Diane Ladd (Mississippi) & Grace Zabriskie (Louisiana)

Diane Ladd (Mississippi) & Grace Zabriskie (Louisiana) Feb 11, 2023 1:19:38 GMT politicidal, mattgarth, and 8 more like this

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Post by petrolino on Feb 11, 2023 1:19:38 GMT

Mississippi ~ Louisiana : 🪱 'Delta' Diane Ladd & 'Amazing' Grace Zabriskie 🐊

Big Joe Williams And His Unique 9-String Guitar

Diane Ladd (born Rose Diane Ladner on November 29, 1935 in Laurel, Mississippi) 🍂

Actress and director Diane Ladd is the daughter of actress Mary Bernadette Ladner (née Anderson). Playwright Tennessee Williams was one of her cousins. Her daughter Laura Dern is also an actress (her father is actor Bruce Dern).

"Diane Ladd counts as her favorite women actors Bette Davis, Simone Signoret, and a trio of actors who epitomize American Method acting at its best: Geraldine Page, Joanne Woodward, and Kim Stanley. She shares with these women a strong, soulful, and gutsy presence. Ladd brings her own distinctive qualities to acting, among them a spirited playfulness with more than a soupçon of flamboyance."

- Carole Zucker, Springer

'Say! (Boss Man)' (1958) - Bo Diddley

Actor Ethan Hawke, who's from Austin, Texas, is also related to Tennessee Williams; he's currently trying to bring Williams' play 'Camino Real' (1953) to the screen.

"When you do something, when you do a part, especially based on reality, and then you discover that that person appreciates what you've done and you've succeeded, it is like a painting. Like having done a painting but nobody can see it really and know. I can't tell you the feeling, because my whole job as an actor is to fight for justice, to show you saint or sinner, so that we don't judge too quickly.
We judge often quickly in this world, we human beings. Do you have a car like I do? Do you drive the same car? Do you belong to the same club? What are you wearing? Who made that bag?

It's all a joke! It's all baloney. It's all about you. You are the book cover and what's your book like inside? You know, we got to start reading the books of each other."

- Diane Ladd, Eye For Film

'Chain Gang' (1960) - Sam Cooke

Diane Ladd is a member of Martha Coolidge and David Lynch's stock companies and she was once a key member of Stuart Rosenberg's company. Like Bruce Dern, she also has strong links to filmmaker Roger Corman who directed her in 'The Wild Angels' (1966); Ladd and Dern later headlined Martin B. Cohen's spin-off 'The Rebel Rousers' (1970). Ladd's worked with several directors who've worked alongside Corman including Bernard L. Kowalski, Martin Scorsese, Robert Towne and Adam Simon.

"For decades, I have been a fan of the life’s work of Edgar Cayce. I want to take a moment to express why I think his gift is important and what it still means to us today.
Although there are literally hundreds of books about Cayce’s life and work, his amazing psychic talent, his insights into hundreds of topics from personal spirituality and ancient mysteries to holistic health and personal guidance, what stands out for me is that he made it abundantly clear that each and every one of us has a special gift.
For some, that gift might be serving as a wonderful and supporting parent. Some find a talent with counseling or teaching. Others might find it in avenues as diverse as business or even nature. There are many roles that people find in the healing professions. In my case, the gift that called to me has been the Creative Arts. There is something that each and every one of us is called to do — a role that perhaps no one else can fill as well as we can.
Cayce’s life is, in part, the story of a regular individual who had incredible access to universal knowledge and information. It wasn’t a gift that he readily accepted, at first. In fact, he was very reluctant to take on the role of medical clairvoyant but it was the efficacy of the information, and the way that he could see that the information helped people change their lives for the better that convinced him that his gift was a role that he needed to take on to help so many others.
There is a difference, in my opinion, between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is something that is too often changeable or something that might be important one moment and gone the next. Wisdom, on the other hand, is something that is relevant forever and a day."

- Diane Ladd, 'Edgar Cayce : Your Body, Mind, Spirit Resource Since 1931'

'Hey, Western Union Man' (1968) - Jerry Butler

The state of Mississippi has produced pioneer country artists of great magnitude including Jimmie Rogers, Charley Pride, Hank Cochran and Tammy Wynette. A fine line in mellow jazz and soft soul music has emanated from the state, bringing artists like Rufus Thomas, Sam Cooke, Jerry Butler and Thelma Houston to the world, yet Mississippi remains particularly cherished for its deep-held blues tradition which includes a raw, confessional style known as "Delta blues".

"From impeccable food and one-of-a-kind music, to beautiful museums and exciting nightlife, Mississippi offers something for everyone."

