Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #17: Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

Jeremiah Johnson is, quite simply, a movie about Jeremiah Johnson, one of the most legendary mountain men of the old American West. Going west to tough it out in the gold and fur trades, he somehow got into a blood feud with the Crow. He earned the nickname “liver-eating Johnson,” based on the rumor that he would cut out the liver of each Crow warrior he killed. The movie doesn’t include the liver part, so don’t worry about any violence in that respect.

Jeremiah Johnson is based on two books, the non-fiction Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson and Vardis Fisher’s historical novel Mountain Man, with a few inventions of its own. The real Jeremiah Johnson’s life is sketchy in areas, with gaps often filled by possibly legendary inventions and embellished facts. The movie definitely adjusts his beginnings. He’s simply portrayed as a Mexican War veteran, when in real life he actually deserted and changed part of his name. The movie likely does this to make him start out as a more innocent and out-of-his-depth man.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #16: 12 Years a Slave

 

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen, is one of the more in-depth looks at what it was like to be a slave. It’s based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black living in New York who was attracted by a fiddling job in Washington DC, only to be drugged and wake up in a slave pen. He found himself transported along with other kidnapped blacks (and a lot of slaves who were also abducted or were being resold) to New Orleans. For the next 12 years (1841-1853) he served under several masters, experiencing different degrees of slavery. Eventually he found a sympathetic white Canadian, Samuel Bass, who got word of where he was to his family, and Northup was freed. Understandably, he became a prominent abolitionist.

There is actually a debate about the veracity of Northup’s memoir. The debate arises form several passages which seem to express white views of slavery and race and others which had uncanny similarities to other slave narratives. The explanation for these bits is that Northup wrote his memoir via dictation through a white writer. The white writer likely decided to make some alterations to make the book more sellable.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #15: Amistad (1997)

 Steven Spielberg finally makes it to my watchlist with Amistad. Amistad is one of his less known movies and thus also his most underrated. It’s a high-stakes court drama, based on the story of the Spanish slaver Amistad. As in real life, the slaves on board manage to slaughter most of the crew. The two surviving Spaniards, however, don’t take them back to Africa, but land in Connecticut. With the slave trade legal for Spain, but not America, there is a long legal battle. President Martin van Buren, seeking reelection, is worried that if the slaves are freed he’ll lose the southern vote, so he twice has the trial done again in a higher court. He also has to deal with the Spanish government, which insists that the slaves are their property and should be punished for killing most of the slavers.

The movie is chockfull of real historical characters and follows the events closely for the most part. The main character is Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), a man kidnapped and sold into slavery. The real Cinque actually had a different name that was anglicized into his more familiar one, but the movie simplifies things. His defense lawyer is Roger Sherman Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), who was a well established legal figure in real life, but is turned into an ambitious low-level one to give us more of an underdog story. The big hurdle for the defense team is the language barrier, but gradually this is overcome with the discovery of James Covey (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a sailor who was born in West Africa and knows some of the different tongues.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #14: The Alamo (2004)

 

Among the more filmed moments of American history is the Battle of the Alamo. To those who don’t know the story, Mexico, trying to popular their largely unsettled northern territories, invited Americans to depart the United States and come to Texas. Naturally, letting thousands of Protestants, many with their own unique beliefs of what a society should be, flood into a Catholic held land caused many social problems. I can’t claim to understand the dizzying Mexican political scene of the 19^th Century, which was constantly shifting and saw frequent revolts and revolutions. However, the United States best remembers the Texas Revolution of 1836, which featured the legendary last stand of under 200 men at the Alamo in San Antonio. With no option for surrender, they fought to the last man and inflicted over thrice their number in Mexican casualties.

If I include Disney’s Davy Crockett series, I’ve seen only three of the Alamo adaptations. I considered trying a new one, but decided to rewatch the last of them, the 2004 effort directed by John Lee Hancock and produced by one of Disney’s many production companies. The movie was a big bomb. While I can see how it might not connect with audiences, I think the cause was the historical debate about the event that was happening. There was some revision going on, some of it well-researched and credible. I remember people in right-wing media and in my social circles thinking the movie was going to be a left-wing retelling that would paint the Alamo defenders in a negative light or worse vilify them. Actually, while the movie gets rid of some of the admittedly ludicrous glorification (I’ll discuss a couple aspects of this) it still paints the Texan Revolution in a fairly positive light. In fact it removes a couple facts that would undercut the heroism. On the other hand, production issues led many people to decide it was a bad movie before it even came out, so that didn't help.