12. Southerners in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
**The Yearling (1946). This is an all-time favourite about family life on the Florida frontier and a troublesome pet deer. Seldom noticed is that the father, Gregory Peck, is a former Confederate soldier. The film is based on the novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Another fine Rawlings book about her life among Florida “crackers” during the Depression was made into a less successful film, (X) Cross Creek. This one comes across as feminist meets Dogpatch. The star, Mary Steenburgen, is from Arkansas and should have known better.
**The Virginian (2000). Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian is a benchmark in American Western literature and made the Cowboy an American icon. Its Southern hero in Wyoming cattle country acts with natural integrity, deals with rustlers, and successfully courts the Yankee schoolmarm and corrects her strange notions. The Virginian has been put on the screen numerous times, dating back to the silent film era, and it provided the title for a popular TV series that ran for nine seasons. Unlike its predecessors, which were at best routine oaters, this 2000 version with Bill Pullman is excellent, I might even say beautiful. It has a real feel for the Wyoming frontier and a poetic appreciation for the characters. By contrast, (X) The Virginian (1946) with Joel McRea is a joke. Whoever made that version evidently knew nothing about the book except a plot summary, piled on every false Hollywood idea of “the West,” and completely missed the point.
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