This article was originally published in Film Comment vol. 16 no. 4, July-August 1980, and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

[This is the first piece of criticism I wrote in Australia. Hardly a contribution to Australian film culture, it was an effort to address a body of film which had caught my attention but was not much discussed in the film literature. The article intentionally uses language and terms from redneck films. Many of the subheadings are dialogue quotations from those films, some playful: “What’ll she do?” is a ubiquitous question asked about how fast a car will go; it also calls attention to the identification of cars as female. In the same way, “…a new Peterbilt” refers directly to a brand of truck (along with Kenworth, Mack, Freuhauf, etc.), but in the informal argot of the day puts a phallic spin on it. Kudzu was an imported tropical plant not native to the US which, at the time of writing, was over-running the Southern swamp states of Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida. “What’s your 10-20?” was CB radio shorthand for “Where are you?” and fit with my attempts to locate the redneck film phenomenon. RT]

The bike picture faded, the Western went revisionist, the prime-time war flopped, and a new B.O. formula coalesced: the redneck movie. It drew elements from the standard American individualist-hero action film, placed them in the rural South, and extended them two ways: centripetally, into films set in a contemporary redneck society; and centrifugally, thrusting redneck figures and the issues they embodied into all sorts of films. These lively celebrations took over the action film in the Seventies like unchecked kudzu.

What is a redneck movie? Where did they come from all of a sudden? What do we need to know about them? What are they telling us? Will they go away if we behave ourselves?

Swamp Gone Gitch Yo Mama

American culture has always contained city-country distinctions: the tension between the two elements shifts constantly. The myth of the land as frontier altered around the turn of the century, when the nation became more urban than rural. The country and its villages were idealized, but also began to be feared. From that fear sprang reductive formulas depicting country people as stupid (the invention of the hillbilly figure; Ma and Pa Kettle films), as crude, quaint, over-sexed, or simply not playing with a full deck (Tobacco Road and the songs of Dorothy Shay, “The Park Avenue Hillbilly”). All the King’s Men on a local scale, and A Face in the Crowd on a more modern national scale, present this fear of the appeal and potency of the redneck as liberal cautionary tales. Remember that the heroic figure related to and generated from the land during most of this century has not been the farmer, the trapper, or the hillman, but the nineteenth-century Westerner, often specifically presented as the figure who will reconcile the differences of that major event which separates North from South, the Civil War, by joining all unto himself.

The South made a bid to assert its difference by separation and was punitively defeated. As the North came to see itself as the embodiment of the urban, the South was thought to be rural – and, by that definition, second best. Northern bias toward the conquered South was projected via New England Puritanism as disapproval of Southern mores. Lynching was one of the most feared Southern sins during the period when the North felt it could banish the Negro problem below the Mason-Dixon line. Thanks to the convenient timing of the Dust Bowl and the history-shaping photography of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, et al., it was possible for the North to suggest visually that the Depression was largely a rural phenomenon (in retrospect, at least). And as the North consoled itself with its own version of Protestantism, it comes also to fear the hard-boiled Old Testament fundamentalism of the South – an issue constantly raised by media-hip Billy Graham types working the North (and indeed the rest of the world) from a Southern base.

American film has always had a place for the country: Tol’able David, Hallelujah!, Stark Love, Swamp Water,The Southerner, God’s Little Acre, thousands more. Most use the country to confront a mythic Nature; or as a table of yeoman values within a simple, physical, productive life, presided over by patriarch or matriarch figures drawing their authority from the earth itself; or as an arena in which passions are more elemental and more easily enacted. Erskine Caldwell may be the key figure here, then Al Capp, Ruby Gentry, and Tennessee Williams.

“You Can’t Get There from Here”

Then the city changed.

The city was caught moving out from both ends of a polarization. Film noir confirmed the end of innocence and respectability for the city (and, through its recurrent use of pastoral episodes, infected the country as well). But at the other extreme, a series of city idylls developed: My Sister Eileen, On the Town, Sunday in New York, Barefoot in the Park, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on and on – the city as lyric. An effort was made to hold up the country as sanctuary – but, in the face of massive re-understanding of the world (downward), that didn’t last long either. In looking at films of the 1945-70 period which propose implicit or explicit country-city distinctions, the key questions are: How are city and country different? Does one control the other? From which to which does the dynamic of evil flow?

By the Seventies, the city, which had been idolized both negatively and positively through the Sixties, had become untenable: cities were nasty to live in, unmanageable, self-destructing. New York, the god of cities, went down the tubes, given the kiss-off when Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show to Burbank. Having lost all this, the city even ceased to be a viable subject for comedy, as the mean-spiritedness of the Neil Simon school shows. A piece of suggestive folklore, parallel to girls in the early Sixties worrying about hatching black widow spiders in their bouffant hairdos: New York City began to think that all those circus souvenir caymans they flushed down toilets were breeding and living below, and that, in fact, the sewers of their city belonged to alligators….

“Chomp. Chomp.”