- Holly Perkins, Culture Trip

'Paying The Cost To Be The Boss' (1968) - B.B. King

Mississippi musicians like Charley Patton, Big Bo Carter, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Robert Wilkins, Willie Brown, Louise Johnson, Son House, Skip James, Big Joe Williams, Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup, Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Roebuck 'Pops' Staples, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Big 'Shakey' Walter Horton, Elmore James, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Albert King, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, Guitar Slim, R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Junior Parker, Otis Rush, Jimmy Dawkins and Magic Sam helped establish the blues tradition.

'Mississippi Delta blues, also known as Delta blues, regional style of early 20th-century American folk music, centred in the Delta region of northwestern Mississippi. The pioneers of the style played a key role in developing the market for traditional blues recordings in the 1920s and ’30s, while the subsequent generation of Delta-born guitarists contributed to the rise of Chicago blues, electric blues, and the folk blues revival in the post-World War II years.'

- Britannica

'Is It Because I'm Black' (1969) - Syl Johnson

Mississippi has embraced its creative voices across the decades, from William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, to Jim Henson and Beth Henley. Today, Mississippian musician Hayley Williams brings the spirit of Mississippi to a worldwide audience online.

'Dislocation Of A Figure' by Clarence John Laughlin

🍃 Grace Zabriskie (born Grace Caplinger on May 17, 1941 in New Orleans, Louisiana)

Actress and artist Grace Zabriskie is the daughter of Marion Grace (née Zabriskie) who was related to pioneer industrialist James Zabriskie. Her father Tom Caplinger was the owner of the Cafe Lafitte in Exile, a bar located in the French Quarter of New Orleans that today claims to be the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the United States of America (along with the White Horse Inn in Oakland, California which has also operated since 1933). Writers frequented this bar including Louisianan Truman Capote and Mississippian Tennessee Williams.

'In 1954, author John Steinbeck wrote an article about Tom Caplinger and Cafe Lafitte for the Saturday Evening Post, describing Caplinger as "an uninhibited, unkempt scholar, whose laissez-faire policy of running a gin mill can only be termed unique."'

- Wikipedia

'Lil' Liza Jane' (1958) - Fats Domino

Grace Zabriskie is a member of Gus Van Sant and David Lynch's stock companies and she was once a key member of comic Tim Conway's company. Her career in film received a major boost when she was cast at the helm of a troubled spaceship in Bruce D. Clark's science-fiction fantasy horror 'Galaxy Of Terror' (1981) which was produced by Roger Corman.

"I have always, since early childhood, been a writer, an actor and a visual artist. I acted in a few things as a child in New Orleans, but preferred painting sets to acting in high school plays. My father, who had been an actor himself, was advised by friends from L.A. to keep me out of acting as long as possible, to make sure I had a normal life, growing up.
I majored in French and art in college, took no theatre courses, but was commandeered by seniors for their senior directing projects. I did a couple of plays in New Orleans as a young adult, and was pregnant with my daughter, Marion, when I played my last ingenue at the Gallery Circle Theatre in the French Quarter. For many years my writing was foremost at times, and then my visual art.
I did occasional plays in Atlanta as my children were growing up. I started doing commercial voice-overs for all manner of things, including expensive perfumes. Those were fun. Then I did a few movies.
"Norma Rae" was the fourth or fifth professional film project I did, and, long story short, moved to L.A. within a year of its release, as there were several agents interested in representing me, and I was ready to leave Atlanta."

- Grace Zabriskie, Twin Peaks Archive

'Lonely Drifter' (1963) - Johnny Adams

In the 1960s, Kerry Thornley, co-founder (with childhood friend Greg Hill) of the Discordianism movement, became obsessed with Grace Zabriskie.

"I have done a bunch of interviews in my life for roles that were just extremely bizarre. One of them involved having just killed my parents and now I was munching on the hand of my mother or some damn thing. I asked myself, How in the world would you get there? Can I imagine eating the hand of my mother? No. Killing my mother? No. Hating my mother enough to kill her? No, not really. The fleeting wish? Not really, but I'm a little closer. Can I imagine being very angry with her? Yes. You just have to keep going back until you find the place where you can come in, and work from there."

- Grace Zabriskie, Backstage

'Sufferin' With The Blues' (1964) - Irma Thomas

Ragtime jazz, voodoo grooves, swamp hoodoo and bayou blues contributed to the creation of a boogie woogie fever that enveloped Louisiana in the 20th century. Elements of classical music, folk and country melded together with local musical styles like blues, cajun and zydeco to cook up a hot sauce boogaloo stew that exploded across local airwaves in the 1950s.

"Mardi Gras parades, French pastries and Cajun culture may come to mind when you picture the Bayou State. But there’s more to the US state of Louisiana than parties and doughnuts."

