The theme of this year’s It Came from Texas film festival was a celebration of the independent Texas spirit. Festival director Kelly Kitchens infused that theme not only into the movies she chose to screen, but into every aspect of the fest to create a wider celebration of Texas artists and their impact on the history and legacy of film. (You can find my pieces on ICFTX 2023 here and here.)
Expanding into a third day of film screenings from ICFTX 2023’s two-day fest, the opening night double feature was a tribute to a towering figure in Texas storytelling. Beginning his journey in the arts as an actor, writer Horton Foote switched to putting words on the page full time when the plays he was writing on the side started getting better reviews than his acting. Director Anne Rapp’s documentary, Horton Foote: The Road to Home, opened the festival with an intimate portrait of a humanist writer who probed the human experience and our need to connect to one another.
Foote, who was born in Wharton, Texas in 1916, quickly learned that he needed to pseudonymize the tiny Texas town (pop. 8627 as of the 2020 census) and the people who inspired his characters if he wanted to keep the peace. Rapp’s film covers Foote’s early years as a playwright and popular, in-demand writer in the 1950s for the then-fledgling medium known as television. We then see him burst onto the Hollywood scene with his 1962 Oscar-winning screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s Great American Novel contender To Kill a Mockingbird.
The Road to Home’s examination of Foote’s life and career is boilerplate documentary filmmaking, but I was impressed with the extensive interview segments with the man himself in the final years of his life – Foote died in 2009; The Road to Home had a 2020 debut. Rapp successfully gets Foote to ruminate on his life, his life philosophy, and what he’s trying to get at through his writing in a way that makes us feel like we’re in the room with him.
To complement Horton Foote: The Road to Home, the second half of the double bill for the opening night of ICFTX 2024 was a movie written by Foote, the 1983 drama Tender Mercies. It stars Robert Duvall as a country music star whose marriage and career are destroyed by alcoholism but who finds redemption in a widowed motel owner and her young son. I had seen Tender Mercies once before, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, and it was as good as I remembered. It was nominated for five Oscars and won two, one going to Foote for Original Screenplay and one to Duvall for Best Actor.
Before the screening, we were treated to a presentation from Jeannine Oppewall, who served as the art director on Tender Mercies. She came prepared with a PowerPoint slide show to walk us through each stage of her process in conceiving of the main set – the roadside motel acts as the anchor location for the film, which at times has a distinct stage bound feel to it – as well as its construction. It was an insightful look into a movie-making discipline that most movie fans probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about.
Jeannine Oppewall discusses her work on Tender Mercies. (photo by the author)
*****
I had to miss the first screening of day two, The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich’s heartbreaking rumination on life in a small Texas town. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I was attending a three- and five-year-old’s birthday party – their birth-months are close together, so mom has (wisely) decided to make them a joint celebration. The party was held at a water park, so I was able to spend about three hours in a lazy river, which was a pretty good tradeoff for having to miss Last Picture Show.
I did make it in time for the mid-afternoon block, a short paired with a feature and a panel discussion afterwards about the importance of film preservation and archiving. This is where I need to disclose that I helped Kelly with this year’s ICFTX. I volunteered a few hours to work on media roundtable press releases for her.
When she programmed The Blood of Jesus, a 1941 “race film” – now commonly referred to as Black-audience films – directed by and starring Spencer Williams, I was excited to let her know that I had seen a brand-new short film at this year’s Dallas International Film Festival called The Making of a Classic. The beautifully photographed short recreates the struggles of the cast and crew as they film one shot during the making of The Blood of Jesus. Kelly was able to take a look at it during DIFF’s first offshoot shorts festival, and, to my gratification, she was so taken by the movie and the serendipity of the situation that she contacted the filmmakers to secure the rights to show The Making of a Classic before The Blood of Jesus.
The most extraordinary thing about The Blood of Jesus is that we are able to see it at all. As you can imagine, race films, made by and for people of color in defiance of the studio system that shut them out, were treated as disposable and all but worthless by the dominant (read: white) power structure. According to Wikipedia, of the approximately 500 race films made between 1915 and the early 1950s, over 400 of those are now lost films.
The Blood of Jesus only survives because prints of it were discovered in the mid-1980s in a warehouse in Tyler, Texas. The people in charge of the warehouse at the time contacted the media studies department at Southern Methodist University and basically said, “We don’t know what we have here, and it’s yours if you want it. Otherwise, everything’s going in the trash.”
Luckily, everything did not go in the trash.
Aside from the history of the film itself, The Blood of Jesus is like a fever dream of religious imagery. I’m an atheist, but I could easily listen to the rich and astounding harmonies of the gospel numbers featured in Spencer’s picture on a loop. Seeing it was a wonderful experience, and appreciating how lucky I was to get to see it at all wasn’t lost on me.
That’s partly because Kelly programmed a panel discussion after the screening of both The Making of a Classic and The Blood of Jesus that put everything I’ve mentioned above into context. The producer of The Making of a Classic, Martin C. Jones, discussed why they wanted to make the film as part of a series of short films, collectively called Forging Texas, specifically made for teachers to use in their classrooms that dramatizes pieces of Texas history that have otherwise been overlooked.
The Making of a Classic producer Martin C. Jones (right) discusses making the short film. (photo by the author)
Also participating in the panel was the head of the SMU film studies department, Dr. Rick Worland, who spoke about the cultural and artistic significance of race films in general and The Blood of Jesus specifically. He was later joined by Elizabeth Hansen of the Texas Archives of the Moving Image to underscore how important it is to preserve these works of art.
