Lane Smith – Movie Musings

Overcoming adversity and racism are themes not always successfully balanced in Benton’s family epic

Director: Robert Benton

Cast: Sally Field (Edna Spalding), Lindsay Crouse (Margaret Lomax), Danny Glover (Moze Hardner), John Malkovich (Mr Will), Ed Harris (Wayne Lomax), Amy Madign (Viola Kelsey), Yankton Hatten (Frank Spalding), Gennie James (Possum Spalding), Lane Smith (Albert Denby), Ray Baker (Sheriff Royce Spalding), Terry O’Quinn (Buddy Kelsey), De’voreaux White (Wylie)

Partially based on his own childhood memories, set in Texas 1935 as the Depression grips America, Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart is a tear-jerking tale of overcoming adversity, mixed with an earnest attempt to look at Southern racism. It’s often a little heavy-handed in the former, and a little fudged (if very well-meaning) in the second. Places in the Heart is a frustrating film with a genuinely engaging, engrossing story that, for various reasons, the film never manages to quite bring into focus, for all the undoubted skill in its making.

Sally Field plays Edna Spalding, a widow after her sheriff husband (Ray Baker) is accidentally shot and killed by a drunken Black teenager (promptly brutally lynched by the Klan the same day). With the bank pushing to foreclose on the farm she can no longer afford, poverty and homelessness seem certain until a chance meeting with Black drifter Moze (Danny Glover) offers hope. Moze is an experienced cotton worker, and he coaches Edna through getting the fastest cotton crop of the season (and the $100 prize for that feat). Edna and her children throw themselves into the task, and she starts to build a new family with Moze and blind war-veteran lodger Mr Will (John Malkovich). But will weather, the Klan and the banks allow it?

Benton’s film is, in many ways, a master-class in constructing a framework of highly impactful scenes. Places in the Heart is carefully paced with metronomic precision to give us an impactful, powerful scene roughly every ten minutes. From the shockingly sudden shooting of Sheriff Spalding and Edna cleaning his deceased body on her dining room table it gives us scenes that build perfectly to showcase high impact moments. Confrontations, tornadoes that place children in peril, triumphant confrontations with arrogant bankers and facing down corrupt cotton sellers, inevitable fireworks after a disastrous double date and heart-rending racist attacks. It’s a film almost completely constructed of tent-pole moments, to illicit maximum impact.

However, where it fails are the moments in-between. It’s so focused on nailing those big moments, that it allows the emotional journey that should inter-connect them (and make the story truly satisfying) to falter. The clearest example is Malkovich’s blind Mr Will: in no more than three scenes he goes from a man bitter at his disability, dumped on Mrs Spalding by a family who can’t be bothered to care for him, resenting her ‘hooligan’ children to risking his life to becoming their surrogate uncle. It’s a tribute to Malkovich that he sells this lightning fast emotional turn-around, but a more patient film would have spent this change feel organic (rather than, essentially, relying on a tornado act-of-God to complete the arc).

Similarly lightning fast work covers the bond between Edna and Moze: swiftly we go a few scenes from her greeting him with slightly less racist discomfort than her sister, to Jean-Valjean-like claiming she asked him to deliver to a friend the silver spoons he steals from her house, to him becoming another surrogate uncle to the kids and treated in the house like an equal (he notably doesn’t cross the door threshold for the first hour of the film). Now you can admire the efficiency here – for example, the film is good at establishing without fanfare the rope aids hung up around the farm to help Mr Will (vital for a later confrontation). But you can also regret that it is so keen to get to the emotionally cathartic moments, it skims on showing us the journey (after all, a one hundred mile walk seems less impressive if you only see the start and end).

Part of the problem is Benton keeps dragging us away from these engaging plotlines to wallow in a side-plot involving Mrs Spalding’s sister and her wayward husband’s affair with a school teacher. This storyline barely intersects with events on the Spalding farm, in no way serves as a commentary on events there (a braver film would have contrasted it with a romantic relationship between Edna and Moze, which you can be sure would not have been as genteelly resolved as that affair in a South as racist as this). All it really does – for all the efforts of Crouse (Oscar-nominated, presumably due to her husband-slapping confrontation scene), Harris and Madigan, it’s meandering, dull and feels pointless even while you are watching it.