- Nick Dauk, Culture Trip

'Everybody Dance' (1965) - Lydia Marcelle

Louisianan musicians like 'Drive Em Down' Willie Hall, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Lead Belly, Amede Ardoin, Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, Lonnie Johnson, Amede Breaux, Louis Armstrong, Leo Soileau, Cleoma Breaux, Tuts Washington, Red Allen, Champion Jack Dupree, Louis Prima, Silas Hogan, Mahalia Jackson, Smiley Lewis, Lightnin' Slim, Dave Bartholomew, Professor Longhair, Roy Brown, Paul Gayten, Canray Fontenot, Slim Harpo, Clifton Chenier, Joe Jones, Fats Domino, Lonesome Sundown, Queen Ida, Boozoo Chavis, Little Walter, Alvin Batiste, Rockin' Dopsie, Floyd Cramer, Lazy Lester, 'Mr. Personality' Lloyd Price, James 'Sugar Boy' Crawford, Johnny Adams, Earl King, Huey 'Piano' Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Guy, Dale Hawkins, Allen Toussaint and James Booker displayed the breadth, colour and diversity of the state's experimental musical palette.

'Cajun, descendant of Roman Catholic French Canadians whom the British, in the 18th century, drove from the captured French colony of Acadia (now Nova Scotia and adjacent areas) and who settled in the fertile bayou lands of southern Louisiana. The Cajuns today form small, compact, generally self-contained communities. Their patois is a combination of archaic French forms with idioms taken from their English, Spanish, German, American Indian, and African American (usually “Creole”) neighbours. Cajun separateness, though often their own preference, was also the result of the prejudice against them.
The word Cajun is today applied to cultural elements that did not originate with, nor do they necessarily correspond to, the Cajun people. The so-called Cajun cuisine reflects the mixture of cultures in Louisiana. Among its classic dishes are alligator stew, jambalaya, gumbo — actually a Creole dish, made with a roux — and crayfish (or other seafood) étouffée, served over rice. Many dishes are prepared with some variety of sausage, such as boudin or andouille (a smoked sausage made with pork), and tasso (a pork shoulder preparation borrowed from the Choctaw). Essential seasonings include filé powder (made from sassafras leaves), cumin, coriander, smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, and red pepper flakes.
Cajun music likewise shows a blend of several influences, including French, Creole, and Celtic songs. Cajun songs are usually sung in French. Typical ensemble instruments are the fiddle, the diatonic (button) accordion, the guitar, and spoons or the triangle. Tempos can range from a mournful waltz to a lively two-step, but, whatever the tempo, Cajun music is meant to be danced to. Scholars and aficionados distinguish Cajun music from zydeco, which is a development of older Creole styles and black popular music.'

- Britannica

'Get Low Down' (1966) - 'Curly' Curley Moore

Magnetic film performers who've emerged from Louisiana have included Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Henry, Faith Domergue, Garrett Morris, John Larroquette, Carl Weathers and Patricia Clarkson. Today, Louisianan Reese Witherspoon flies the flag, leading some classics fans to wonder if she's related to the state's great acting matriarch, Cora Witherspoon.

Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon (born March 22, 1976, New Orleans, Louisiana)

Reese Witherspoon - What do you call an alligator in a vest?

Twitter - An investigator.

{ : Reese Witherspoon speaks out ... : }

Hues ~ Sweat, Silt & Sin : 'Swamp Water' (1940s), 'Baby Doll' (1950s) & 'To Kill A Mockingbird' (1960s)

'Welcome to Swamp Lake : The locale of this story is the Okefenokee Swamp in the State of Georgia. Not so many years ago, its seven hundred miles of marsh and cypress were an unknown wilderness to the people who lived around its edges. They knew that its sluggish waters were filled with alligators and that its boggy forests harbored the deadly cotton-mouth snake. They feared these creatures, but much more they feared the unexplored vastness in which a man might disappear, never to be seen again.'

'You Talk Too Much' (1960) - Joe Jones

'Swamp Water' (1941) is a crime adventure based on a novel by Vereen Bell. Director Jean Renoir experiments with depth-of-field, illumination and perspective to create a fluid fever dream with a pressing atmosphere. The film is filled with painterly compositions but it's also extremely mobile and at once musical. The narrative develops itself into a scathing indictment of mob mentality (it's similar to William Wellman's 1943 lynching drama 'The Ox-Bow Incident' in this regard). Dana Andrews stars as a stubborn, principled man who defies his local community at every turn; in real life, Andrews was the son of a Baptist Minister, born in Mississippi and schooled in Texas.

"In 1939, Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) opened in Paris to a storm of derision from critics and audiences alike. Criticized as both silly and unpatriotic, it was eventually denounced by the French government as "demoralizing," and banned. This personal trauma, combined with France's surrender to Hitler in 1940, led Renoir (and many other European filmmakers) to an unexpected exile in Hollywood.

In 1941, Renoir signed a one–year contract with Darryl F. Zanuck's Twentieth Century–Fox studio, and after several false starts on other projects, he began production on a Dudley Nichols script, Swamp Water.

