Cane River (H. B. J. Productions, Cane River Recording Company, Zweitzen Deutschen Fernsehen (ZDF). Oscilloscope, 1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 7) I watched a quite remarkable film on Turner Classic Movies that pretty much fell through the cracks: Cane River, a 1982 romantic drama set in Cane River and Natchitoches, Louisiana. It was written, directed and produced by Horace B. Jenkins, who had previously made documentaries for TV (one of which won an Emmy Award) but this was his only dramatic fiction film. It’s a story about Black Americans, but TCM didn’t show it as part of their Black History Month tribute; instead they ran it as part of an evening saluting film preservation, co-hosted by Jacqueline Stewart and MIke Pogorzelski, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ film archive. Cane River was made independently by a filmmaker who died of a heart attack at age 41 just after he’d finished it and was trying to sell it to a distributor. Then it sat in the vaults at DuPar Film Laboratories, the New York-based processing house that had done the lab work on the negative, for 31 years until DuPar decided to convert from celluloid to digital. They had a whole lot of film negatives and prints in their care, which they offered to donate to the Academy for preservation – and this minor gem was in the bunch. The Academy struck a new print from Jenkins’ negative and then spent the next seven years, from 2013 to 2020, looking for a distributor, which they finally found in a tiny company called Oscilloscope which I’d never heard of before.

Cane River turned out to be a remarkable movie and a quite good one, basically a romantic comedy-drama centered around the class conflicts between Louisiana Creoles and Blacks. I’ve mentioned the Louisiana Creoles in previous posts, but just to recap: since Louisiana spent a good chunk of its existence prior to U.S. rule as a colony of France, and the French were considerably more easygoing about interracial relationships than the Anglos that settled the rest of what became the United States, a group of mixed-race Creoles emerged. Like the mixed-race “coloreds” in South Africa under apartheid, the Creoles, who were proud of their French ancestry and regarded France, not Africa, as their homeland, occupied an in-between step in the racial hierarchy, below the whites but above the Blacks – until the advent of enforced “Jim Crow” segregation in the 1890’s pulled them down from their intermediate perch and flung them in with the Blacks. The infamous test case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the U.S. Supreme Court legitimized racial segregation for the next 58 years, involved Homer Adolph Plessy, a New Orleans Creole who was only one-sixteenth Black. When Plessy took a seat in a whites-only railroad car to set up the test case (brought by railroads who didn’t want the added expense of separate cars for white and Black passengers), he had to explain to the conductor that he was Black to get himself arrested and start the case. I’ve long believed that segregation was the reason jazz was born when (the 1890’s) and where (New Orleans) it was; Creole musicians brought European harmonic training to the mix, while Blacks supplied the blues and soul.

Cane River dramatizes the ongoing conflict between Creoles and Blacks via a Romeo and Juliet-style love story involving Peter Metoyer (Richard Romain), a young Creole man who returns to his ancestral homeland of Cane River only to discover that his family has been cheated of the big plantation their founder, his great-grandmother, started; and Maria Mathis (Tommye Myrick), a young Black woman from Natchitoches. They have a classic Hollywood-style meet-cute but run into opposition from Maria’s family, particularly her mother (Carol Sutton) and her brother (Ilunga Adell). Both of them point out that the Metoyers ran the big plantation in the area, and while the founder of the family was a freed slave herself, eventually she got so successful that she owned slaves. We learn all this via a book sold at the gift shop of the former plantation house that has since become a museum, run by an officious white woman (the only Caucasian character of any significance), which both Peter and Maria read. At one point Peter turns Maria’s attention to a painting of his grandfather, who looks totally Black, just to settle Maria’s doubts as to which race he identifies with. Maria’s mom and brother are convinced Peter is only out to exploit her sexually, and at one point mom tells Maria that she should wait for four years and attend college, living in its dorms, and if Peter is still waiting for her after four years then mom just might believe Peter is truly in love with her (an oddly 19th century conceit for a story both made and set in 1982).

There’s a series of scenes in which Peter takes Maria to New Orleans, a city she’s never visited even though it’s only 100 miles away from where she grew up, and the strait-laced Maria, who had in their initial meeting with Peter asked if he was a “pervert” (i.e., was he Gay?), is predictably shocked at seeing public displays of affection between women and also between men. It’s also established that Peter is a Roman Catholic and Maria is a Baptist, and there’s a great pair of scenes once Peter has persuaded Maria that he’ll come to her church if she comes to his. Maria shows up at St. Augustine’s Church, endowed initially by the Metoyer family, and she arrives late – “I don’t know why you Catholics get up so early on Sundays,” she says; “we believe it’s the day of rest, so we rest” – and then they go to the local Baptist church, a full-on Black church experience with a stomping gospel chorus (the “Interdenominational Choir of Natchitoches,” playing itself) and a band playing the music that became the basis for rock ‘n’ roll. Though hamstrung by the inevitable budget limitations and Jenkins’ decision to use soul singer and composer Leroy Glover (a quite good soft folk-soul singer who reminded me of Bill Withers) as a sort of Greek chorus commenting on the action – which gets annoying at times as Glover’s songs recap scenes we’ve just seen – Cane River is a quite remarkable and well-done movie that, among other things, makes one wonder what Jenkins might have been able to do next if he hadn’t suddenly died just after finishing it. (There are two female singers credited as well, Renee Courtney and Anita Pichon, and I’m presuming one of them was Glover’s duet partner on one or two of his songs and the other was the soloist in the Baptist Church sequence, but I have no idea which was which.) Certainly we have every reason to be grateful that Cane River escaped from the lab where it was imprisoned for 31 years and we can finally get to see it!