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 POLITICAL
FILM SOCIETY MEETING
On Saturday, June 5, the Political Film Society will hold
a meeting at 7 p.m. to reword legal documents in response
to a letter from IRS regarding the Society’s application to
be a tax-exempt organization. The meeting, to be held at 8481
Allenwood Road, Los Angeles, is open to all.
GOOD
TIMES IN MISSISSIPPI ARE FEATURED IN RECENT FILMS
In Cookie’s Fortune, director Robert Altman
takes us to Holly Springs, Mississippi (a town halfway between
Memphis and Tupelo) for a mystery caper. Although filmviewers
and two of the actors know who is responsible for a death,
the police do not, but the real mysteries are wrapped up in
the Faulknerian characters, their foibles, and the symbolism
of what we see and wish we could understand from Altman’s
clues. Cookie (played by Patricia Neal) is the one who dies;
she commits suicide. Her nieces Camille and Cora (played by
Glenn Close and Julianne Moore) believe that they are the
heirs, and Camille insists that they hush up the shame of
suicide by faking a break-in, including breaking the glass
of a cabinet where guns are kept. However, the door of the
gun cabinet keeps opening on its own and cannot close. Other
clues just do not make sense to the police, but Cookie’s honest
and helpful black caretaker Willis Richland (played by Charles
Dutton) of the house is arrested because he appears to have
blood on his shirt because he was holding a bag with catfish.
The white chief of police (played by Ned Beatty) does not
believe that the black man is guilty; when asked why, he replies
that they have gone fishing together. But the black man must
stay in jail while the case is investigated, so he is joined
by the chief of police for a game of scrabble and great-niece
Emma (played by Liv Tyler) who offers to be Willis’s cellmate.
Affirmative action has provided black and white police officers
working harmoniously as if Holly Springs had none of the racial
antagonisms experienced elsewhere in Mississippi. Indeed,
a sign "In 1897 nothing happened here" seems to suggest that
the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing segregation, Plessy
versus Ferguson, was never implemented in Holly Springs with
Jim Crow legislation.
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In the
end, the police exonerate Willis. We discover that Cookie,
the nieces, and Willis have common grandparents; some turned
out white, other black, and that Cookie has willed her estate
to a black man whom the white nieces hope to placate so that
they can move into Cookie’s house. A final mystery is not
knowing whether they all ended up living together. The tagline
of the film, "Welcome to Holly Springs . . . home of murder,
mayhem and catfish enchiladas" is the most delightful spoof
of all in a Mississippi that someday may grow beyond distinctions
of race and class. MH
Life,
directed by Ted Demme, presents a different Mississippi—where
black men are imprisoned whether guilty or otherwise. Different
except in one fascinating respect—Ned Beatty is again cast
as an unprejudiced white prison superintendent. The film focuses
on two inmates of a prison farm, played by Eddie Murphy and
Martin Lawrence, New Yorkers in Mississippi to pick up moonshine
during Prohibition, both of whom are framed for murder by
a white sheriff trying to cover up the fact that he is the
murderer, and they are sentenced to hard labor for life at
a prison farm somewhere near Greenville. Nevertheless, they
prove to be an "odd couple," bantering and bitching for some
fifty years. While they miss events of the century that liberate
blacks outside the prison farm, they find enjoyment by being
themselves. The film shows a more contemplative Eddie Murphy,
who is neither "Coming to America" nor "The
Distinguished Gentleman" but instead has turned into
a Bill Cosby or a Spike Lee, telling us that there is something
more important than accommodating or fighting racial injustice,
for the film’s tagline is "Share it with someone you love."
MH
NEW
WORKING PAPER AVAILABLE
Thanks to Stefanie L. Martin of the University of Washington,
the Political Film Society now offers a new publication, entitled
Fiction and Independent Films: Creating Viable Communities
and Coalitions by Reappropriating History. Click
here to see the Society's other publications.
NOMINEES
FOR 1999
EXPOSÉ:
Three Seasons
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