Renoir wanted to shoot most, if not all, of the film in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, where the story is set, but with the exception of several brief scenes shot on location without sound, Zanuck kept him tied to the studio backlot. Nevertheless, the final film possesses a visual authenticity and a striking empathy for its characters.

As with all copies of Swamp Water distributed to theaters in 1941, The Museum of Modern Art's original release print is tinted sepia, an unusual, though canny, aesthetic choice that heightened the film's rustic sensibility."

- Steven Higgins, 'Still Moving : The Film And Media Collections Of The Museum Of Modern Art'

"Dana Andrews knew himself that ''Swamp Water" would be important to his career. In June 1941 he took “a fast cross country airliner,” to Waycross, Georgia to film on location according to the Waycross Journal-Herald of June 25, 1941. "It’s my big chance," laughed young Andrews a bit groggy after his first plane trip but fascinated by it all to such a degree he hadn’t been able to sleep.”

Thirty-three years later, in his mid-60s, in another phase of his career when performing dinner theatre in “Best of Friends” at the Alhambra Theatre, Jacksonville, Florida, Andrews took his wife on a side trip to the Okefenokee. He wanted to show her where he had filmed some scenes for “Swamp Water”. He was recognized in a Waycross diner. (Waycross Journal-Herald, February 13, 1974).

Dana Andrews had been the only principal actor to film in the Okefenokee, not counting his hound dog in the film, “Trouble.” According to the Journal-Herald, Trouble also arrived on the same plane with Mr. Andrews, “‘sick as a dog’ from flying so high” in these days before jet planes with pressurized cabins.
Director Jean Renoir, in his first American film, and his assistant Irving Pichel arrived as well, with Mr. Pichel taking over the location shooting when Renoir went back to Hollywood, where of course most of the film was shot on sets. It’s an unusual film, a precursor perhaps to Renoir’s “The Southerner” (1945) about Texas sharecroppers, which we’ll probably get around to sometime or other. In both, this esteemed French director, with an impressive body of work in French cinema behind him, and who was also the son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, tackles a brooding American landscape. The swamp, with its gothic imagery, is a place of escape and freedom, but also a claustrophobic prison, a place of gruesome death."

- Jacqueline T. Lynch, 'Swamp Water'

"Jean Renoir’s films were underestimated when they first came out. They were unconventional, complex, and so energetic and technically daring that few noticed their intricate structure. They were often dismissed as rough, not fully achieved artistically. The generation that came to the cinema in the ’60s and ’70s (perhaps the richest and most diverse era in European cinema) recognised Renoir as an ancestor who had already made the kind of films they admired or were setting out to make themselves, and justly hailed them as masterpieces. Critic David Thomson recalls: “The Renoir retrospective at London’s National Film Theatre in 1962 amounted to the clearest revelation of the nature of cinema that I have ever had.”
For Alain Resnais La Règle du jeu (1939) “remains, I think, the single most overwhelming experience I have ever had in the cinema.” He continues: "When I first came out of the theatre, I remember, I just had to sit on the edge of the pavement; I sat there for a good five minutes, and then I walked the streets of Paris for a couple of hours. For me, everything had been turned upside down. All my ideas about the cinema had been changed. Whilst I was actually watching the film, my impressions were so strong physically that I thought that if this or that sequence were to go on for one shot more, I would either burst into tears, or scream, or something. Since then, of course, I’ve seen it at least fifteen times — like most filmmakers of my generation."
An unfortunate future result of this adulation, coming during the days when film was starting to become academically and intellectually respectable, was that Renoir’s films would ultimately become enshrined as “classics,” worthy objects for academic study, rather than sources of vital emotional and intellectual experience. Now, in an era when producers, financiers and commissioning editors exhibit the most abject conformity, and exciting work is locked up in a ghetto far away from the mainstream lest it should spread infection, the wheel has come full circle. Lip service is paid to Renoir as a master, but few encountering his work for the first time seem able to recognise or appreciate its humour, passion or significance. We are all the poorer.

Great art is alive. It informs and generates passions: witness the response to the recent New York production of Arturo Ui, a play by Renoir’s friend Bertolt Brecht. La Règle du jeu, made on the eve of war to illustrate the notion “We are dancing on a volcano,” has, sadly, as much or more to say about the modern world as it said about the world of 1939, when it aroused such passions as to lead to its being effectively booed off the screen, then banned by the censorship as “demoralizing”. This was clear even before 9/11, though before then the threat seemed more distant, and probably ecological. Renoir’s vision of the modern world, with its intrusive media reporters, in which “Everyone lies…, drug company prospectuses, governments, the radio, the cinema, newspapers…” and of a society absorbed in its own conventions, hypocrisies and cover-ups, peopled by individuals who, though often charming and likeable, have been made complacent by affluence, is as up-to-date, radical and potentially disturbing as ever. It is, still, an “exact description of the bourgeois of our time.” In 1939 audiences were outraged. Now, they don’t seem to notice, or care."