Two strains come from Caldwell, Williams, William Faulkner, and the other Southern Renaissance writers: the decay of an aristocratic antebellum past and its futile nobility in the present; and an inbred, sultry, dead-end-but-vital sensual present, eccentric and poetic, the legacy of all the South has suffered. By the early Sixties, with civil-rights events located in the South, the region completed a long cycle and reached ground zero. While the Western still awaited the debunking of the Seventies, nearly everything that could be done to the old South had been done.

That tabula-rasa status made it ideal ground for re-mythologizing. And the idea of “ground” is important here, because three linked choices had to be made to reach redneck heaven: the choice of an iconographically new hero; the choice of a mythic-geographic location; and, generated between those two like rubbing sticks together, the choice of a new style.

From Goon to Good Ol’ Boy

We need, first, a redneck: not a hillbilly, not a country boy. The task is this: to humanize the redneck figure and prepare him for action as a hero. This means starting with the sadistic, cowardly, degenerate bullies in The Phenix City Story, Hurry Sundown, and The Chase – liberal psycho-dramas in which urban actors play redneck figures in much the same way that white actors and actresses played blacks in “Negro problem” films of the late Forties and early Fifties.

Instructive comparison: two nearly identical plots, directed by the same strong director. Phil Karlson – Phenix City Story (1955), pre-redneck, with a very Northern-urban hero and sensibility; and a redneck classic, Walking Tall (1973), whose bold Frankenstein imagery relates to darker aspects of the redneck film. In Phenix City, the implication is that the rednecks are the source of villainy and so the solution is to Northernize the town in order to save it (clearly a contradiction for the South). In Walking Tall, the hero is a redneck – the best of the rednecks – and the implication is that the corruption of the town has to do with cities insinuating their practices into the clear values of the country South.

The first part of Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York gives us a glimpse of the GOB (Good Ol’ Boy) prototype. Alvin York (Gary Cooper) cuts a drunken, disrespectful swath through his hill village until he is struck by lightning and religion in the same thunderbolt. Important here is that this occurs within the explicit context of disapproval (represented by Walter Brennan, another icon, as the backcountry preacher). Essential but not unique to the redneck character, disapproval provides the dialectic through which he can define himself and then operate – either disapproval within the film itself (see Fifties juvenile delinquent films) or within the general film-viewing context: “Oh, no, you don’t want to see a redneck movie, do you?”

Basic work constructing the redneck figure was done by Robert Mitchum and Paul Newman. Newman’s work, because of his place in the industry, was more highly visible and commented upon, particularly his urban-sensibility performances as Faulkner or Williams heroes (The Long Hot Summer, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth) and in films in which he moves from the urban back to the redneck (Hud, The Outrage, Cool Hand Luke, Pocket Money, Slap Shot). He has always been sensitive to cultural politics: if fraternity style was cool in the Fifties, black style in the Sixties, and redneck style in the Seventies, Newman had a part of it. Two of his strategies have been influential in red-neck acting: (1) fullface fullforce blue eyes – active; means deceit, subterfuge, or put-on; (2) from the side, quartering the face, an oblique glance from the corner of the eyes – passive; means analysis, skepticism, judgement. He directed and acted in Sometimes a Great Notion(1971), which showed redneck life in Oregon’s timber industry, where I first knew it.

If Newman lends the power of a major star to the redneck figure and significantly establishes that figure at the level of style, Mitchum reverses the movement and goes from redneck to stardom, establishing not only style but substance. His reserve, insolence, command of situation, and shared self-judgement are redneck templates. Mitchum’s Thunder Road(1958) crystallizes the theme of city corruption forced on an orderly country society (allegory of states’ rights) and, more important, lays out the hot-car/road variant.

That’s plenty, but Mitchum’s other work, cumulatively, is also essential to developing the redneck. The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952) began a cycle detailing the narrow, anti-urban lifestyle of professional cowboys today: The Rounders, J.W Coop, The Honkers, Junior Bonner, Bronco Billy. His versions of wanderers who have opted out of the Union nail down a Southern-redneck motif: defining self and culture in terms of the freedom to deny, to secede, to say, “I am not” (Bandido!, Fire Down Below, The Wonderful Country, etc.). His genius for regional dialect and mannerism informs all his work, particularly such milestones in the creation of the redneck figure as Reverend Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter and Cap’n Wade Hunnicutt in Home from the Hill. Perhaps his most pointed and dangerous work in the field is Max Cady, the unredeemed psychopathic villain in Cape Fear, whom we quickly start rooting for in his twisted redneck revenge upon a liberal script and a dependably wooden Gregory Peck.

Elvis Presley’s long (1956-69) series of films is a saga built on this problem: How can a country artist fashion a redneck image acceptable to the urban media without sacrificing the basic arrogance necessary for that style? In Phil Karlson’s Kid Gahalad, Elvis takes a parable about city people enacting their problems in the country and pulls it inside out – showing the film what its actual repressed subject is. Other versions of this are Sam Katzman’s Hootenanny Hoot and Your Cheatin’ Heart (the Hank Williams biopic and ancestor of Payday). The Fastest Guitar Alive is a good ol’ boy’s fantasy of what a Sam Katzman musical should be: Roy Orbison, country pop music, showbiz glitter with appropriate humility, and a guitar that shoots people dead. Russ Meyer’s very different series of films (1964 on) vividly conceives a redneck sexual mythology; see Joseph Sargent’s White Lightnin’ for a later residue of this work. Meyer’s Mud Honey is clearly Ruby Gentry for those who don’t worry about Freud.

