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Post by petrolino on Feb 3, 2018 2:18:05 GMT
Southern Gothic : ‘Swamp Water’ / ‘Baby Doll’ / ‘Mockingbird’
Last year, the British Film Institute published the results of a survey to find readers' favourite Southern Gothic movies and they accompanied this list by drawing up a top 10 of their own. Their oldest selection was 'Swamp Water' (1941), the film with the highest number of votes among those the BFI writers didn't include themselves was 'Baby Doll' (1956), and their banner production was the evergreen family classic 'To Kill A Mockingbird' (1962). You can read the full article in the link below if you're interested (it got me thinking) ... “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’
“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’
"I actually started writing when I was a kid and kept at it a lot of years. When I was really young, I read a book called Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolff - that was one of the books that got me excited and made me want to become a writer. So I pretty much thought of myself as a writer my entire life. But I married younger and kids were being born and I had to make a living and I wasn’t selling short stories and novels for a lot of years, so I worked as a carpenter and later on me and my sons had a painting business. But I still thought I would break in to publishing and then I did with a short story. Then after that it sort of got weird and seemed to happen really quickly, after a short story came out in the Georgia Review and an agent called me. I’d been trying to get an agent for some time, but most agents seemed like they weren’t interested in you unless you were already selling. I had really been going about getting published the wrong way. I’d write a story and send it to the New Yorker or the Atlantic or Harpers or Playboy and they’d reject it. But then I started sending to the quarterlies and college magazines and the very first story I sent in was published. It wasn’t long after that, that the fella who bought my story for the Georgia Review had another job as an acquisitions editor for a small press and he called me up wanting to know if I had a novel and naturally I did. Eventually, the company he worked for, MacMurry & Beck, put out The Long Home. But I always wanted to be a writer, it was the only thing I could picture myself being. I was never interested in being a cop or a fireman or an astronaut or anything like that. I always thought being a writer was the highest thing that you could aspire to do."
- William Gay (born October 27, 1941 in Hohenwald, Tennessee)
'My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy' - Dolly Parton
'Swamp Water'
'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.'
Dana Andrews & Anne Baxter take mapping directions from Jean Renoir
'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. 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 Wellman, the tomboy Baxter was happiest when she was digging around in the dirt. Both Caldwell and novelist Vereen Bell was born in Georgia, as were the authors Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, James Dickey and Harry Crews. "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'"It’s another facet that makes Yellow Sky so interesting to watch – the gender lines become blurred when it comes to Mike (Anne Baxter) and Stretch (Gregory Peck). In two separate, but pivotal scenes (the rape scene and the aforementioned shootout), they both save each other from possible death. Unlike most westerns, Mike’s character doesn’t suddenly turn into that of “damsel in distress.” If anything, it’s Stretch who becomes the damsel! Once he falls in love with Mike, therefore respecting her, his gang loses respect for him. Without Mike’s protection, he would be a dead man since it’s hard to fight when there are five against one. The roles have reversed and it’s an interesting path for William Wellman to go down, but it’s certainly one that he treaded down before. Although the genres and situations are different, his 1937 film, A Star is Born is another movie that has similar gender relations. The up-and-coming actress (Janet Gaynor) becomes a star, while the once-famous husband (Fredric March) is reduced to the role of Mr. Vicki Lester. In order to save him, she must give up her own career and she doesn’t do it because she has to–she does it because she loves him. Yet, the literal death of her career becomes a figurative one for him. It’s heartbreaking to watch and for a director that was nicknamed, “Wild Bill”, he certainly had a sensitivity for relationships and how they work."- 'Yellow Sky' reviewed at The Roadshow Version
Gene Tierney hangs off Charley Grapewin in 'Tobacco Road'
"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"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
'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 (born March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia)
Anne Baxter holds up Gregory Peck in 'Yellow Sky'
'Uncle June And Aunt Kiyoti' - Kristin Hersh (born August 7, 1966 in Atlanta, Georgia)
'Down In The Willow Garden' performed by Kristin Hersh
'Baby Doll'
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. “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
"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] 1 To scream, Friday the 13th-style over edgy, shimmery layers of guitar pop (the Babes' latest album, Nemesisters) a) 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
"The whole idea in Bastard Out of Carolina was to give you a working class family that had all the flaws, but to also give you the notion of real people and not of caricatures. A lot of working-class fiction or pseudo-working-class fiction gives you dismissive caricatures, people who drink and whore and kill each other and are funny about it. I wanted my characters to be charming, so charming they wake you up in the night. That, for me, is political fiction. It takes you out of yourself, it makes you brood on it, it makes you worry about what happens after the book is over."
- Dorothy Allison (born April 11, 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina)
Carroll Baker in 'Baby Doll'
'Mississippi Delta' - Bobbie Gentry (born July 27, 1944 near Woodland in Mississippi)
'When It Comes Down To It (Do It)' - Minnie Riperton
* TRIVIA *
"Baby Doll Rock" progenitor Lydia Lunch's band Teenage Jesus And The Jerks released their seminal punk record 'Baby Doll' on 7" vinyl in 1979. Lunch later formed the band Harry Crews with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and drummer Sadie Mae, taking their name from novelist Harry Crews. Their album 'Naked In Garden Hills' was named after a Crews novel published in 1969.
'Mockingbird'
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 (born September 30, 1924 in New Orleans, Louisiana)
'To Kill A Mockingbird'
'Hit Or Miss' - Odetta
'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)
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