And it always takes us away from the real interest on the farm. The depiction of triumph over adversity is fairly straight-forward – with a host of hissable strawmen, led by Lane Smith’s patronisingly sexist banker – but it’s told with such professional skill it can’t help but land. Who doesn’t enjoy a woman who never believed she amounted to anything, suddenly discovering an inner-fire and sense of purpose she never knew. You may notice the similarity to Sally Field’s other Oscar-winning role (Norma Rae). Her performance here is cut from the same cloth, only this time she can’t find the same naturalness: she is frequently mannered, precise and actorly when she should feel raw, grounded and real.

The real daring interest here is the way the film tries to address racism. You can’t deny there is a certain romanticism in its looks at the Ol’ South, but its balanced with putting on screen something of the real horrors of racism. Perhaps even more shocking than the sudden shooting of Sheriff Spalding is the sight of young Wylie’s disfigured body dragged behind a truck full of gun-totting racists. (And that this is objected to, not for the violence, but for the poor taste of dragging a dead man to Spalding’s wake). Needless to say there is no investigation or punishment for this crime whatsoever.

Moze’s story captures some of the perils of being Black in Depression-era Texas. Danny Glover, in the film’s finest performance, perfectly captures both the anger of the unjustly oppressed and the fear (and shame of that fear) that death could come from the wrong word or looking at someone the wrong way. Moze constantly shuffles himself to the back, casting his-eyes down and changing the timbre of his voice to something slower and more humble when confronted with white men of power. It’s markedly different from the warmth, decency and sharp opinions he shows with people he trusts. And Places in the Heart’s most appalling moment is when he is confronted with the white-hooded face of the South’s ‘defenders’.

At times this sometimes over-balances a film that, at heart, wants to be optimistic. (As you can tell, all too clearly, from its bizarre, overly demonstrative, deliberately dream-like ‘we-can-all-be-the-same’ ending which must have felt meaningful to Benton but to me feels shockingly trite). Moze’s suffering is shown with real compassion, but he is still presented as a character who magically shows up at exactly the time he is needed and then disappears when his task is done. It’s a film that imagines a utopia where a desperate mother, a blind white man and a Black man can learn all men are equal, while struggling to accept that this is nestled in a land riddled with Klan racists where the n-word is so casually used it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. In the end cold, hard reality is a little too much for Places in the Heart to digest.

Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel and Richard Pryor are working joes who want to stick it to the man in Blue Collar

Director: Paul Schrader

Cast: Richard Pryor (Zeke Brown), Harvey Keitel (Jerry Bartowski), Yaphet Kotto (Smokey James), Ed Begley Jnr (Bobby Joe), Harry Bellaver (Eddie Johnson), George Memmoli (Jenkins), Lane Smith (Calrence Hill), Cliff DeYoung (John Burrows), Lucy Saroyan (Arlene Bartowski), Chip Fields (Caroline Brown)

America doesn’t really have a director like Ken Loach. It’s one of the points raised on Indicator’s excellent (and essential) blu-ray release of Paul Schrader’s near Marxist drama about blue-collar car workers in Detriot. There aren’t many (or indeed nearly any) American films I can think of that take the stance of the working man like this one – or as angry, pissed off, furious and, in the end, as lacking in hope as this one. Which makes it sound like the sort of film you’d run a mile from actually seeing. Well you’d be wrong: this is a blistering, intelligent, witty drama crammed with brilliant scenes and great performances. On so many levels it’s something really quite special. It’s a shame no one saw it (I blame the publicity campaign – I mean look at that rubbish poster that basically suggests you are in for Pryor stand up routine).

In a car factory in Detriot, our heroes work in varying jobs on the production line. All of them are unhappy with their lot and feel they get precious little support (or concern) from the union that runs the shop floor. Zeke (Richard Pryor) is furious at the lack of equality and opportunity, as well as defrauding the inland revenue with a (literally) childish scheme to try and make ends meet. Jerry (Harvey Keitel) is drifting through his life, unable to afford the dentistry bills to give his daughter the braces she needs. “Smokey” (Yaphet Kotto) is an angry proto-anarchist who just wants to stick it to the man. When the three of them realise there is a safe (probably) full of cash in the union office, they decide to steal it. However, rather than cash, they find the safe full of accountancy records of the union’s dodgy money laundering arrangements with organised crime. The men decide to offer to sell it back to the union – and open up for themselves a world of trouble…

Blue Collar is a hard to categorise film. It’s a brilliant hotch-potch of several genres. It opens like a workers film, crammed with an angry wit (the opening half hour is very funny) with several scenes that acutely skewer the petty clashes of working life as well as the corner-cutting financial desperation of men trying to make ends meet. The opening scenes have the edge of a raw black comedy to them, mixed with observational realism. Then the film subtly changes over, becoming first through near-caper (the hilariously bungled attempt to steal the safe), into politics as the union and the men begin to shift alliances, into a straight classic 1970s conspiracy thriller (complete with late car chase and an outre death for one of the characters) before finally wheeling back round into a tub-thumbing condemnation of the “divide and conquer” plans of the ruling classes.

