview, Kazan said of these characters, “I think Miss Ella’s right to want to stay on her land. I think Glover is right, too. There’s a need to do things for the good of the majority, which in this case is to establish inexpensive electric power and to control the erratic, devastating flooding of the Tennessee River. . . . But when you do that, some individuals are just ruled out, and I think that’s a real loss and should not be ignored.”6
In Foxfire, students recognize the similar dilemma facing Annie Nations (portrayed by British actress Jessica Tandy, who spent much of her latter career playing Georgia women).7 This elderly widow faces pressures from land-hungry developers to give up her north Georgia farmstead so that they can make big profits from the scenic vistas of that mountain-top property. The more ambiguous, and perhaps universal, issue in her story is simply her age, and the concern of her son (John Denver) as to how much longer she can live independently in that remote environment and the physical demands required to sustain a life on it.
Some of my students at UGA are familiar with the scenario behind Annie Nations’s story—the incursion of tourism and second-home development in the north Georgia mountains. The families of some have vacation homes there, and others have visited friends or relatives who do. But they admit that their contacts with natives of the area have been minimal, and they’ve never thought in terms of the human and cultural costs of that development. Given how many of our students come from suburban Atlanta, they react even more strongly to Deliverance. (Some female students are repulsed by the film and find it very difficult to sit through the rape scene at its core, a reaction I don’t recall when the film first appeared in 1972 and became the biggest box-office hit of that year.) But as Jerry Williamson has so astutely observed, “Deliverance is not about mountain people; it is rather a critique of city people.”8 By shifting discussion from the harassment by grotesque hillbillies and viewing the four Atlantans as something other than simply the victims of mountain violence, we open a new frame of reference that informs several of the other films as well.
These films also provide very effective means through which to explore gender issues. Strong women play key roles in so many of these films that students could easily conclude, based on Hollywood’s version of southern mountain life, that Appalachia was a matriarchal society. In a chapter of Hillbillyland devoted to “Hillbilly Gals,” Jerry Williamson notes, “If a hillbilly is a democrat, then hillbillyland grants extraordinary equality to women. . . . At times.” It certainly does so in the films under consideration here; one cannot help but be struck by the nearly reverential treatment afforded mountain women in nearly all these movies—only Deliverance lacks a memorable female character.
Jane Fonda, Jessica Tandy, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger made the most of formidable yet vulnerable heroines in The Dollmaker, Foxfire, and Cold Mountain. All these characters face seemingly overwhelming odds that force them to fight for their families, their homes, or their own survivals, usually with little or no support from men. Fonda’s performance, in particular, is an extraordinary blend of fortitude and vulnerability that embodies much of both the stereotypes and the reality of Appalachian women. (She has said that Gertie Nevels is the role of which she is most proud; she won an Emmy for it.)9 Jessica Tandy plays an equally poignant character in Foxfire, whose fragility—due only to age—and stubborn attachment to her way of life, her land, and her memories suggest what Gertie Nevels might have become in thirty years.
Equally memorable and worthy of analysis are the rich array of secondary female characters in almost all these films. They are even stronger mountain women, played by able character actresses: Jo Van Fleet as the island matriarch of Wild River; Pat Carroll as Viney Butler, the curmudgeonly midwife who becomes the champion of Songcatcher’s title character Lily Penlaric (Janet McTeer) and the most authentic source of the music Penlaric is collecting; Mary McDonnell as Elma, the boardinghouse operator and widow in Matewan, who stands her ground in supporting the strike and factors prominently—and triumphantly—in the film’s climactic shoot-out; Eileen Atkins as the “goat woman” who rescues Inman and nurses him back to health in Cold Mountain; and the British stage actress Margaret Wycherly as Ma York, perhaps the ultimate of mountain matriarchs, whose stalwart dignity commands the respect and submission of her wayward son Alvin (Gary Cooper) and makes their relationship as much the emotional center of Sergeant York as his courtship of his young sweetheart Gracie (Joan Leslie).10
Not all such women are admirable: Geraldine Page plays Gertie Nevels’s overbearing and needy mother, who insists that Gertie join her husband in Detroit, which in effect forces her daughter to give up the farm she had scraped and saved so hard to acquire. In Matewan, Bridey Mae, a rather empty-headed and man-hungry young widow (played by Nancy Mette) is easily manipulated into betraying the coal miners and their community, of which she herself had been a part.
