The Struggle for California’s “White Gold”: The Making of LA’s Modern Metropolis

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Environmental, Natural Environment, Popular Culture, Regional History


In 1900 the population of Los Angeles was 102,479, the 36th largest city in the USAⓐ. A couple of years into the new century the name Hollywood resonated only as a hotel, Hollywood’s legendary preeminence as the epicentre of the world’s film industry was still over a decade away. Nonetheless the city’s growing numbers were already putting pressure on the water supplies. LA’s location on a water-poor, semi-arid plane magnified those pressures. A lack of rainfall and groundwater and droughts was making the situation worse (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Owens and Mono Lakes’ (MONO Case), Case No 379, (TED Case Studies), www.web.archive.org).

Mulholland in the valley (Photo: LA Times)

A couple of ambitious engineers in the city’s water company (later the LA Board of Water and Power)—Fred Eaton (also the LA mayor) and William Mulholland—cast their eyes round for a more reliable source of water to accommodate Los Angeles’ continued growth and development. The solution lay to the northeast, in the Owens River Valley which backs on to the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. If Los Angeles owned the land here the water could be diverted to the city. The obstacle was that this was farming land with hundreds and hundreds of farmers legally ensconced on small plot-holders. The farmers’ land-holdings also gave them water rights and they had their own agenda regarding the Owens valley, they were backing a national valley reclamation project to irrigate the valley farmlands.

Mulholland (pointing), with members of his syndicate (Photo credit: www.latimes.com)

It was former mayor Eaton who started the ball rolling, at the same time setting the ethical standard for Mulholland, by securing options on riparian lands under the pretense of establishing cattle ranches (Marian L Ryan, ‘Los Angeles Newspapers Fight the Water War, 1924-1927’, Southern California Quarterly, 50(2) (June 1968)). Soon Mulholland was driving the scheme and the Los Angeles water authority set about buying up as much of the land around the Owens River as they could. Mulholland, Eaton and other local business notables including Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntingdon formed a business cabal which became known as the San Fernando Syndicate. The syndicate allegedly used inside knowledge (the plan to build a aqueduct connecting the valley to the city) to buy up land that would become highly profitable (‘William Mulholland’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

Cottonwood Creek diversion conduct and Owens Lake in background (wwww.owensvalleyhistory.com)

Mulholland’s vision for LA’s prosperity was dependent on the monopolisation of the valley’s water, but he was completely unscrupulous in the way he went about it, “employ(ing) chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies” to secure the water LA needed (‘Reading Los Angeles.: Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert’, (Christopher Hawthorne), LA Times, 29-Jun-2011,  www.latimesblogs.latimes.com). The cagey, Belfast-born Mulholland deceived Owens Valley farmers and also misled the Angelenos as well by grossly understating the quantity of water that would be taken for LA.

Route of the LA aqueduct (Image: www.owensvalleyhistory.com)

The syndicate, from 1905 on, bought up strategic parcels of land piecemeal in the valley (by 1928 90% of the water rights were in Mulholland’s hands). The City of Los Angeles meanwhile built a 375km-long aqueduct (completed in 1913) to siphon off the water from the Owens River. Some of the water was diverted to irrigate the San Fernando Valley but most went via the aquifer to service the needs of the LA metropolis. (‘The Water Fight That Inspired “Chinatown”’, Felicity Barringer, 25-Apr-2012, (Green),  www.green.blogs.nytimes.com).

