Folks from the South ponder things that other people don’t care about. Aaron Wilburn, Southern Culture 2008
In Southern films there will be one single defining feature – it’s going to be hot. Stinking hot. Friggin’ hot. Rich Hall’s The Dirty South ***** BBC 2010
What’s Body Heat but a remake of Double Indemnity with sweat? ibid.
The Long Hot Summer ... In the Heat of the Night ... Mississippi Burning ... ibid.
The true South – it’s not all gallant men and magnolias, nor is it all rednecks and Bible thumpers. But the film interpretations of its people, races impoverished, unsophisticated, almost always seem to paint it that way. ibid.
The motto of the Lost Cause is – The South’s Gonna Rise Again. ibid.
If a filmmaker has made you feel the South he has achieved something remarkable. ibid.
Suddenly Last Summer: Catherine Hepburn plays a decaying Southern matriarch who attempts to have her niece committed to a mental asylum and lobotomised. ibid.
And that’s the South in a nutshell – it cannot escape the stigma of losing the Civil War. ibid.
The South itself is a memory play. ibid.
Hollywood treats the South like dirt. ibid.
What kind of people actually celebrate inbreeding, retardation and reverse evolution? And why? ibid.
The hillbilly was invented by northern newspaper men and other fantasists are a kind of antidote to civilisation. ibid.
The stereotype of the fighting feuding hillbilly embarrassed the northern elite. ibid.
No-one sold more novels than ... Erskine Caldwell. ibid.
In Tobacco Road a sheer-cropper’s daughter offers her body in exchange for a turnip. ibid.
What Erskine Caldwell was trying to do was to portray the abuse of the Southern industrial worker and the disintegration of the family through the ravages of poverty: viz God’s Little Acre 1958, directed by Anthony Mann ibid.
The image of the southerner as an icon of ridicule was now firmly cemented in American consciousness as a fly in amber. ibid.
Intruder in the Dusk is the first film to actually treat the South realistically. ibid.
What it does have is Tennessee Williams. ibid.
A Streetcar Named Desire is set in a two-room apartment in New Orleans. ibid.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Burl Ives plays Big Daddy, he is a plantation owner who has also got terminal cancer ... A metaphor for the decline of the old South. ibid.
What Williams did was to give the South a dimension of feeling, he made it nasty and sexy and dirty and psychotic and illicit. ibid.
Sun Studios ... Some of the greatest artists in the history of music have recorded in this five-hundred-and-forty-square-foot room. ibid.
Elvis played rockabilly, and rockabilly caused its listeners to go manic. ibid.
They had no idea what Jerry Lee was about to stir up ... Jerry Lee Lewis was a shit-kicker. ibid.
Rednecks, racism and religion. ibid.
In the mid-fifties in America the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the all-white section of the city bus. ibid.
By the end of To Kill a Mockingbird six-year-old Scout Finch has learned a valuable lesson. ibid.
In The Heat of the Night ... depicting its people as universally racist. ibid.
Sydney Poitier was there first. ibid.
The Klansman starring Lee Marvin and Richard Burton co-starring O J Simpson. ibid.
Southern prejudice as a cinematic construct was a no-brainer for Hollywood and an easy leap for viewers to make. ibid.
Easy Rider ... It’s lazy, it’s self-agrandising, it’s not remotely anti-Hollywood. ibid.
2The chain-gang film is the perfect embodiment of individual versus institution – Cool Hand Luke. ibid.
Cool Hand Luke ... How much more Biblical do you want to get? ... One of the greatest anti-institutional films of all time. ibid.
What Reynolds managed to do was to reclaim the Southerner sense of humour. ibid.
No southern film has made more of an impression than Deliverance. ibid.
What Hollywood has uniformly failed to do is to capture the cultural wealth of the South, and its natural beauty and its hospitality. ibid.
At the dawn of the 1970s a new sound emerged from the American deep south ... This generation of bands would transform America. Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga, BBC 2016
Days after [Martin Luther] King’s death, the 20-year-old Gregg Allman wrote God Rest His Soul. ibid.
Towards the end of the decade there was an explosion of counter-culture rock music on the east and west coast of America. ibid.
Lynyrd Skynyrd – that year Alan Walden left Capricorn after the Allman Brothers debut failed to explode and struck out on his own. ibid.
With Fillmore East, the Allmans had finally broken out of the South and onto FM radio with a huge hits album. ibid.
Al Cooper produced Lynyrd Skynyrd’s debut album Pronounced. ibid.
Capricorn snapped up a number of southern rock bands. ibid.
The southern rock sound was now moving beyond the deep south and across the sunbelt. ibid.
ZZ Top from Texas, Black Oak Arkansas, the Atlanta Rhythm Section and the Ozark Mountain Dare Devils were spreading the gospel. ibid.
Sweet Home Alabama was a game-changer. ibid.
A southern rock classic: Freebird. ibid.
Capricorn records folded in 1979. ibid.
The Allman Brothers Band reformed in 1979. 10 years after the plane crash, the surviving members of Lynyrd Skynyrd reunited. Both bands record and perform to this day. Phil Walden successfully relaunched Capricorn Records in the 1990s. He died in 2006. ibid.
His name was Kane. He had a horse. Django Unchained ***** 2012 starring Jamie Foxx & Christoph Waltz & Leonardo DiCaprio & Kerry Washington & Samuel L Jackson & Don Johnson & Walton Goggins & James Remar & Dennis Christopher & James Russo et al, director Quentin Tarantino, song
Kill white folks and they pay you for it? What’s not to like? ibid. Django
And after a very cold and very profitable winter Django and Dr Schultz came down from the mountains and headed for Mississippi. ibid. caption
I am that one nigger in ten thousand. ibid. Django
This movie will set the industry back fifty years. Go home. Tennessee Williams, allegedly to customers in queue to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
They told me that there’s a streetcar named Desire. A Streetcar Named Desire ***** 1951 starring Marlon Brando & Vivien Leigh & Kim Hunter & Karl Malden & Rudy Bond & Nick Dennis & Peg Hillias & Wright King & Richard Garrick & Ann Dere & Edna Thomas et al, director Elia Kazan, opening scene
Daylight never exposed so total a ruin. ibid. Blanche
So much confusion in the world. ibid.
An animal’s habits. There’s even something sub-human about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by. ibid.
No matter what happens we’ve all got to keep on going. ibid. woman
Why did you call Gooper’s kiddies ‘no-neck monsters’? Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 1958 starring Paul Newman & Elizabeth Taylor & Burl Ives & Judith Anderson & Jack Carson & Madeleine Sherwood & Larry Gates & Vaughn Taylor, director Richard Brooks, Brick to Maggie
You can’t even stand drinking out of the same glass, can you? ibid. Maggie to Brick
Why can’t you lose your good looks, Brick? Most drinking men lose theirs. Why can’t you? I think you’ve even got better looking since you went on the bottle. ibid.
I feel like a cat on a hot tin roof. ibid.
Uncle Brick got drunk and broke his leg. ibid. little girl
Big Daddy. Now what makes him so big? His big heart, his big belly or his big money? ibid. Brick to Maggie