None of these women bows to the authority or power of men (though Gertie’s mother forces her daughter to do so); on the other hand, only Ma York is defined by her influence on a male. Her quiet authority and moral suasion over not only Alvin but her entire household of children render her a pivotal character despite what is a surprisingl
y small speaking part. Although her role is based heavily on the real Mary York and her relationship with her son, one cannot help but wonder if another influence on screenwriters was the character of Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, produced a year earlier. (The role won an Academy Award for actress Jane Darwell.) In her influence over her grown son (Tom, played by Henry Fonda) and her management of a large family, Ma Joad is much like Ma York; both films served as tribute to American motherhood as the backbone of the nation’s pioneering spirit in an era of strong patriotic and historic sentiment. (There are perhaps even stronger parallels between The Grapes of Wrath and The Dollmaker, and of the stalwart women, Ma Joad and Gertie Nevels, who attempt to hold their families together during the traumatic displacement forced upon each by the Great Depression.)
These films provide plenty of opportunity for students to scrutinize masculinity as well. It is the very essence of Deliverance—and by this point in the course students recognize that this film is the only one we view that depicts a mountain society devoid of women, and they are struck by how that makes the society appear far bleaker and more threatening. (Is it mere coincidence that Drew [Ronny Cox], the most sensitive of the four Atlantans, and the only one to connect with a local resident—through their banjo duet—is the only one killed by those locals?) There is no shortage of violence in these films, but only occasionally is it portrayed as endemic to mountain society—the decadent brutality in Deliverance; the good-ole-boy rowdiness and barroom brawls in several films, from Sergeant York to Songcatcher; a gut-wrenching execution of a slave in The Journey of August King; and vigilante retribution rendered by local hoodlums upon Montgomery Clift’s TVA agent in Wild River. Just as often, if not more frequently, the violence is instigated by outsiders, as in Matewan, or results from larger outside forces, such as the guerrilla warfare in Cold Mountain.
If one were to keep score, it quickly becomes apparent that mountain men are not nearly as appreciated by filmmakers as are mountain women. Of male protagonists, only August King, Inman, and Sergeant York qualify as heroes in terms of standing up for principles (and in each case, a woman is behind much of their motivation in doing so); in Matewan and Wild River, it is outsiders—pacifist union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) and TVA agent Chuck Glover—who serve as the moral compasses when confronted with wrongs that need to be righted. More often than not, the native men in these movies are seen as weak, irresponsible, rowdy, even emasculated, malevolent, or intolerant. Women emerge as the guardians, even the repositories, of values, of culture, and of tradition. This is particularly evident in Songcatcher, which features no fewer than six major female characters; it is probably no coincidence that it is also the only film in the course that was both written and directed by a woman, Maggie Greenwald. For the most part, these films affirm the final speech delivered by that archetypal screen matriarch, Ma Joad, in The Grapes of Wrath. Just before her upbeat declaration “We’re the people,” she notes how her family has responded to the challenges and crises they’ve faced in seeking work as California migrants: “A woman can change better than a man. Man, he lives in fits and jerks. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream.” And so it seems with Hollywood’s Appalachian men and women as well.
These films can trigger fruitful discussion of other key topics in Appalachian history, such as race, religion, and community. Slavery is central to August King, of course, although Annalees is the only black character with a speaking part in the film, and despite her tough, determined exterior, she remains a rather passive character whose fate remains fully in the hands of men. Racial divisions among labor forces are evident in the strikebreakers (led by James Earl Jones, no less) who so alter the dynamics of organizing efforts in Matewan, and in local white resentments over the New Deal policy of equal wages to black workers in Wild River. The sheer absence of racial issues can generate good class discussion as well, the most conspicuous example being the lack of African American characters in Cold Mountain, even though Ada Monroe is depicted as a slaveholder.11
Preachers appear as influential members of Appalachian communities in Sergeant York, Matewan, Cold Mountain, and Songcatcher, sometimes as social activists, sometimes as their moral consciences. Each of these films features at least one church scene that serves to reveal vital truths about local values and/or prejudices. It’s a fourteen-year-old preacher, Danny (Will Oldham) whose perspective provides the crucial narrative thread through which the Matewan massacre is told in hindsight. And, as the local community is forced to deal with its persecution of the mission workers in its midst, a church meeting makes up the climax of Songcatcher (which ends, rather improbably, with a woman shooting her abusive husband in front of the congregation).