The problem with the proposed Owens Valley Reclamation Project, which had it gone ahead would have stymied Mulholland’s plans, was already taken care of. Mulholland through his political connexions in Washington lobbied the US president, Theodore Roosevelt, who squashed the project (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct’). This was viewed by the farm settlers as a public act of betrayal (‘The Valley of Broken Hearts’, C.E. Kunze, The San Francisco Call (1924), in ‘Owens Valley’s – Los Angeles Aqueduct’, (Owens Valley), www.owensvalleyhistory.com). In time the Owens Valley farmers amd ranchers realised the enormity of the threat to them…by 1926 Owens Lake was completely dry. Frustrated, angered and rebellious, they attempted to retaliate through acts of sabotage, in 1924 blowing up the aqueduct. Mulholland responded by calling in armed guards, conflicts occurred and tensions ran high over water access. A second flashpoint occurred when Owens Valley activists aided by a local scofflaw element commandeered the Alabama Gates section of the aqueduct resulting in a four-day standoff. Afterwards Mulholland hired Pinkerton private detectives to track the ‘culprits’ and ‘ringleaders’. Other incidents escalated the conflict including more dynamiting of the infrastructure in 1927ⓑ (‘The Water War that Polarized 1920s California’, (Gary Krist), Literary Hub, 17-May-2018,  www.lithub.com ; ‘New Perspectives on the West’, ‘William Mulholland (1855-1935)’, www.pbs.org).

Detectives investigating the scene (Photo: LA Times)

Mulholland eventually came out on top in the ‘war’ due to a combination of factors, “determination and deceit” on his part, but also because the Inyo County Bank folded , taking with it most of the ranchers and farmers’ savings. Personally for Mulholland though, he had just a modicum of time to savour his victory. In 1928 the collapse of St Francis Dam cost nearly 500 lives and caused widespread devastation of property and crops. As he had been project engineer, Mulholland was blamed for the disaster and forced to resign in disgrace (‘New Perspectives’, PBS). By 1930 the handful of remaining farm-owners, with unviable land having lost their irrigating water—the “white gold” as they called it—and confronted with droughts, their only one recourse was ultimately enforced migration (Kunze, ‘Owens Valley’).

Mono Basin, Cal.

The Los Angeles Water Department (even after Mulholland’s esclipse) continued the search for new sources of water, one scheme sought to extend the LA aqueduct to the Mono Basin. Local farmers after eventually realising that Mono Lake was staring down the same fate as Owens Lake, took action to save it from destruction (‘Mono Lake’)ⓒ.

The Los Angeles water authority’s and Mulholland’s diverting of the Owens River and the incorporation of the San Fernando Valley into LA’s municipal boundaries, paved the way for LA’s eventual growth into a mega-sized city by any standardsⓓ (Hawthorne). But this achievement was at devastating and irreparable cost to the Owens Valley environment which became no longer viable as a farming community… the Owens River was reduced to a trickle and the Owens Lake ecosystem destroyed (Barringer).

Endnote: Chinatown backdrop

The story of the LA water wars and the Californian “water czar” William Mulholland’s machinations inspired the 1974 cult neo-noir mystery film Chinatown. Polanski’s film uses the historic 1920s conflicts as backdrop for a fictional detective story in which the persona of the larger-than-life Mulholland is represented by two characters: the visionary and straight dealing Hollis Mulwray, and the Machiavellian über-schemer Noah Cross (Barringer).

ᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽ

ⓐ ‘Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1900’. United States Census Bureau, June 15, 1998
ⓑ prompting LA newspaper of the day The Gridiron to report that “Civil War Threatened” as “L.A. Faces Water Famine”, (11-Jun-1927)
ⓒ Mulholland and Los Angeles also looked at tapping into the Colorado River to replenish the city’s water supplies but this proved logistically too difficult even for Mulholland
ⓓ 9,000,000 people by 1994

The Much Mooted ‘Hillbilly Wars’ of Appalachia: The McCoy v. Hatfield Feud

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Popular Culture, Regional History

One of the iconic historic associations with the hills of Appalachia is the fateful conflict in the last quarter of the 19th century between two mountain-dwelling families – the Hatfields and the McCoys. The feud between the two “warring clans” has tended to be wrapped in the veneer of legend, obscured by the myth-making of popular culture over the decades. The McCoy-Hatfield feud has featured in a raft of US books, songs, comic strips, feature movies and television shows (with both animated and human content)✱. These overwhelmingly fictionalised narratives of the Hatfields and the McCoys have vouchsafed a place for them in the annals of American folklore and at the same time contributed to the caricatured impression of ‘hillbillies’ in the popular consciousness.