- James Leahy, 'First Movement : Polemic'

"Upon his return to France in 1953, Jean Renoir was no longer the revered figure he had been at the point of his departure in 1940. On the other hand, the French critical establishment remembered his string of 1930s masterpieces, and The Rules of the Game was just beginning to enjoy rediscovery. André Bazin, probably the most influential critic in postwar France, used his editorship of Cahiers du Cinéma to remind readers of Renoir’s past achievements and to support his new films, aided by the young critics Bazin was gathering who adored Renoir and who would eventually pay homage to him in their own films: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer.

Until his last film, in 1969, Renoir never stopped experimenting with special effects, deep focus, sync sound, camera movement, offscreen space, color, multiple cameras — all in the service of destroying the visual cliché in favor of the real. Deep focus, in particular, is such an important element of Renoir’s visual style because it creates a screen space within which all the members of his ensemble can find their proper places. It also represents a connection between the filmmaker and his father’s generation of painters: figures are not simply posed in front of a landscape, they inhabit it.

More generally, the vast amount of innovation and experimentation in Renoir’s work allowed the filmmaker to expand his seemingly endless ability to find new variants on cinematic realism. As Tom Milne has written, regarding Renoir’s ability to turn on a dime between the comic and the tragic, there is the central conflict in his work between theater and reality, desire and fantasy. We can go further and point to the alternations between objective reality and subjective reality–the reality that exists and the potential reality of imagination and thought."

– David Pendleton, The Harvard Film Archive

"Jean Renoir stands on his own: the greatest of European directors: very probably the greatest of all directors — a gigantic silhouette on the horizon of our waning century."

- Orson Welles, The Los Angeles Times

'Jailhouse' (1967) - Aaron Neville

Dana Andrews also features in John Ford's 'Tobacco Road' (1941) which is based on a story by Erskine Caldwell and stars Gene Tierney as feral girl Ellie May Lester. In 'Swamp Water', Anne Baxter co-stars as feral girl Julie. According to filmmaker William Wellman who directed Baxter in the revolutionary gender-bending western 'Yellow Sky' (1949), the tomboy Baxter was happiest when she was digging around in the dirt. Both Caldwell and novelist Vereen Bell were born in Georgia, as were southern gothic authors Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, James Dickey and Harry Crews.

"There are many people in this country who feel strongly about "Tobacco Road," But whatever one's personal reaction to that fabulously long-lived play, the fact cannot be denied that it is a brutal, morbid but strangely trenchant chronicle of human degeneration. Underneath its filth and grossness one catches a glimpse of utter tragedy. Not so in Mr. John Ford's screen version; the story is played for laughs. And although the film is introduced with a solemnly sentimental exploration of the wasted Georgia back lands, of the once respectable families whose pride and property have gone (as the narrator actually puts it) "with the wind," the mood very soon becomes one of bucolic levity and remains on that note throughout."

- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

Dana Andrews & Anne Baxter take mapping directions from Jean Renoir

In the black comedy 'Baby Doll' (1956), Elia Kazan uses intrusive angles and a relentless eye to serenade a trio of schemers, shooting inside a decaying mansion with high contrast photography. It's aggressive, startling, suggestive and inflammatory but also fun. This cult picture has proven to be extremely influential over time; few films can lay claim to having inspired the look and style of a major musical movement. The writer Tennessee Williams was from Mississippi, home of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.

"Upon its release in 1956, the film Baby Doll provoked virulent threats from protestors, bans from religious leaders, and flippancy from film critics who dismissed it as a lurid tale of a virgin child bride, her sexually frustrated husband, and her smarmy lover. Since then film historians have continued to revisit Baby Doll as significant to Hollywood’s censorship struggle; yet the film itself has failed to find a respectable place in the canon of American cinema and as such has rarely been the subject of detailed critical analysis.

A collaboration between writer Tennessee Williams and director Elia Kazan, the story portrays the nineteen-year-old married virgin Baby Doll Meighan (Carroll Baker) who must consummate her marriage the following day on her twentieth birthday, as long as her husband Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden) upholds his end of the bargain: to provide her with a comfortable life. The wrinkle in his plan arrives in the form of Sicilian Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach), who has overtaken the local cotton-gin business."

- Michele Meek, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review

"In 1956 this film gained a notorious reputation because, as some of you may know, it was condemned by Cardinal Spellman of St. Patrick’s in New York — and it was later found out that he condemned the film without having seen it! And when he was asked about it, Cardinal Spellman said, “Well, I don’t have to drink polluted water. Do you have to have a disease in order to know what it is?” Now, his condemnation of the film [was] in 1956, remember, not now. A condemnation now might have given the film a box-office buzz, but in 1956 it hurt the film, and the film ended up not being a box-office winner. But I would say looking at the film 54 years later, not that Cardinal Spellman was right — God forbid, he was not right — but that the film is naughty. It really is a naughty, sexy, funny black comedy, and it really was, sexually speaking, ahead of its time.