Sergeant York opens with a church service, the primary point of which is the rowdy Alvin’s absence from it. His conversion experience, along with his quest for bottomland (and a marriage that’s contingent on that land), form the dramatic crux of the movie’s first half. “Folks say you’re no good ’cept for fightin’ and hell-raisin’,” says his sweetheart (Joan Leslie), “and I’m thinkin’ they’re plumb right.” Prodded by Pastor Pile (Walter Brennan) and the two women in his life, York quickly matures into a responsible adult, and his newfound faith spurs the pacifist convictions and the resultant moral struggle he confronts in becoming a soldier.
The sense of community is more sharply defined in some of these films than in others. John Sayles’s Matewan is certainly the epitome of community studies; in fact, I would argue that no other film has ever portrayed as complete and complex a portrait of a single community. Others, such as The Journey of August King, Sergeant York, and Cold Mountain, make the collective values and agendas of particular communities central to their protagonists’ own dilemmas and actions, though Cold Mountain does so far more superficially than the others; students notice that particularly when they compare the three films. All three, like Matewan, thus provide useful reference points for discussions of class differences, of shifts in power and powerlessness, of mob (or mere group) mentalities, and of how outside forces serve either to unite or to divide local residents.
Revealing too are characters such as August King, Inman, Gertie Nevels, and Annie Nations who for various reasons, either forced upon them or self-imposed, are alienated or removed from the communities of which they once were or could have been a part. The resulting tensions between these characters and those in whose midst they live can tell us much about the shifting dynamics within Appalachian society at various eras in its history.
Students become sensitized to the use of music and settings as barometers of how authentic an Appalachian experience filmmakers seek to capture on celluloid. With only two exceptions (Sergeant York, filmed entirely in Hollywood, and more famously, Cold Mountain, filmed in Romania), these films were produced on location in or near the regions in which they are set, and they are generally effective in making not only the mountain scenery, but mountain life—buildings; agriculture; flora, fauna, and other natural resources; and physical isolation or remoteness—integral elements of the highland experience.12
Nearly all these filmmakers use authentic music to add credibility to their productions and to enhance the sense of mountain life and culture—English ballads and folk tunes, gospel music and labor songs, and of course “Dueling Banjos.” Most hired established musicians from the region as either consultants or performers or both. It is interesting to explore correlations between the authenticity of depictions of Appalachia and the choices of music and the locales at which a movie is shot. It is obvious that Georgia’s Chattooga River is integral to Deliverance’s impact, but what effect does the banjo score have on the film’s tone and mood? How much do the blending of multiple musical traditions in Matewan reflect the multicultural components—Baptist, Italian, African American, and so on—that so characterized the workers’ struggle there?13 Are the relatively minor though egregious stereotypes and inaccuracies in Songcatcher ultimately redeemed by the filmmakers’ close attention t
o what most matters in the film—its music, so meticulously re-created under the supervision of Sheila Kay Adams? And what of the irony that Sergeant York, the most romanticized and stereotyped depiction of the region among these films and the only one in which no attempt was made to shoot on location or to incorporate mountain-based music, may have been the most authentic film of all? After all, it was made in consultation with Alvin York himself, who had not only full script approval but specified that Gary Cooper should portray him on-screen.14
Unlike the hillbilly images stressed by Jerry Williamson (through mostly different films than those discussed here), there is a pervasive sense in these films of Appalachians fighting back. They are constantly under siege and regularly exploited, and yet they never become merely victims. These characters don’t take their oppression lying down. Whether they’re fighting for property, for family, for community, for tradition, for culture or a way of life, or for their very lives, they all take on heroic qualities that make us admire their willpower, their courage, and their determination, sometimes against unbeatable odds. That this spirit is captured so effectively and through so many different stories and such a range of multifaceted characters brought to life in powerful performances is a point not often appreciated by those who have focused on the misrepresentations of Appalachia by outsiders—journalists, fiction writers, and playwrights as well as filmmakers. (Given the dominance of this view, it is no wonder that Deliverance has received far more attention from Appalachian scholars—and almost always in defensive mode—than nearly all the rest of these films combined.)
Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Page 47