The moonshiner film was thought to be the cycle’s gangster cognate, but early in the process of redneck self-definition this notion was lunched. In an unexpected gesture of appetite and power, the redneck film annexed the gangster film and took this most urban of genres down home. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) marks this shift, which was followed (often with the help of Roger Corman) by A Bullet for Pretty Boy, Killers Three, The Grissom Gang, Bloody Mama, Crazy Mama, and Dillinger. With this step, the redneck film demonstrated a potential for the period film as well, claiming the Thirties (Emperor of the North, Boxcar Bertha, Bound for Glory), the Forties (Baby Blue Marine), the Fifties (Macon Country Line, Buster and Billie).

The urban gangster-film counter-attacked by sending the cowboy to the city – Coogan’s Bluff and McCloud – then directly in Prime Cut, which fails by not having the confidence to follow its vision through; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre succeeds with similar material. One image in Prime Cut signifies: a monster Anthony Mann wheat combine-thresher machine is chasing the urban gangsters – in a black Continental Mark IV – around a field. The farm machine swallows the whole limo and spits back a compacted cubic foot of chrome and sheet metal.

The redneck, formerly disenfranchised by an urban-determined culture, turns the tables.

“Betchass!”

It has been suggested by Burt Reynolds and others that the redneck film is a replacement for or transformation of the Western (R.I.P). This should come as no surprise. One of the basest commonplaces plaguing American films – right up there with “escapism”, “entertainment”, and “realistic” – is to compare anything and everything with the Western. These are the similarities cited: both are popular, entertainment, action forms; both contain oppositions of city and country; their individualist heroes are pitted against the forces of authority; they take place in wide open spaces through which the hero has special mobility (the horse, the hot stock car); and both refer us back to a moral world of simpler values. It should be added that both types are fundamentally determined by their choice of location (the West and the Western town; the South and the country, in each case a mythically constructed, privileged place) more than by narrative-oriented imperatives.

But there is one essential difference: the Western hero is located outside of class structures and so is relatively classless, exercising extreme social mobility; the redneck is specifically a working-class hero in his style, concerns, iconography, and limits. He taps a long American tradition of simmering working-class resentment of “betters”: the rich, the urban – all of high culture and its morality. (Elaborate Southern charm and hospitality are often the attributes of villains in these films, perhaps as a reaction against polite culture, or perhaps because of their antebellum associations).

Another prime difference from the Westerner is that the redneck is very often a trickster hero. The Westerner may be forced to deceive or play a trick as a matter of self-preservation or no-other-choice strategy, but a redneck will choose and enjoy trickster behavior when several options are available. It’s the difference between Jimmy Stewart letting someone think his empty gun is loaded and, say, Burt Reynolds foiling TV journalist Lauren Hutton’s attempt to interview him on-camera by improvising a commercial for a feminine aerosol product called “Sprunt” (this detail is blipped from TV broadcasts of Gator).

Any new variation of the hero needs an iconography – to specify, to flesh out, to identify, to ritualize. In this case, the icons are drawn from the characters’ locale and work, anchored in a delicate balance of culture, time and place. Country music, which had growed like Topsy in the Sixties, had instant symbiosis with these films. Demand for the kinetic (inherited from the preceding cycle, bike pix), conditioned by a vocal campaign against physical violence in the media, conveniently located violence at the level of the car. Given C&W and cars, CB radio was mandated. In constructing his mythic culture, the redneck acquired his own music, mobility, and media without the drawbacks of their urban counterparts. Cultural referents are welded on: vocabulary, accents, naming functions (double Christian names; a new rhythm of place names; more Bubbas than a hound has ticks). To top it off, a new cuisine: beer, chicken-fried steak, moon pies, and shaky pudding.

The viability of this package was considerably increased by the economy of location shooting in the South – away from Hollywood.

“Have a Chaw of Swamp Cabbage – Keeps Your Gut Healthy”

The “where” of the Western is the endless horizontal plain. The “where” of the redneck movie is the swamp – land and water in an uneasy, undependable combination. “It’s as if the prairie were a river” – Wind Across the Everglades (1958). But Nicholas Ray’s nostalgia for the horizontal blurs the key difference: that the swamp is the world before the land was separated from the water. Primeval: in Ruby Gentry, it’s what was there before, and what the land reverts to after the hubris of its inhabitants. It’s the centre of the South’s identity, what defines it from the rest of the nation. The flora and fauna of this terra incognita are exotic, dangerous, and part of a very literal presentation of corruption. The swamp is the Other, and so it is the functional center of the North’s rejection of the South.

In films like Band of Angels, Slaves, Mandingo, and Roots, the swamp is literally the Other, the alternative location to the plantation; the swamp is where you go to live when you escape from the mansion, and so it has a very specific guilt meaning. To go further, the swamp provided whiteman-proof shelter for the old Indian tribe not successfully defeated by the American military; see Budd Boetticher’s Seminole and Raoul Walsh’s Distant Drums. (See also eco-revenge films such as Frogs).

Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip developed dramatic, moral, and stylistic aspects of the swamp giving this locus much of its lingo and all of its perloo. Consider Joe Don Baker and Albert Alligator as two versions of the same figure, separated only by a thin comic line. (And that line is Albert’s: “Wowf! Dagbone it!”) Even given Kelly’s twenty-odd years of work, the task of reclamation is massive. The swamp has always been posited as the degree zero of the American moral landscape. Example: Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, where the swamp is literally the last, the worst, the bottom line. By which I don’t mean that it is the lack of something, or being the least of something, that gives the swamp its status. Quite the reverse: it’s what’s in the swamp, what the swamp stands for, and what the swamp is in us that gives its potency. The swamp is to America as the horror film is the corpus of American film.

Coming out of nowhere (and usually regarded as a strange item falling between categories), Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades is an adamic articulation of what the swamp is; from that point on, it’s all variations on the theme. The swamp is the dead center of redneck films – not necessarily each particular film, but rather the collective activity. Whether they actually show the swamp or not, all these film are swamp-spawned, metaphors functioning for the swamp, and forays from the swamp into politer territory. We think that Bloody Mama is redneck when the family-gang has retreated as far from civilization as possible, hiding out in an isolated, deserted farmhouse; We know it’s redneck when they go one step further: down the backyard slope into a brackish body of water (blood brother to the sump in Psycho) in which Robert De Niro and Don Stroud pleasure themselves machine-gunning alligators.

Note also that the development of the redneck film coincides with America’s difficulties in the metaphoric South-East Asian swamp – “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”

PRINCIPAL TYPES. Redneck films cast themselves in a few basic forms. One film may include aspects of more than one of these formulas, but examples of each of these exist as pure types.

“What Kind of Town Is This?

THE MALIGNANT-SMALL-TOWN FILM. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) is the legendary first; it is the direct precedent for Texas Chainsaw Massacre (subtitle: Who Will Be Left…..And What Will Be Left Of Them?) These films are about entering – or returning to – a pleasant-enough-looking small town which reveals itself to be a miasmic, cancerous nightmare. The more one learns about such a town, the more one is made a stranger within it – and, consequently, a victim. Sometimes, one person makes the entire town an instrument of his evil; other times, everybody in the place is meat-axe mad. The Town That Dreaded Sundown; A Small Town in Texas; Macon County Line and its sequel, Return to Macon County; The Chase; White Lightnin’; Jackson County Jail; The Hills Have Eyes; Race With the Devil; I Hate Your Guts/The Intruder, Corman’s first redneck experiment; Thunder and Lightning; Outlaw Blues; Walking Tall; Walking Tall, Part II; and Walking Tall, the Final Part; Framed; Vigilante Force; Fighting Mad. William L. Norton, Jr., is the screenwriter most often behind the best redneck films, and this type is his specialty.

“Everybody Likes Everybody When They’re Kissing”

THE COUPLE FILM. It’s either the psychopathology of doomed love, in which various standard elements of the redneck world are set as obstacles to love, or celebrations of cheerful, lusty couples having as much fun with themselves and their cars as possible. The energy and simplicity of their love renders any challenge ridiculous. I Walk the Line; A Small Town in Texas; Buster and Billie; Ode to Billy Joe; Baby Blue Marine; Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw; Thomasine and Bushrod (blaxploitation variation); Thunderbolt and Lightfoot; The Grissom Gang; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry; Smokey and the Bandit; Outlaw Blues; Thunder and Lightning; The Great Texas Dynamite Chase; Every Which Way but Loose; Badlands; Pretty Poison. These films prove a useful distinction test via comparisons with earlier couple-on-the run films. Comparing any of these films with Gun Crazy, You Only Live Once, They Live By Night – or even the transition film, Bonnie and Clyde – will quickly isolate redneck differences.

“What She’ll Do?”

THE HOT-CAR-ROAD FILM. Pre-redneck country boys had little mobility; their world was strictly local, not regional. Through his car the redneck can dominate space: he can drive from Georgia through Texas, pick up a load of Coors beer, and floor it on back, in a truck, in twenty-four hours (Smokey and the Bandit).

The potential of the American road has been exploited since the beginning of movies. Filmmakers are so familiar with the many variations of this formula that they circle back on themselves, as when a Roadrunner cartoon is inserted into The Sugarland Express. In addition to Thunder Road, see The Last American Hero; Devil’s 8; Hard Driver, Eat My Dust; Grand Theft Auto; Mad Max; White Lightnin’; Greased Lightning(blaxploitation version of The Last American Hero); High Rollin’; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry; The Dukes of Hazzard. Payday is certainly a road picture, if not a hot-car one. Special cases: two major road films which are fugitives from the redneck style – Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop. The RV (recreational vehicle; camper) in Race With the Devil; and the swamp equivalent of the hotrod, the propellor-driven airboat in Gator.

“…A New Peterbilt.”