Tug Fork Valley and the family patriarchs
In the 19th century the McCoys lived (as they do today) on the Kentucky side of Tug Fork (a tributary of the Big Sandy River), with the Hatfields residing on the other side of the river (in West Virginia). The Hatfield patriarch was William Anderson Hatfield, widely known as ‘Devil Anse’, while the patriarch of the McCoys was Randolph McCoy (sometimes identified as ‘Randall’ McCoy). Of the two families the Hatfields were appreciably more affluent than the McCoys (Devil Anse’s profitable timber business employed many men including some McCoys).

Patriarch of the Hatfield family, ‘Devil Anse’ ⬇
Background to the feud
The earliest incident between the two families seemed to have occurred during the Civil War…in 1865 Asa Harmon McCoy, who fought with the Union during the war, was ambushed and killed by members of a local Confederate militia connected to the Hatfield family. Some have identified the feud’s genesis in the murder, but Harmon McCoy’s siding with the North (while almost all of the McCoys and the Hatfields gave their allegiances to the Confederacy) made him unpopular with both families. His death did not trigger a reprisal and most historians have concluded that the incident was a stand-alone event [‘The Hatfield & McCoy Feud’, History, www.history.com].

A porcine pretext for feuding
Some thirteen years after the shooting of Randall McCoy’s brother, a new incident was the catalyst for a downward decline in relations between the McCoys and the Hatfields. The trigger was a dispute over the ownership of a razorback hog in 1878. The McCoy clan claimed that the Hatfields had stolen one of their pigs. A subsequent legal case (known as the “Hog Trial”) was brought before the local Justice of the Peace (who happened to be a Hatfield), who predictably dismissed the charge…the McCoys responded by killing one of the allies of the Hatfields.

Makings of a vendetta: “Tit-for-tat” acts of vengeance
Over the next ten to twelve years a pattern emerged of accusations, recriminations, acts of violence and retaliations – with excesses on both sides. Both clans used their connexions with the law in ‘home’ jurisdiction (either Kentucky or West Virginia) to try to exact retribution against the other. In separate incidents, the McCoy boys ‘arrested’ Johnse (pronounced “John-see”) Hatfield after he entered into a romantic liaison with Roseanna McCoy✦, followed in turn by Hatfield constables apprehending and extraditing three of Roseanna’s brothers for the killing of Devil Anse Hatfield’s brother Ellison.

Escalation and denouement of the feud
By now “bad blood” was endemic between the families. In the years after 1882 the conflict escalated dramatically…killings met with counter-killings (more than 12 members or associates of the two families died during the decade). A Hatfield raid on the McCoy patriarch’s farm in 1888 – known as the ‘New Year Night’s Massacre’ – resulted in the murder of two of Randolph McCoy’s children. The subsequent Battle of the Grapevine Creek, an attempt by the Hatfields to take out the McCoys once and for all, resulted in an ambush gone wrong…the tables were turned on the Hatfield raiders and the bulk of their number were arrested. Over the next few years they were tried and all given jail sentences (except one, possibly a ‘scapegoat’, who was executed). The ill feelings slowly dissipated with the conclusion of the trials and the conflict receded from memory – in 1890 the New York Times reported that the feud was at an end (there was in fact still the odd simmering flare-up such as in the mid 1890s but the potentially explosive incidents were effectively over) [‘A Long Feud Ended’, NYT, 06-Sep-1890, www.rarenewspapers.com].

⇧ Hatfield clan 1890s

Scope of the feud: a media “beat-up”?
While the McCoy-Hatfield feud played out in the Appalachians, the Eastern Seaboard press whetted the public’s imagination with its well-received accounts of the conflict. The press coverage tended to be negative, especially towards the wealthier Hatfields, who it portrayed as “violent backwoods hillbillies” roaming the mountains wreaking violence. As the shootings continued, what had been a local story of isolated homicides got national traction and was sensationalised by the newspapers.[‘History’, loc.cit.]. Some historians, in particular Altina Waller, have argued that the myth-making surrounding the ‘feud’ has obscured the realities and significance of the event. Waller’s contention is that the feud lasted only twelve years – from the hog episode to the sentencing of the Hatfields. [AL Waller, Feuds, Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia,1860-1900, (1988)].

