I do not watch much film, and no TV, so have not viewed much of the available material. Below are my impressions of what I have seen.
Roots
The standard slavery film, Roots, is being redone. I have not seen it since childhood and will avoid the new version like ebola, which is sure to by a Social justice fantasy. I can tell you that the scene where the protagonist is hunted down by white men in the interior of West Africa is ridiculous. Slave raids only occurred early in the European period, and on the coast. White people died like flies in the interior—and that was before the spears started flying! Inland slaves were captured by blacks, sold to other blacks, who then sold them either to whites or Arabs for transport to their final, miserable, destination.
The Patriot
This Mel Gibson version of Braveheart in tights and pony tails has a ridiculous depiction of black maroons [hardcore, militant, escaped slaves] hosting slave masters in exile!
Whitey, please!
Gone with the Wind
This movie is surprisingly accurate in terms of how modern black people behave in a white-dominated work place. Thinking back to my time as a white grocery store manager, I can literally name a black employee that would take the role of any and all of the plantation staff characters seamlessly. Historically we are seeing the idealized upper echelon of plantations, so while accurate as far as it goes, Gone with the Wind, does not depict the conditions suffered under by most slaves.
Django
This film was patently ridiculous on almost every level, but a lot of fun. Even the guns were wrong. The depiction of two slaves fighting to the death, including the ritual killing of the loser with a hammer, was criminally inaccurate. The few slaves who did box won their freedom! For that reason, very, very few slaves were allowed to box, with the ban on black fighters challenging for the heavyweight belt a generation later, a continuation of the suppression of masculine rituals among blacks by their white masters.
The most egregious aspect of this movie was the major premise, of a white, German, Jew, travelling around the South freeing slaves and killing masters! In fact, the Vice President of the Confederacy—depicted by Adam Sandler in the Wikipedia photo—was a Jew!
When Grant took Tennessee the only confederate civilians who insisted on slave trading under his nose were the Jews, who defied him openly! In fact, the only account I found of a confederate civilian fighting union soldiers to keep his human property, occurred in Tennessee, and that slave master with the shotgun was a Jew!
Now, unlike most anti-government writers, I am not a Jew hater. In fact, I prefer the company of the occasional Jewess. I also believe that the Holocaust did happen, and that the Jews are morally obligated to kill as many Moslems as they have to to recover their ancient homeland. My favorite TV movie as a kid was the Raid on Antebi, in which Charles Bronson plaid an IDF commando kicking Ugandan ass! Hell, when I plaid the Arab IsrŠ°eli wargame by Avalon Hill, I loved being the IDF player and lighting up Syrian T-54s!
However, the depiction of an avenging anti-slavery Angel of Judea in the Old South, is nothing but a modern fabrication to sure up the obscene alliance of left wing “white” special interest groups, international bankers and their African American mobs in today’s sick society, and has nothing at all to do with the actual experience of slavery in the Old South.
That said, Samuel L. Jackson’s depiction of the head house Negro was accurate, outrageous, and superbly done. He should have won the Oscar, and it was he alone who saved the movie for me.
Twelve Years a Slave
This was the most scrupulously accurate movie on the general character of slavery during the later period and was taken faithfully from a firsthand account. However, the movie—while doing well with reasonable composites to compress the book into film—also played down the brutality of the actual masters of Solomon Northup toward their human property. The movie, produced and directed by a black man, went out of its way to demonstrate the truth that Solomon could not free himself, and was only rescued from his torment by a cooperative conspiracy of caring and powerful white men. The film also showed the reality of slave master poverty, that most slave owners, even those who owned many people, still lived at the poverty line, the greatest indictment of a wasteful system, a system so bankrupt at its core that it could not win a defensive war, even with nine out of ten of the best soldiers and eight out of ten of the best officers serving in its ranks.
Mandingo
I have seen this movie four times, and I rank it as the best of the tiny genre. This movie accurately portrays the limited prize fighting permitted slave men, shows the system of slave-on-slave betrayal that still plagues the black community in America, and the outright bestial nature of the socially emasculated, alcoholic male who comes into the unconditional, power-of-life-and-death ownership of desirable slave girls and potentially restive slave men. The worst of Southern slavery was more common than is admitted, and linked—at this, its cruelest level—with the ancient practice under the Romans.
Cool Hand Luke
This is by far the best movie of the lot—in my opinion one of the ten best movies ever made. The life of the white Southern convict in the Jim Crow Era is a precise—if anachronistic—depiction of the life of an indentured servant of the 16-1700s, and of the most brutalized of the black slaves of the 1800s. Cool Hand Luke, with its searingly accurate portrayal of what slavery is—the feeding of the human spirit into the fires that fuels the soulless social machine that is the State—offers us a picture of the human past endured by our ancestors, and of the inhuman future, to which we have cursed our descendents, through our unparalleled greed and cowardice.
Hi James, I enjoy your writing. Here's some info on 12 Years a Slave. Apparently it's a remake. Keep up the good work.
takimag.com/article/new_movie_same_old_skin_game_steve_sailer/print
Thank you so much.
I have read this sailor article a while back. he does good work.
I'll check it out again if donning my rose colored glasses!