THE TRUCKER FILM. The hot stockcar signifies brute power – tons of it. The truck is a richly condensed image: it’s everything the car is to hot-car films, and much more. To the redneck generation, a truck is what the small family farm was to his forebears: his home; his livelihood and place of business (and often, like the farm, mortgaged – a lever of vulnerability); his tool, and a fetish object he makes in his own image. The special relationship between a man and his truck is one of mechanical intimacy, too – these are movies for men who like to change their own oil. The heroes establish their independence through their machines, so the loss of the truck is the worst possible calamity. These isolatos, always and never home, constitute a new, mobile geography: the whole nation schematized as the Brownian motion of eighteen-wheelers sending out location bearings via CB radio.

Every group of films has its legendary lost work, and the redneck example is Terry Malick and Vernon Zimmerman’s Deadhead Miles, apparently a variation of the phantom trucker legend, which was made and shelved in the early Seventies. Not even Days of Heaven has pried it loose. (Among the younger writers, Malick and Tom Rickman have the greatest flair for redneck style: Malick’s Badlands and Pocket Money, Rickman’s W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, Hooper, etc.).

Finally, the truck is a country thing, out of place and out of scale in the city. It’s the dinosaur of vehicles, fueled by the essence of its Mesozoic archetypes. Smokey and the Bandit made all the money, but don’t miss Highballin’, shot in crystalline winter air and light. The others: Breaker Breaker; Convoy; White Line Fever; Truck Stop Women, and the two TV series, Movin’ On and B.J. and the Bear (TV’s version of Every Which Way but Loose, scaling an orangutan down to a chimp). Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis are now making a trucker film in the Australian outback. Citizens Band/Handle With Care isn’t really a trucker film, but deserves mention here for its eponymous celebration.

“Ain’t Had So Much Fun Since the Hogs Et My Brother”

THE LIFESTYLE FILM. Some of these films are not strongly shaped in any of the above formulas. The central concern of such films is serving up redneck life and style – W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings; The Cockfighter, Hooper, The Grissom Gang; Citizens Band; Pocket Money; Evel Knievel; The Rose; Urban Cowboy; Roadie. The operating principle of lifestyle in the Western is asperity; in the redneck film, it’s saturation. This opposition is frequently exploited by Sam Peckinpah – connoisseur and promotor of prime redneckery – who squeezes some into nearly every film since Ride the High Country paraded its inbred and murderously weak-minded brothers. (Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks may be the first film to fully redneck the Western).

Hawks’ Red Line 7000 has redneck elements to burn: the new South; aspiring young men; the milieu of stockcar racing shot on location at Darlington, Rockingham, etc; classy transient life in motel restaurants and lounges; Boots Randolph on the cassette player out to the pool. But the director’s patrician distance blocks redneck activity in the film. His strategy of isolation strictly limits the characters to their own narrow world rather than involving them in a mesh of exchanges with the culture around them.
A third variant of the asperity-saturation principle: Nashville turns a couple dozen Hollywood actors loose in Music City and encourages them to act out their redneck fantasies, right down to composing their own country songs. In other words, too much excess.

Another inversion: Lamont Johnson’s Western, A Gunfight (backed with investment capital from an Apache tribe) casts Johnny Cash in his black riverboat-gambler outfit as Kirk Douglas’ antagonist. Representing saturation against asperity, Cash acts as a black hole and inhales the entire film.

“Dagnab It, Pepina, Where’s Little Luke”

Lifestyle films often give prominence to the family in redneck life. In great contrast to other male action films, redneck heroes frequently have a living father right there in the film, and may even be living with him. These fathers and relatives represent the past (pre-redneck) generation harmoniously integrated with the present redneck generation. The redneck movie is not about the need to reject parents, nor is it about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons. The presence of and loyalty to family is the hero’s Achilles heel. The black side of this set of family relationships: families in malignant town pictures. The families in The Grissom Gang, Bloody Mama, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes are conclusive proof of the Kallikax vs. Jukes theory.

Before the key developments in the cycle, television consistently presented country people in family units: The Beverly Hillbillies; The Real McCoys; The Andy Griffith Show; Petticoat Junction; Mayberry R.F.D. These shows used the city mouse-country mouse, Will Rogers-wise rube, and trickster traditions. The Johnny Cash Show, which began on network television in the late Sixties, was a milestone: it scrapped the hillbilly image of Hee Haw and showed Cash on an equal footing with Bob Dylan. The initial redneck series, Movin’ On (1974-76), took the old Route 66 formula and traded in the Corvette, the two fraternity boys, and the Nelson Riddle theme for a Kenworth diesel, Claude Akins, and a Merle Haggard theme. There’s no way to even keep track of the swarm of redneck characters and plots traipsing through most TV series in recent years. Not to mention Dallas.

The same thing happened to the movies. One look at Burt Reynolds’ sassy redneck in The Longest Yard (a standard prison picture turned by its inmates into a redneck mine’s-bigger-than-yours competition) and every movie wanted its own good ol’ boy. (Midnight Cowboy helped, too). “Serious” and “art” films regularly used the old South for handy metaphors (Intruder in the Dust; To Kill a Mockingbird; Hurry Sundown; The Chase; In the Heat of the Night; Night of the Hunter; Bus Stop; Baby Doll; They Live By Night; Louisiana Story), and have begun to carpetbag the new redneck location as well (Deliverance; In Cold Blood; Stay Hungry; Hard Times; Pretty Baby; Nashville; Thieves Like Us; Badlands; Payday; Bound for Glory; Rancho Deluxe).