Just consider some of the imagery in the film: there’s an ice-cream cone scene, there’s a pumping well, there’s a double-seated swing, there are whips, there’s a Peeping Tom husband, Baby Doll sucking her thumb in a crib, a man in black—there are all kinds of sexual overtones and undertones, covert and overt, and be on the lookout for it. The film is not innocent. It is a film about a seduction, made by one of the most seductive directors in the history of movies, Elia Kazan, and one of the most sexually voracious writers, Tennessee Williams.

So this is a movie with sex on its mind, and perhaps word had gotten to the good Cardinal Spellman that the film was a bit overly titillating for 1956. Looking at it now, and even at the time, this is one of the great films. One of the greatest films ever made in America. There are four extraordinary performances in this film: Of course Carroll Baker as Baby Doll, Eli Wallach, Karl Malden, and Mildred Dunnock — the four of them give the kind of immaculate, full-bodied, Method-drenched performances that Kazan was an absolute master of. The film is about a young woman’s coming of age. It’s also about a change in the Old South."

- Foster Hirsch, 'Conversations At The Cinematheque'

"This was supposed to be just a small independent film shot in the South — no publicity, nothing. And then, of course, we had the big scandal when the Catholic Church banned us. Nobody expected it. All of us just went into shock. Kazan, Williams, Eli, Millie — everybody was in shock. Because we didn’t expect it, we just thought it was a nice little black-and-white film — it was considered a sleeper.

Oh it is naughty, sure — for any time! That swing scene is good for any time!"

- Carroll Baker on 'Baby Doll'

'KAT BJELLAND (kăt'byĕl' and) n. 1. Baby-doll-dress-wearing guitarist and singer/songwriter for Minneapolis misfit punk trio Babes in Toyland

2. Former member of Sugar Baby Doll, which also included L7 bassist Jennifer Finch and Courtney Love of Hole

3. Writer of aggressive, intensely personal lyric poetry

4. Subject of the book Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock & Roll Band – vt. [Slang]

5. a) To scream, Friday the 13th-style over edgy, shimmery layers of guitar pop (the Babes' latest album, Nemesisters) b) To screech [Wow, she really bjelland that last line] see HOWL.'

- Chris Mundy writing in Rolling Stone

"So, it turned out 'Baby Doll' was, like, so important. Kat Bjelland, Courtney Love, Carla Bozulich, Kim Shattuck, Corin Tucker, they all wore baby doll dresses performing up on stage, one time or another. It was an alternative rock revolution, inspired by a little black-and-white film everybody seemed to have forgotten."

- Kelly Tanner, Alternative Stage

Eli Wallach comforts Carroll Baker in 'Baby Doll'

The inspirational novel 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is taught in schools all over the world and it's sometimes accompanied by a screening of Robert Mulligan's classic film adaptation 'To Kill A Mockingbird' (1962). In 1995, Mulligan's film was listed in the National Film Registry, and in 2003, the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) the greatest movie hero of the 20th century. 'Mockingbird' author Harper Lee was from Monroeville in Alabama, home state of Zora Neale Hurston, Walker Percy, Tom Franklin and Michael McDowell.

"A Pulitzer Prize winner when it was published in 1960, Harper Lee's first book, To Kill a Mockingbird, went on to sell more than 30 million copies. Yet most Hollywood studios weren't interested in bringing Lee's story of racial intolerance in the Deep South to the big screen.

According to Robert Mulligan, who directed the film for Universal, "the other studios didn't want it because what's it about? It's about a middle-aged lawyer with two kids. There's no romance, no violence (except off-screen). There's no action. What is there? Where's the story?"

Well, as Mulligan so deftly demonstrates, the story is in the characters, their failings and fragility, their heroism and nobility of spirit. It's in the depiction of heart-breaking cruelty and heart-warming humanity. It's in the innocence of a child's world overshadowed by the evil that adults do."

- Marc Lee, The Telegraph

"Set in the fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, in the 1930s, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' is simply about black and white. It is a gentle portrayal of the extremes of racism suffered by black people, and the way that white liberals like lawyer Atticus Finch negotiate the criss-cross of fine lines through their society. Scout and Jem, the children of Finch, episodically live through three years during which their father takes on the case of his lifetime: defending Tom Robinson against a rape charge brought by Mayella Ewell. The story is the children's daily lives: their fascination for the people on their street, particularly the hermit Boo Radley, their relationships with their neighbours and their schoolfriends as it slowly dawns on the town that Atticus is not only going to take on the case of a black man accused of rape, but is actively going to defend him.

