Nevins called the “Golden Age of the law film” and the defense lawyer (Papke 474-475). (Liénard-Yeterian 39-40)ĥ The emergence of integration and message films coincided with what Francis M. Filmic representations of the South provide emotional paradigms and elaborate psychological scripts that bring comfort either because they offer an outlet for certain fears or because they offer a comfortable distancing (“they” are not “us”). It projects idealized and comforting images by offering alternatives to distressing and current events, or it processes fears and anxieties generated by the news. He South has always provided a reservoir of images and narrative resources used by Hollywood to respond to certain national needs. A “backward South”, correlated to “racism and tradition”, was then adroitly distanced from “a modern or 'enlightened nation'” associated with democracy and change (Duck 3).Ĥ In her article, “Angel or Demon: Peforming the South in Cinema”, Marie Liénard-Yeterian commented these binary visions of the South as an idyllic setting or as a land of evil and horror. Hollywood then provided a different stance both on racism and the region. But by the mid-1940s, and most importantly in the 1950s and 1960s, the South had become the location where central characters defeated the region's institutional and collective racism in movies such as To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heart of the Night (1967). In films of the 1930s, the comforting images of the southern upper class in a colorful landscape undeniably brought relief during the Depression years (Liénard-Yeterian 38). When To Kill a Mockingbird was released, Hollywood had ceased to portray Louisiana and Mississippi as the “romantic backdrops for films about the Old South, the planter elite, riverboat gamblers, and showboats” (Cox 86). Yet, while clinging to the filmic codes of the courtroom drama (Papke), both films play different cultural works regarding both race and the South. As Roger Ebert from Chicago Sun-Times rightfully argued in his review of the film, A Time to Kill raises interesting questions, “but they don't occur while you're watching the film” (Ebert).ģ Like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill mixes three movie genres: the courtroom drama, the race movie and the southern film. Rob Dreher, from the Sun Sentinel, laughed at this “visceral tale of a brave white lawyer trying to defend a black man in a racially charged Southern climate-A Time to Kill a Mockingbird” (Dreher). In Variety, Todd MacCarthy gave more credit to the film's cast than to “this sweaty Southern courtroom drama its To Kill a Mockingbird setup” (MacCarthy). Hal Hinson from The Washington Post, called it a “stick, fast-paced and glamorously sexy To Kill a Mockingbird with a blockbuster make-over” (Hinson). This is the plot of Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill, a Hollywood-made courtroom drama on race relations in Mississippi, adapted from John Grisham's first best-seller and autobiographical novel.Ģ Not randomly, when A Time to Kill was released in American theaters, several movie critics disparagingly compared Joel Schumacher's film to the 1962 movie adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's novel directed by Robert Mulligan. 1 In 1989, in Clanton, Mississippi, Jake Brigance, a young white local lawyer, is hired to defend Carl Lee Hailey, a black father charged with the murder of the two white men who savagely raped his ten-year-old daughter.
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