Manny Farber’s old distinctions between high-art films and low-art ones still obtain in this area. Case in point: Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) calculatedly invites comparison with The Searchers (Old Testament father figure from the country follows daughter figure into an opposed, despised other culture where she is sexually threatened), but it should more accurately be seen as a limper, sensationalized recycling of Richard T. Heffron’s quasi-redneck drop-dead letter to L.A., Trackdown (1976).

“Hey, Ain’t You Gatuh McCluskey?”

A school of actors strongly identified with redneck work has emerged, an unusual occurrence in the acting world of the Seventies. Some are exclusive specialists. Some have adapted themselves from other areas – second line actors from the declining Western, say, who had little difficulty altering their iconographic plumage. Some have drifted in accidentally from unrelated areas, done striking work, assimilated the gout de terroir, and taken it back with them into other geo/genero/socio-determined film types. MOs of these actors do not confine themselves to redneck films (now that that cycle is waning) but the bring the entire system of redneck cinema into the foreground of the other films they appear in.

Example: Bo Hopkins’ Rockford Files tryout, presumably as a potential replacement for departing Beth Davenport (Gretchen Corbett); even as a three-piece suit legal gray wolf sans GOB (Good Ol’ Boy) shtick or accent, he clearly articulates the country picaro: sly, unhurried, discredited, game, and considerably enjoying the manipulation of an urban corruption more impersonal but just as byzantine as that in a sultry Southern novel. Another variation on the Coogan’s Bluff-Eischeid formula.

Red Necks….

No matter where they were born and raised, these actors certify a redneck film with canny, underside wit, sharp eye and posture work, and a finely judged rhythm of withholding.

Andy Griffith. Historical progenitor and a current practitioner. Early hit monologue record, “What It Was, Was Football”; a keywork, A Face in the Crowd; No Time for Sergeants; The Andy Griffith Show. He has moved from Pat Buttram material and the rustification of Father Knows Best to playing plain nasty types well-camouflaged with goose-grease charm – mainly on TV.

Royal Dano. Archetype of the curt, hawkfaced backwoodsman ever since his elegant Abraham Lincoln on Omnibus.

Burl Ives. “The sweet tastin’ joys of this world!” A folk troubador who incarnated for Nicholas Ray the gusto, the threat, and the Old Testament-Darwinian morality of something much more than a hillbilly: the proto-redneck Big Daddy patriarch of Wind Across the Everglades (and here he stands for his sweet-tempered band of swampies, featuring MacKinlay Kantor and especially the New York recruit, Peter Falk).

R.G. Armstrong. Avatar of Puritan righteousness; obsessed eyes, juicy syllables.

Bill McKinney. Deliverance. Cannonball, and high marks as the woman-baiter who gets his just desserts in Clint Eastwood’s contemplative-repetitive The Gauntlet.

John Quade. Unwashed, bristly, porcine, squinty, roundfaced, and ugly. Also deep down mean. Easily seen as Dixie’s Ronald Fraser or Roy Kinnear, he’s a live-action version of Walt Kelly’s McCarthy figure. Simple J. Malarkey. Ubiquitous; notable in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

James Garner. Prototype work, paralleling Paul Newman, in preparing for the trickster charm-light comic redneck hero, an essential component of Reynolds’ synthesis. Redemption of cowardice, pique, and frustration as virtues. Maverick, Nichols, The Rockford Files, The Skin Game, Cash McCall, The Wheeler-Dealers.

Billy Green Bush. Sharply unsentimental, particularly in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More; the single redeeming factor in Electra-Glide in Blue.

Ed Lauter. Cold, snake-eyed specialist with a taste for sadism, notably in The Longest Yard. Hitchcock’s redneck in The Family Plot.

Dub Taylor. Grinning and friendly from Bonnie and Clyde days on, he seems an incarnation of Smiley Burnett, (“Mister Or’ter-ee”) Gene’s old side-kick, much as Dom DeLuise seems to be that of Grady Sutton.

Charles Napier. Russ Meyer discovery. In Supervixens he condenses the guilt of most macho fantasies into a single but very active redneck figure under the initial sign of “Martin Borman’s Super Service”; he is domesticated in Citizens Band. See also The Blues Brothers, in which he’s the leader of a C&W band called The Good Old Boys.

Clifton James. Stylish, heavy sheriff who brought James Bond into redneck country.
Pat Hingle. Excellent at the wistful/desperate desire of the middle-aged man caught moving up into unfamiliar and demanding bourgeois life, whose response is the fetishizing of redneck attributes. Bloody Mama, Splendor in the Grass, Hang ‘em High, etc.

G.D. Spradlin. The Corporate Redneck. Saurian face. Viciously exploited by Francis Coppola in Apocalypse Now.

Matt Clark. Has perfected little man tremulousness (at the other end of the spectrum from Peter O’Toole’s stock-in-trade, widescreen tremulousness). Leading contender for the redneck Elisha Cook Jr. slot.