The crown jewel of ICFTX 2024 was the Saturday night screening of Giant, the 1956 George Stevens epic starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson. I’ve seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Ben-Hur, but until now I had somehow missed Giant, or even knowing much about it. Set and filmed in arid West Texas, Giant was a revelation to me. Both Edna Ferber’s source novel and the film wrestle with racial discrimination against the local Latino population, which Ferber saw firsthand while doing research for the book. (Giant’s publication led to a firestorm from the citizens of Texas, some of whom resorted to ugly antisemitic attacks on New York-native Ferber to show their distaste for her perspective on race relations in the Lone Star State.)
I got the context for the making of Giant mentioned above from the documentary that screened as the first part of a double feature, Children of Giant. Hector Galan’s film is ostensibly about the Latino children (and a few adults) in Marfa, Texas, where the film was shot, who were cast as extras and in principal roles in Giant. It does cover that topic, but Children of Giant could more accurately be described as a broad survey of the general production history and making of the classic film. It feels like Giant is missing from the conversation of classical Hollywood epics, but I was glad I finally caught up with it, and on the big screen, no less.
*****
The third and final day of the festival felt like the lightest and most carefree, especially when considering the serious themes of Tender Mercies and Giant. The first screening encapsulated the mood of frivolity as the fest wound down. It was a cartoon short from legendary animator Tex Avery. The First Bad Man, released by MGM in 1955, is a comedic take on the stereotypical image of Texans and Texas culture. Avery was born and raised in Texas, so he had an insider view of how best to poke fun at the myth of Texas.
The premise is simple. Avery shows us what Texas was like a million years ago, where Texan cavemen wore cowboy hats and ranchers looked after herds of brontosaurs with Texas Longhorn-looking heads. The gender and sexual politics in The First Bad Man are about what you would expect from a funny man of the mid-20th century, but the goofy riffs on what Dallas was like in the stone age are amusing, and it certainly fit with the theme of ICFTX.
Following the cartoon were two singing cowboy pictures from the 1930s, one starring Roy Rogers and the other starring Gene Autry. Under Western Stars features Rogers playing a version of himself who robs from the rich, greedy water company to give to the poor, beleaguered ranchers who depend on the water for their lives and livelihoods.
There are shady political dealings, a progressive, socialist message – Roy runs for congress, like his dad, in order to get a bill passed to make sure everyone has enough water – and elites are shown as out-of-touch and venal. Still, with all there is to like about Under Western Stars, it simply isn’t very interesting to watch. The film was the product of Republic Pictures, which was known for producing movies as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Following Under Western Stars was another Republic release, but I was able to connect to this one on an emotional level, mostly because of its sense of humor. The Big Show, starring Gene Autry, was released in 1936 and featured a plotline revolving around Autry performing at the Texas Centennial celebration at the State Fair of Texas. Autry, playing himself, is convinced to fill in for the actor for whom he’s been doing stunts when that actor can’t make it to Dallas. Confusion and hijinks ensue when Autry becomes more popular than the guy he’s doubling.
The real revelation for me in both of these movies was a guy named Smiley Burnette. Fans of television from the 1960s might recognize the name as belonging to a series regular on the show Petticoat Junction. Burnette played the sidekick or comic relief to several B-movie cowboys in the 1930s and ‘40s, Autry and Rogers among them. I was delighted by how funny Burnette was, especially in The Big Show. His comedic timing was pristine, and he got guffaws out of me on more than one occasion, especially the bits involving him ringing a bell. Kelly arranged for SMU Film History professor Sean Griffin to introduce and give context to the circumstances surrounding the making of both films and the cultural climate into which they were released.
Following the rootin’ tootin’ cowboy double feature was A Fair to Remember, a short 2008 documentary about the history of the Great State Fair of Texas. Filmmakers Allen Mondell and Cynthia Salzman Mondell were in attendance and spoke about the experience of making their movie, mostly about how excited Allen was to use the shoot as an excuse to eat as much of the fair food as possible.
Gordon K. Smith (left) talks to Allen Mondell (center) and Cynthia Salzman Mondell (right) about making A Fair to Remember. (photo by the author)
I learned from watching the documentary that the only reason the State Fair of Texas is held in Dallas is because one rich guy (RL Thornton, for Dallas natives) decided he wanted it here to draw business prospects to the area. So, he wrote a ten-million-dollar check and, boom, the Texas State Fair became a Dallas institution. Aside from that, I’m sorry to tell Allen and Cynthia that, after seeing their movie, I’m still ambivalent at best about the fair. That’s a controversial statement, because people around these parts can get worked up about their love for the yearly tradition.
ICFTX 2024’s final event was the same as last year. Comedians Danny Gallagher, Liz Barksdale, and Albie Robles – AKA Mocky Horror Picture Show – assembled to give the MST3K-style treatment to an oddity from 1957 called Rock Baby – Rock It. The movie is an attempt to cash in on that wild rock-n-roll sound by highlighting the Texas versions of nationally popular acts of the day like Elvis and The Everly Brothers. There’s a wacky setup involving a group of teens who want to open a club so they can ditch the squares and listen to that far-out, groovy rock-and-roll, daddio. Things get complicated when the mob(!) gets involved.
The movie is pure harmless megacheese, and the jokes from MHPS were strong. We got a Cancun Cruz joke – I relish any public humiliation of the most hated man in the United States Senate – and several jokes that rewarded esoteric film knowledge. Anybody can yell fart jokes over a movie, but I appreciate smart joke writing, and the folks at MHPS always deliver.
It Came from Texas 2024 excelled by focusing on context for the movies it was screening and reveling in celebrating movies made in Texas and exhibiting the independent Texas spirit. It’s a delightful community film festival that I’m already looking forward to attending next year.
(photo by the author)