I don’t know what it is about the Deep South. My spouse has
noted that the honeysuckle accent that dominates the sound track of many movies can sound charming on the lips of
a woman. But a man with a Southern drawl generally conjures up the image of an
overall-wearing, sixpack-chugging good ol’ boy. In short, a member of the
Beverly Hillbillies.
There’s been so much stereotyping of the South at the movies
that I was raised to be skeptical of all of it. On the one hand, movies have
given us the romantic South, full of hoop skirts, white-pillared plantations,
loyal darkies, and tragic loss on the field of battle. (See, of course, Gone With the Wind.) By contrast,
there’s the racist South: bigotry and lynchings galore. That’s one reason why Deliverance (both James Dickey’s novel
and the 1972 film directed by John Boorman) is so refreshing. The story of Deliverance contains no plantations and
no racial strife. It’s a man-against-nature tale, in which four Atlanta city
slickers who are out for a lark in the great outdoors find far more than they
bargained for while on a river-rafting trip in Northern Georgia.
It happens that I have visited the gorge where the movie was
made, a place where the late Burt Reynolds legendarily risked his life so the
cameras could get a realistic shot of a man going over the falls in a canoe.
While touring what’s called the Red Clay Country of North Georgia, my husband
and I kept being asked by locals if we planned to have lunch at the Dillard
House Inn. It sounded like a must-try, so we stopped in for what turned out to
be one of the great meals of my life. (Biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, ribs,
stewed tomatoes, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans, corn on the cob,
strawberry shortcake, and of course sweet iced tea, all for a ridiculously low
price.) In the restaurant lobby, there was a showcase full of memorabilia relating
to the Deliverance cast and crew, who
had happily made the Dillard House their home away from home.
So I have a soft spot in my heart (and of course my stomach)
for Deliverance, and the passing of
Burt Reynolds has helped remind me of the movie’s many charms. Aside from the
vivid performances of Reynolds and Jon Voigt, Deliverance introduced to the screen the wonderful Ned Beatty, an
appropriately Southern actor who began a great career when he took the role of
the unfortunate Bobby Trippe, he who runs afoul of some genuine hillbilly
types.
Another aspect of Southern life shows up in Steel Magnolias, the 1989 film (directed
by Herbert Ross) based on a hit Broadway play. This is the small-town South of
middle-aged white ladies who hang out at the local beauty parlor to gossip, to
bicker, and to support one another when the chips are down. They have funny
names (M’Lynn, Truvy, Ouiser, Annelle, Clairee) and they’re played by some of
Hollywood’s finest (Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah,
Olympia Dukakis), all of them clearly having a fine old time. There’s lots of
humor, but also a highly serious plot strand involving M’Lynn’s newlywed
daughter Shelby (a very young Julia Roberts) and the medical condition that may
wreak havoc on her pregnancy. As in the somewhat similar Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), laughter and tears prettily co-mingle,
with Southern Sisterhood proving to be powerful indeed. Just to make it quite clear that these folks are without
racial bias, I noticed in crowd scenes the occasional strategic black face.
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