James Best. Worked his way up through hick character parts, notably for Fuller in Shock Corridor, playing all the contradictions of the post-Korean war South. He is Ode to Billy Joe’s secret that dares not speak its name and has ended up in The Dukes of Hazzard playing the buffoon sheriff Roscoe Coltrane.

Kris Kristofferson. Elusive, suggestive case whose work intersects with that of the seminal William L. Norton Jr., in Norton’s first directorial job, Cisco Pike. Kris Kristofferson’s face-body style is lazy, an impeded version of Ben Johnson, but his voice – too rarely used for this purpose – is near Mitchum’s in its redneck craft. Vigilante Force, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Semi-Tough, A Star is Born.

Noah Beery Jr. Avuncular salt of the earth. Centers the country imagery in The Rockford Files: fishing, trucking, muscle pickup truck, self-sufficiency. Excellent at sturdy, simple dignity in the face of everything the city can throw at him.

Rip Torn. Top manic redneck: post-bellum dementia. Repeated success as politican-redneck. Sweet Bird of Youth, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, Payday.

L.Q. Jones. Antic charm. Redneck as loony adolescent.

Claude Akins. All-rounder with excellent credentials including TV’s first deep-dish redneck series. Movin’ On. Currently degraded as the inane Sheriff Lobo on TV’s second redneck trucker series B.J and the Bear. This is not poetic justice.

White Socks….

Folks can come to the country from the city and function well as country folks.

Paul Koslo. Rat-faced (light) heavy who over-enjoys his work. Doncha just wanna take that sneering skinny smart-ass back of the barn and pretzelize him? Koslo machine guns a warehouse full of ripe, red watermelons in Mr. Majestyk.

Gary Busey. It’s as if a much smarter version of Jody McCrea from the Beach Party pictures wandered into the late Seventies and had to make himself a place. (“Hi, my name’s Leroy and I’ll do Anything!”) He might be surprise to learn – and it certainly confirms his good-ol-boyism in a new cultural context – that he and Big Wednesday are chapter-and-verse to the surfies on Australia’s Gold Coast. The country version of Ron Howard. Then there’s The Buddy Holly Story and Carny.

Kurt Russell. Carpenter’s Elvis TV film.

Robby Benson. Not country, but provides a clear channel into the experience of Ode to Billy Joe through his depiction of universal adolescent trauma.

Glynnis O’Connor. In Ode to Billy Joe, her modestly right performance is not so much interested in attaching to the things around her as in irradiating them. The topic “women and the redneck film” is not active or central as “women in film noir” is. While they are certainly present in the films – wives, lovers, sisters, mothers – they are not a major determining force. No body of actresses, for instance, have specialized in redneck films as actors have. (But: Coalminer’s Daughter, the Loretta Lynn biopic, is in release. See also Norma Rae.) The Romeo-and-Juliet couple films aside, women function most interestingly in redneck films when their relative degree of independence serves to reveal contradictions in the hero’s supposed degree of freedom: see particularly the Burt Reynolds cycle.

The Vint Brothers. From Macon County Line, they are welcome visitors to the redneck film: fun-loving, athletic, paranoid, victims without undue masochism-and actor/writer/producers.

Dennis Weaver. From Gentle Ben, Ivan Tors’ tamed version of the Everglades (not enough cottonmouths). Shifts back and forth well, popping up in the marginal, allegorically-inflected Duel but also doing groundwork in Touch of Evil (“I’m the night man!”). Until the arrival of Ken Curtis, Weaver represented the redneck in the microcosmic TV series, Gunsmoke. Curtis embraces the ludicrous extremes of the stereotype: see Cheyenne Autumn, The Searchers, Two Rode Together.

Geoffrey Lewis: Either opting for the Noah Beery Jr. sentimental line or, more likely, heading off Koslo and Clark for the Elisha Cook Jr. spot. Dillinger, Every Which Way but Loose, Bronco Billy.

Peter Fonda. Organises the family nervous tics into an odyssey from biker noir (Wild Angels, Easy Rider) through Western variations (The Hired Hand) to the mainstream: Highballin’; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry; Fighting Mad; Outlaw Blues (the redneck version of The Harder They Come).

Jack Nicholson. Two major redneck modes: 1. Dumb-but-cunning; 2. The liberating energy of raw crudity – the kid in fourth grade who can hawk up the most phlegm the most noisily, spit the furthest, and breezily tell an unending repertoire of dirty jokes with the implication that he knows much more than anyone else, all in the certain conviction that these attributes make him eminently desirable socially. Fine example of redneck sensibility in other locations: Cuckoo’s Nest; Missouri Breaks; Goin’ South – and particularly Five Easy Pieces, in which his rebellion against his high culture family is enacted in red-neck terms; and Easy Rider, in which we witness a primal good ol’ boy perceiving the importance that helling around on motorcycles etc. will have for the new mythology.

John Doucette, Jack Elam, Jack Lambert, John Larch, John McIntyre, and Robert J. Wilke. This unofficial team has from the Fifties until the present specialized in uncultured, uncouth, and often unconscionable types circulating through morally charged action films (film noir, Westerns, redneck films).