What was it about the Southern politeness, the heat, the black and whiteness of the book, that went to my core? It was a society I recognised, in England and in Sri Lanka. I first read the book in 1977. That summer, I had witnessed the National Front march down Lewisham High Street. I was told I couldn't be the Princess, or, come to that, any of the Charlie's Angels, in the playground, because brown was ugly. My parents were teachers, Methodists, socialists. They did not acknowledge racism, or talk about it. They were above that: my father was training to be a local preacher, and had a good line in Atticus-style aphorisms. My parents built our lives for us through our community: Forest Hill in the 1970s was in many ways similar to Maycomb. But also the heat, the niceties, the ways in which people did things in the Alabama of the book, reminded me of the Sri Lanka my grandmother introduced us to when our parents took us for rare visits.

Reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird' gave me a taste of a place I belonged to on the other side of the world, but translated from a language I barely understood to a Deep South English."

- Roshi Fernando, 'Book Of A Lifetime : To Kill A Mockingbird, By Harper Lee'

"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet."

- Truman Capote

'To Kill A Mockingbird'

30 Films : Southern Gothic ~ Bawdy Blues ~ Hothouse Melodrama

“Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Because of its dark and controversial subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) became the first Southern Gothic writer to fully explore the genre’s potential. Many of his best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic.
While Poe is a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner (1897–1962) arguably looms the largest. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. On top of this, Faulkner’s complex, modernist, labyrinthine language creates in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation.”

- Thomas Ervold Bjerre, ‘Southern Gothic Literature’

01) 'They Won't Forget' (1937 - Mervyn LeRoy) / Novel by Ward Greene (North Carolina)

02) 'Swamp Water' (1941 - Jean Renoir) / Novel by Vereen Bell (Georgia)

03) 'Tobacco Road' (1941 - John Ford) / Novel by Erskine Caldwell (Georgia)

04) 'The Southerner' (1945 - Jean Renoir) / Novel by George Sessions Perry (Texas)

05) 'Intruder In The Dust' (1949 - Clarence Brown) / Novel by William Faulkner (Mississippi)

06) 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1951 - Elia Kazan) / Play by Tennessee Williams (Mississippi)

07) 'The Member Of The Wedding' (1952 - Fred Zinnemann) / Novel by Carson McCullers (Georgia)

08) 'The Night Of The Hunter' (1955 - Charles Laughton) / Novel by Davis Grubb (West Virginia)

09) 'Baby Doll' (1956 - Elia Kazan) / Play by Tennessee Williams (Mississippi)

10) 'Written On The Wind' (1956 - Douglas Sirk) / Novel by Robert Wilder (Virginia)

'Give It Up' (1969) - Lee Dorsey

“Nice ladies have asked me why I write about difficult people in depressing circumstances. Because many of us Southerners would rather read about the aberrant among us, the lowly and damned. Maybe it’s because we’re always on the bottom and wouldn’t mind looking down on someone else for a change. “Southern Gothic” spread from the Gothic literary movement of the 19th century, when romance novels were dressed up in dreary ambience and set in spooky castles and decrepit manors, shot through with excess, fear, and madness. The best of the lot — classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, Wuthering Heights, and the stories of Edgar Allen Poe — used fantastical devices and aberrant behavior to get at the ugly truth all trussed up in pomp and formality.

Aristocratic Southern society, in its post-bellum heyday, erected a similar façade of gentility and custom to hide the way people really lived. Southern writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams contrasted these customs with grotesque caricatures and shocking imagery to amplify the contradictions of Southern society. Some examples that spring to mind are Faulkner’s rotting corpse in the frilly upstairs bed from “A Rose for Emily” or Flannery O’Connor’s low-class country people, running roughshod over civilized white dignity and vice versa.

In his stage dramas, Tennessee Williams put fine Southerners on their worst behavior, and I especially love the Gothic sensibilities in Elia Kazan’s film “Baby Doll,” an adaptation of Williams’s one-act play “27 Wagons Full of Cotton,” in which two feuding cotton gin owners in the Mississippi Delta use a lusty, virginal teen as a bargaining chip.

As for my own, I’m not convinced that Southern Gothic is completely viable in a modern-day story. With the flattening of the South, the old aristocrats have all moved to the city. Some stubborn hold-outs and strange relatives have stayed behind in dilapidated mansions, but the rest have been bulldozed to make room for trailer parks and Wal-Marts. Today Southern gentility has been replaced by conservative politics, which is anything but chivalrous.

The decay of the Old South is aggressively apparent. The latest best examples of Southern Gothic are all twenty years or more old. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil comes to mind. John Berendt’s true-crime saga is set in Savannah, Georgia, which may be the South’s most Gothic locale after the capital, New Orleans, with its famously Goth Anne Rice and suicidal John Kennedy Toole. The novels of Harry Crews are rife with this Southern grotesque, especially his 1978 autobiography, A Childhood.”