That’s a lot for any one film to try and squeeze into a less-than-two-hour runtime, but Schrader manages it with aplomb, juggling this mix of styles and genres with such effective skill that you almost don’t even notice as the film grows increasingly darker and more dangerous as it progresses. The eye it has for the rhythms of factory life seems perfectly judged, and the mixture of hacks, place men, agitators and uncaring union men feels absolutely perfect. It also brilliantly captures, in his dialogue, the natural force (and crudeness!) of working men’s conversation, with a brilliant ear for the semi-articulate astuteness and poetry it can reveal.

Schrader builds the pressures up in the film subtly and brilliantly, so that it seems both sudden and perfectly natural as the three men begin to buckle and turn on each other. This is where the Marxist message of the film starts to come in: even when working men have the whip-hand, their superiors will find a way to make them turn on each other, to make them unable to throw off the shackles that bind them as they are unable to work together. On top of this Schrader throws in a brilliant analysis of everyday racism and racial tension (all the union reps and their foremen are of course white), and there is an unspoken edge of racial divide in every conversation – indeed racism is just one of many weapons, the film argues, used to turn working men against each other. This really comes out in the film’s final scene, where two characters who had only warmth and affection for each other at the start are driven to turn on each other with an onslaught of racist fury.

Of course that clash probably carries a lot of its force from the fact that the three leads couldn’t stand each other on set. Pryor, Keitel and Kotto were each told that they were effectively playing the lead in the film and were unaware until signing on of the presence of the other actors. This billing tension was fuelled by their incompatible working methods: in particular Keitel, a theatre trained actor, preferred multiple rehearsals before takes while Pryor, a stand up comedian, preferred minimal or no rehearsal – and usually peaked on the second or third take. Throw in the drugs (that Pryor certainly was indulging in) on set and the three actors reached the point where they could barely stand to be in the same room together (one of the film’s best sequences, a single shot where they sit on the sofa for a long take and plan their next move, was only filmed because the three actors arrived separately, didn’t speak until the camera rolled, and then immediately left).

Did this edgy fury boil over into their performances and give them an extra fire? Certainly I don’t think any of them were better than they were here. Kotto has such an electric, bubbling fury to him, an anarchist’s delight at danger, that he feels like a force of nature. Keitel hadn’t been so gentle, reserved and bemused by the world for years, as an oppressed everyman. But the real electricity comes from Richard Pryor is a goddamn revelation as Zeke. What Schrader did so brilliantly here was to capture all the fire, energy and angry of a typical Pryor stand-up performance and channel it into a dramatic structure. An early Zeke rant against the unions is essentially a Pryor stand-up performance, and Pryor’s whole performance buzzes with an improvisational energy.

Zeke is the film’s key character. At first he seems the weakest and most desperate of the three men, the one most likely to fall into the role of victim. But as the events take hold of the three men, his character deepens and develops to reveal a shrewdness, a realism and even a coldness that the other men don’t possess. Unlike them, he sees events not as a chance to make a quick buck but as a genuine moment to change his life for the long term. And, underneath this, an understanding that as a black man opportunities for him are going to be few and far between. An electric confrontation between him and Jerry late in the film on Zeke’s porch hums with his fury driven realpolitik, Zeke’s understanding that opportunities are there to be seized and that sometimes the price paid is high.

Blue Collar gave Schrader a break-down when he made it. But its’ a masterpiece of political cinema, largely because it never really feels like a political film. Instead it feels above all like a domestic drama of friendship marred that explodes into a thriller., But it’s the understanding of the social situation of these men, of the reasons behind their actions and the intelligent analysis behind it, that makes it really work. It also gives you characters who feel real and in whom you invest, blessed as well (for all their clashes) with three career-best performances from the leads. It’s a brilliant film and in a just world should be seen as a landmark piece of film making.