Also substantial: Jeff Bridges (Bad Company; The Last Picture Show; The Last American Hero); Nick Nolte(Return to Macon County; Who’ll stop the Rain; North Dallas Forty); David Carradine (Boxcar Bertha); Keith Carradine (Emperor of the North); Jan Michael Vincent (White Line Fever; Buster and Billie; The Baby Blue Marin; Hooper).

….And Blue Ribbon Beer.

The contributions of Mitchum and Newman have been discussed. The cream of their successors:

Strother Martin and Denver Pyle. Grand old men of the cycle. Never to be trusted, ever since their debut as a team in The Horse Soldiers.

Harry Dean Stanton. Close to the mother lode; ubiquitous. Dexterous when running changes within redneck types (Where the Lilies Bloom); recently extended the redneck ethos into outer space (“Here, kitty, kitty….” –Alien). See also Rancho Deluxe.

Ned Beatty. Superb range, from art aspects (Deliverance; Nashville; Network; Friendly Fire) down to bush-lightnin’ and gator tail. (White Lightnin’; Wise Blood; W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings). Has a pale (but not thin) shadow in James Hampton (The Longest Yard; Hawmps; The Rockford Files).

Bo Hopkins. The purest, most clearly-delimited-and-nothing-else GOB figure we can locate (White Lightnin’, Killer Elite), first noticed in “A” pix as the rear guard at the Express Office holdup which opens The Wild Bunch, in which he has the best of all redneck deathbed speeches: “How’d you like to kiss my sister’s black cat’s ass?” Like Ned Beatty, he too has a counterpart:

Jerry Reed, the country singer (“When You’re Hot, You’re Hot”) takes Hopkins’ roles in Gator; Smokey and the Bandit; W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, etc., and plays them with good showing-off relish.

Scott Wilson. Pure virtuosity every time he appears, but particularly in the film he steals, The Grissom Gang: not slick, not smart, no sense of humour, but perfectly uniting mad love and its twin, passionate rage.

Slim Pickens. From Lon (“I break the backs around here”) in One-Eyed Jacks to a dead-on-road sail in White Line Fever, master of the pushy, over-ripe redneck as a performance you’d rather-escape. When he stops grinning, the point is made. Dr. Strangelove; Rancho Deluxe.

Ben Johnson. His face a map of superior, resigned knowledge (Ford’s Wagon Master and cavalry films; The Last Picture Show; Dillinger; Sugarland Express) even as things begin to go back (The Town that Dreaded Sundown; Hustle; The Getaway). For his bad side, see his essay on the word “greaser” in One-Eyed Jacks.

Warren Oates. May or may not have been the first to say on the screen, “You redneck peckerwood!” Touched all the bases and variables: The Cockfighter; Race With the Devil; Dillinger; Two-Lane Blacktop. His volatile vulgarity was teamed with Ben Johnson in the greatest male screen team since Bob Hope and Bing Crosby: the Gorch brothers, Lyle and Tector, in The Wild Bunch.

Joe Don Baker and Burt Reynolds. Baker always works the well-defined downside, never deviates from defining the meaning of redneck in modern life; often plays the redneck in a suit and tie. Monolithic working class solidity in Walking Tall; Charley Varrick; Framed; Mitchell.

If Joe Done is the redneck as lumpen, Burt Reynolds is the redneck as star. The distinction here is the same as that between film noir’s two major male figures, John Payne and Robert Mitchum. Payne’s work is always blockplaned flat with the endgrain of the film, defined totally by his reaction to his context, never exceeding that. Mitchum does trascend his narrative framework, but never distorts it. This is not the usual intensified reality of a star, but rather as if Mitchum (like Bing Crosby in his Thirties and Forties films) carried his own floating, private reality with him – an invisible one-way shield.

Reynolds regularly put the redneck film on the B.O. charts (Deliverance, White Lightnin’, W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings; Gator– his directing debut – Smokey and the Bandit; The Longest Yard; Hooper). The cutest of GOBs, and the most sexually secure: at a drive-in Errol Flynn movie in W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, he says to his date, “I’m not queer, but if I were, I’d be queer for him.” A legitimate good ol’ boy with an impasto of media sophistication: he can host The Tonight Show: he can bring redneckery into the daft satire of Semi-Tough; and he can do sophisticated (albeit TV sitcom) romantic comedy in Starting Over.

“Where Y’All Fum?”

At this moment in action-movie country, the cities are forting up: John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and Paul Newman’s Fort Apache: The Bronx. Redneck movies seem healthy enough. Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood both have new films for release this year. The latest Variety contains ads for the following films awaiting release: Hooch; Ruckus; The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia; I Go Pogo (animated); and, especially for New York, Alligator.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to run down a few research problems, films I can’t find or find out much about: Two Thousand Maniacs; Deadhead Miles; Six Pack Annie; William A. Graham’s Honky; White Trash or Po’White Trash, which may be a soft porn film; and an Italian film starring Telly Savalas, called Redneck. Come on?

Created on: Sunday, 5 September 2010