Several of the novels by Louisiana-born African American writer Ernest J. Gaines have been adapted into acclaimed tv movies, including his 1971 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman with Cicely Tyson in the title role in 1974, and Gaines's 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning A Lesson Before Dying with Tyson, Don Cheadle, Mekhi Phifer and in 1999.

Charles Fuller (who won Pulitzer Prize for his play "A Soldier's Play" and received an .Oscar-nomination for screenplay of it )adapted The Sky Is Gray starring Cleavon Little in 1980, and also adapted Gaines's 1983 novel A Gathering of Old Men in 1987, in a production directed by the very literary German director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, The Young Törless, Ogre, The Legend of Rita, Circle of Deceit, etc.).

In an obituary of Richard Widmark (1914-2008) "A Gathering of Old Men" was mentioned as one of the best roles of his later years. He is, in fact, very good as a good ole boy Louisiana sheriff in the early 1970s. The movie also stars Holly Hunter and Lou Gossett, Jr, and a cast of aged/aging (ca. 1987) black character actors.

The story

The movie opens with an overweight black man named Charlie (Breaux) on foot is being chased through fields (over hill and dale) by a similarly chunky white man (ludicrously named "Beau" (Richard Whaley)) with a shotgun from a tractor seat. The black man ducks into a shack. The white man dismounts, reiterates that he is going to kill the black man, and is walking toward the shack with the shotgun aimed at the doorway.

A shot rings out, and the white man is dead. Neither of the two black men inside are at all sure that the days of lynching blacks for killing whites (among other alleged offenses) is over. Neither thinks that self-defense will be accepted by a local jury. So the older one. Mathu (Lou Gossett, Jr.) tells the younger one to run. Mathu will stay and claim responsibility for shooting the ragin' Cajun.

Candy Marshall (the ever-feisty Holly Hunter) sends out an appeal to the men who lived on the Marshall land, that had been a plantation when her ancestors owned their ancestors to gather with their recently fired shotguns. She is going to say that she shot Beau to protect Mathu. All the older black men are also going to say they shot him. And all have recently fired shotguns.

I thought: "Another movie in which the darkies are save by a white character with a conscience?" -- Amistad, Beyond Rangoon, Biko, just to start the alphabet of these. Candy feels the obligation to defend "her" Negroes, especially Maju who seemingly did much to raise and shape her.

Relatively quickly, it becomes apparent that there are complications of class. The Marshalls have a sense of noblesse oblige as well as some sense of still owning and needing to manage the lives of the descendants of their slaves. The Marshalls patronize the darkies and are contemptuous of poor white Cajuns. In turn, the Cajuns despise the airs put on by the Marshalls and are virulently determined to ensure that blacks remain in a position inferior to theirs.

The times they are a'changin'. Many of those both black and white are more aware of this than Candy is -- even Sheriff Mapes (Widmark) who is accustomed to being obeyed, but now can keep neither the darkies nor his deputy (Dave Petitjean) in line and is miffed that the day he had planned to spend fishing it taken up with a standoff with a geriatric camp of armed black men (along with Candy and her journalist fiancée and the prospects of vigilantes arriving, once Beau's father, the even more rotund Fix (Stocker Fontelieu) hears that a black man has shot his son.

Things are further complicated by Beau's younger brother being a football star at LSU on a very integrated team.

Both Sheriff Mapes and Candy Marshall get comeuppances. He takes his with better grace. Fix is bewildered by what his surviving son and a particularly vicious racist who is not a member of the family advocate. Stocker Fontelieu has a particularly impressive scene of grief and frustration in which he reminds me of an elephant after a family member (in this instance, a very rogue elephant!) has been slain.

Evaluations

"The book is better" according to many who have read it. At least in being richer in character and event and voice, this is almost always what those who treasure a book say of its screen adaptations. (I say if of "The Tin Drum" and "Ogre," but not of "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" -- though admittedly Böll's is not a big novel.) Not having read the book, I have no opinion on the matter.

I do think that the cast is both excellent and does very well. In that Gossett has been woefully underused since his Oscar-winning turn in "An Office and a Gentleman," I wish he had a bigger, showier part, but he has great authority in his underplaying. Hunter does hot and bothered and willful very well. Irony is not one of the qualities most immediately associated with Richard Widmark on screen, but he could do wry and bemused very well, and is entertaining without condescending to the character here. (My fellow Minnesota native does not attempt a Southern accent, but is laconic and incisive -- good Minnesota characteristics that fit well a long-time Louisiana sheriff who has earned the respect of everyone.)

Among the old men who gather, Woody Strode stands out as a veteran (WWI). He recalls returning from overseas in uniform and being told in no uncertain term not to get any ideas, that at home he was still a n___er and had better remember his place (at the bottom of the social order in rural Louisiana).

The story of armed resistance is considerably more comic than my other Memorial Day fare (The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Rendition), but, like them, shows considerable toxicities of persecution and domination. The American two have more hopeful endings (than the Anglo-Irish one), but all three show high risks of refusing to go along with injustices. Persons die in all three. And I think that all three are worth watching... And all three show persons rising to the challenge of occasions that should not have occurred.

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD