On the small screen
On our cross country trip this year, we've brought along a black DVD folder. Before we began the trip we made labels with
state names and went through our collection of DVDs to fill the slots. For some
states, like California, New York, Illinois, etc., there were a multitude of films
to choose from. For a few states, we could find nothing (we're looking at you,
Delaware).
For a few other states, like
Mississippi, we only had one film in our collection that would work. We hadn't
watched My Dog Skip for years, when
our kids were, you know, kids. A period film, set during World War II in the
Mississippi town of Yazoo City, the movie was actually made in Mississippi
(though it wasn't actually made during WWII). It starrs Frankie Muniz (of Malcolm in the Middle) as a lonely
little boy who grows to manhood with the help of a brave little dog.
There were no churches in the film,
not much in the way of spiritual content, but there are certainly admirable
people with values of courage, honesty and integrity. So thumbs up for that.
There are a number of films with
Mississippi in the title. Mississippi
Masala features a very young Denzel Washington as an American who falls in
love with an Asian Indian immigrant; it examines the interactions between their
respective families. Mississippi Burning
is an exciting Gene Hackman study of the Civil Rights Movement which offers the
strange historical interpretation that the real heroes of the time were in the
FBI.
In our travels through Mississippi, we
were able to visit the childhood home of Tennessee Williams in Columbus, MS. Baby Doll, a steamy story based on a
short play by Williams and directed by Elia Kazan with Carroll Baker in the
title role and This Property is
Condemned, one of Robert Redford's first films, were both set and filmed in
Mississippi. But two other films based on Williams work, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , featuring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor,
and Summer and Smoke, featuring
Laurence Harvey and Geraldine Page, are set in Mississippi but actually filmed
in other places.
We also visited Oxford, the home of bestselling
writer John Grisham. Grisham has written about a variety of places in the
South, but his first novel, which was made into a film with Matthew
McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, and Samuel L. Jackson, was set and filmed in
Mississippi.
Oxford is also the hometown of another more critically acclaimed writer, William Faulkner. The Reivers, a comedy starring Steve McQueen and based on a novel of Faulkner's, was set and filmed in Mississippi. A wonderful low budget film scripted by Horton Foote and starring Robert Duvall, Tomorrow, is based on a short story by Faulkner and is set and filmed in Mississippi. The Long Hot Summer with Paul Newman and Orson Welles, based on some of Faulkner's short stories, was set in Mississippi but not filmed there.
And finally, a film set and filmed
in Mississippi: the Coen Brothers' O
Brother Where Art Thou will be featured later this year in Movie Churches
during Depression Month. We have to pace ourselves.
On
the big screen
Our first day in Mississippi was
also the last day of Black History Month. We went to the Cinemark Theater in
Pearl, Mississippi, to see Race, a
film about the Olympic exploits of Jesse Owens. There is a reference to the
church in the film: when Jesse proposes to Minnie, the mother of his young
child, they wonder if a Christian clergyman will perform the ceremony.
Apparently, one did.
Owens was the star who outshone the
Nazis in the 1936 Olympics. At the Cinemark, far less impressive stars were functioning as door handles.
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