Category: 1960s

In the days following the Civil War, Union colonel John Wayne leads his men west to gather and sell wild horses while his counterpart Confederate colonel Rock Hudson, disgusted with the actions of carpetbaggers in the south, gathers his family and neighbors to caravan to Mexico to help the French in their invasion. The two groups meet on their disparate paths south. As a fan of Hudson, he was the main draw for me to watch this film, but from a modern perspective, his character is fairly dislikable in the film. In fact, the film glorifies the Southern cause to uncomfortable degrees. I preferred John Wayne’s character here over some of his other work I’ve seen, but even he was uncomfortably sympathetic to the Confederates.    

Richard Widmark is the captain of a naval destroyer which civilian photojournalist Sidney Poitier has recently boarded. The new ship’s doctor Martin Balsam soon discovers that Widmark is a strict commander where illness is just not allowed among his crew not even the slightest headache. This unrelenting maniacal control carries over to other arenas when the ship crosses paths with a Soviet submarine. Because of Poitier’s recent death, I had checked this out as it was one of his few works at my public library that I hadn’t yet seen. While he gives his usual solid performance, he mostly serves as a foil to Widmark’s masterful lead and his Ahabian pursuit of the Russian vessel.  

Set in 1920s Kansas and based on writer-director Gordon Parks’s semi-autobiographical novel, this film centers on Kyle Johnson as a teenager who is quickly forced into adulthood through the events he experiences over the course of a year. Over the short period of time, he is exposed to issues of first love, sex, race, and injustice and how to navigate each as a Black man in small town America. His actions and development are in sharp contrast to those of his friend and later foe Alex Clarke whose path crosses but whose experiences widely deviates from those of Johnson. Overall, the film doesn’t overdramatize the events or force a particular perspective for the viewer. It just offers one man’s realistic, and likely uncommon, experience growing up in middle America.

I don’t know why there were so many of these delinquents being inspired by an idealistic teacher films in the 60s (nor their revival in the late 80s-early 90s) but there is so much sameness to them that they become fairly indistinguishable. Sidney Poitier is the teacher here, a Guianese immigrant to the UK who has taken the job temporarily while he awaits an engineering position. Poitier is always appealing and it’s interesting to see him here as a teacher when he was one of the thugs in the similar Blackboard Jungle. The moralizing lessons and condemnation of non-traditional ways can be eye-roll-y at times, but it’s sweet to see the students change, particularly the females, as they develop more confidence and awareness in themselves.