- Jamie Kornegay, ‘The Evolution Of Southern Gothic’

11) 'Cat On A Hot Tin Roof' (1958 - Richard Brooks) / Play by Tennessee Williams (Mississippi)

12) 'God's Little Acre' (1958 - Anthony Mann) / Novel by Erskine Caldwell (Georgia)

13) 'The Long Hot Summer' (1958 - Martin Ritt) / Novel by William Faulkner (Mississippi)

14) 'Sound And The Fury' (1959 - Martin Ritt) / Novel by William Faulkner (Mississippi)

15) 'Suddenly, Last Summer' (1959 - Joseph L. Mankiewicz) / Play by Tennessee Williams (Mississippi)

16) 'The Fugitive Kind' (1960 - Sidney Lumet) / Play by Tennessee Williams (Mississippi)

17) 'The Young One' (1960 - Luis Bunuel) / Novel by Peter Matthiessen (New York)

18) 'Cape Fear' (1962 - J. Lee Thompson) / Novel by John D. MacDonald (Pennsylvania)

19) 'The Intruder' (1962 - Roger Corman) / Novel by Charles Beaumont (Illinois)

20) 'Sweet Bird Of Youth' (1962 - Richard Brooks) / Play by Tennessee Williams (Mississippi)

'Everybody Gets To Go To The Moon' (1969) - Thelma Houston

“Has any other 20th century American author with so little published output – virtually everything she wrote for publication and a few things that she didn't fit neatly into a single Library of America volume – had such an enormous influence on American literature? Mary Flannery O'Connor published just two novels, "Wise Blood" (1952) and "The Violent Bear It Away" (in 1960, three years before her death at age 39 from kidney failure brought on by lupus) and two collections of stories, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1955) and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1965).

Her influence on literature over the last half-century is enormous, from Alice Walker (who read O'Connor's stories "endlessly" while in college and was "scarcely conscious of the difference between her racial and economic background and my own") to novelists as radically different in temperament as Walker Percy and Cormac McCarthy. The wonder is that it took half a century for her to get a definitive biography, Brad Gooch's "Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor."

More than any other American fiction writer of her time, her influence has gone beyond literature to the realm of American popular culture. Tommy Lee Jones, who wrote his college thesis on O'Connor, seemed to be directing under her spell in his film "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada." Randy Newman and Bruce Springsteen have both recorded albums that sound like background music to her world; Springsteen admitted he wrote and recorded his album "Nebraska" while reading O'Connor. The chilling ending of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is echoed in the title song from that album.”

- Allen Bara, ‘A Southern Gothic Legend Is Hard To Find’

“It’s always the church, the church, the church. I think because it was the centre of our existence. I think the thing I remember the most was the tall steeple at the end of the corner and the red bricks of the church. It was your second home. You lived there every Sunday and Friday. We saw every wedding every funeral in town because we lived next door so there was always a show going on. Someone was always getting married or getting dead so it was an enormous centre of my childhood life.”

- Bruce Springsteen, The Catholic Herald

"Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."

- Flannery O'Connor

21) 'To Kill A Mockingbird' (1962 - Robert Mulligan) / Novel by Harper Lee (Alabama)

22) 'The Cardinal' (1963 - Otto Preminger) / Novel by Henry Morton Robinson (Massachusetts)

23) 'Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte' (1964 - Robert Aldrich) Novel by Henry Farrell (California)

24) 'Mudhoney' (1965 - Russ Meyer) / Novel by Raymond Friday Locke (Mississippi)

25) 'Hurry Sundown' (1967 - Otto Preminger) / Novel by Katya Alpert Gilden (Maine) with Bert Gilden

26) 'Reflections In A Golden Eye' (1967 - John Huston) / Novel by Carson McCullers (Georgia)

27) 'The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter' (1968 - Robert Ellis Miller) / Novel by Carson McCullers (Georgia)

28) 'The Beguiled' (1971 - Don Siegel) / Novel by Thomas Cullinan (Ohio)

29) 'Deliverance' (1972 - John Boorman) / Novel by James Dickey (Georgia)

30) 'Wise Blood' (1979 - John Huston) / Novel by Flannery O'Connor (Georgia)

'The Patriotic Flag Waiver' (1969) - Dr. John

'There's a southern accent, where I come from
The young 'uns call it country
The yankees call it dumb
I got my own way of talkin'
But everything gets done, with a southern accent
Where I come from
Now that drunk tank in Atlanta's
Just a motel room to me
Think I might go work Orlando
If them orange groves don't freeze
I got my own way of workin'
But everything is run, with a southern accent
Where I come from ...'

- Tom Petty (born October 20, 1950 in Gainesville, Florida)

'Ils Ont Volé Mon Traineau' _ Cléoma Breaux & Joe Falcon

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