Advocates for the Appalachian region tend to view the Hatfield-McCoy feud (as depicted by the press) as part of the widespread stereotyping of the entire mountain region [West Virginia Archives and History,, ‘Time Trail, West Virginia’ (1998), www.wvculture.org]. The negativity of the story and the focus on it by external mechanisms of popular culture is seen by many locals in Pike and Mingo counties (where the events took place) and the wider region as another example of the outside’s “Appalachia bashing”✥.

Matewan (WV) wall illustration: ⬆ depicting the Hatfield-McCoy feud

Economic underpinnings of the feud
The feud at its height was a deeply personal one for both families, however an underlying factor in the hostilities was the depressed economic situation in Appalachia at the time. Resentment of Devil Anse Hatfield’s success as a timber merchant (contrasted with the less sanguine fortunes of the McCoys) no doubt played a part in the inter-family tensions. Given the McCoys’ struggle to make a go of farming their land, the incident of the stolen hog (from their perspective) was a serious economic setback for the family. Another player and prime mover behind the conflict was McCoy cousin Perry Cline, who hated Devil Anse and the Hatfields as much as any of the McCoys. Cline was sued by Devil Anse for allegedly cutting timber on Hatfield land. Devil Anse won the judgement and was awarded as damages all of Cline’s virgin West Virginian land (5,000 acres). From that point on, Cline, a lawyer, believing he had been robbed of his rightful property, unwaveringly pursued the Hatfields using his political connections in Kentucky. Cline’s actions, spurred on by the desire to payback Devil Anse Hatfield, helped revive and prolong the feud [AL Waller, ‘Hatfield-McCoy: Economic motives fuelled feud that tarred region’s image’, Lexington Herald Leader, 30-Jul-2012, www.kentucky.com].

Footnote: Rampant flourishing commercialism
The famous feud is long-buried but not forgotten in the Tug Fork and Big Sandy River valleys. The opportunity for commercial advantage from the McCoys and Hatfields’ past remains alive…tourism of the area is well-served by the “Hatfield and McCoy Historical Site Restoration”. In the 21st century reunion festivals and marathons (“no feudin’, just runnin'”) have taken place. More crassly opportunistic was the appearance of descendants of the two families as contestants on the TV panel show ‘Family Feud’ in 1979 [‘Hatfield-McCoy feuds’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

PostScript: The ‘Sheep Wars’
The Hatfield-McCoy feud is not the only protracted inter-clan feud in American history, just the most famous. Arizona’s version of Hatfield v. McCoy was the Pleasant Valley Feud (AKA the ‘Tonto Range War’) which pitted the Grahams’ against the Tewksburys’ in the 1880s and ’90s…the Arizona-based feud was the classic “grazing war” of cattle-men versus sheep-herders, a recurring source of conflict in much of the ‘Old West’ [‘Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War’, www.legandsofamerica.com].

Tewksbury homestead

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Ya-hooo! The Ad-men milking the stereotype for all its worth…

✱ the preceding blog, ‘Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm Again: Hillbilly Stereotypes in Film and Television’ touched on films based on the McCoy and Hatfield saga. Even in mainstream product advertising, the  overly hirsute, “Moonshine-crazed”, “gun-toting” hillbilly trope permeates, eg. PepsiCo’s “Mountain Dew” soft drink
✦ the subject of a 1949 Hollywood B-movie (Roseanna McCoy) which largely fictionalised the cross-clan romance – New York Times‘ short-hand summation of the movie was “feudin’, fussin’ and lovin'”. The real Johnse later dumped Roseanna for another McCoy, her cousin Nancy who he married
✥ part of a whole litany of complaints by Appalachians about how they are portrayed in the media, in film and TV, by Democrat politicians in the big cities

Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm Again: Hillbilly Stereotypes in Film and Television

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Media & Communications, Social History

Hillbilly (noun) informal, chiefly derogatory: an unsophisticated country person [Oxford Dictionary of English]. Etymology: unknown, however the explanation favoured by Anthony Harkins is persuasive if not definitive – coming from the melding of “hill-fort” with “billie” (friend or companion) by Scottish highlanders [‘Hillbillies’, Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture,www.encyclopediaofarkansashistoryandculture.net✱]

☋☊☋☊☋☊ ☋☊☋☊☋☊

The title of this blog references a popular 1950s movie series which neatly encapsulates the essence of the negative  stereotypes of the ‘hillbilly’ conveyed through cinema and television that the jaundiced eye of Hollywood has delighted in perpetuating over the decades – in the name of humour. “Ma and Pa Kettle” are two impoverished and uneducated but headstrong back-country bumpkins on a dilapidated wreck of a farm with 16 mostly out-of-control children (“Hen-pecked” ‘Pa’ is slow-thinking and pathologically indolent, singularly dedicated to the pursuit of the avoidance of any work; ‘Ma’ is a large and loudly haranguing woman and only one cog brighter than her not-intellectually-overburdened husband!). The characters made their visual debut in a 1949 movie The Egg and I (based on a novel by Betty McDonald) in supporting parts but proved so popular that Universal Studios elevated them to leads which segued into nine more films with titles like Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town, Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair and Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki ⌑
.

In popular currency the notion of the hillbilly has an overwhelmingly pejorative connotation anywhere within the reach of American culture (ie, everywhere!), especially as a topic of discussion or comment outside the American South. The stereotype is deeply embedded in and has been perpetuated through the agency of American popular culture – in literature, there have been long-running hillbilly comic strips ridiculing country folk as basically “dumber than dumb”, especially seen in ‘Li’l Abner’ and ‘Snuffy Smith’ (at left). But the idea of hillbillies as backward, ornery and all the other negative connotations associated with them, has been nowhere more pervasive than on the celluloid screen, both big and small.

The Southern Appalachians ⬇️ ️️
The perception given by popular cinema and television comedy is that hillbillies can be found in a loosely defined geographical region somewhere in the American South. If need arises in a storyline to pinpoint their location more precisely, screenwriters will tend to locate them in mountainous areas, and if named it will usually be in one of two southern physiographic regions, either the Ozarks (extending over parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Kansas) or the massive Appalachians (several systems of mountains but usually “Appalachian hillbillies” are depicted as coming from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and (parts of) Ohio)✥.
The Ozarks (“Hillibilly haven”) ⬆️

The hillbilly trope
Hollywood, from the pioneering days of the film industry, has been happy to resort to negative stereotypes of the hillbilly. The early film emphasis was on showing the hillbilly as an agent of violence and social menace, as degenerates and outcasts, only after WWII do we start to see hillbillies as a screen vehicle for innocuous farce and comic effect with the advent of Ma and Pa Kettle and the TV comedies that followed in the Sixties [A Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, (2005)]. The motion pictures’ use of a hillbilly trope can be seen in films as far back as the 1904 silent The Moonshiner…in fact the story of the hillbilly clandestinely making ‘moonshine’ in the backwaters while evading the law has been a much-used trope in movies, recurring for example recently in the Prohibition-era ‘bootlegging’ flick Lawless (2012) [‘Portraying Appalachia: How the Movies Can Get it Wrong’, (Tom Porter), Bowdoin News Archive, 09-Jun-2017, www.community.bowdoin.edu

The South is “a different country”: More audience fodder for Hollywood
In the television age Hollywood’s “go-to” take on hillbillies typically utilises the persona for pure comic intent, mercilessly exposing and ridiculing the (usually) working class hillbilly for his or her wilful ignorance, lack of education and sophistication, depicting him or her as “pre-modern and ignorant hillbillies” (in Anthony Harkins’ words) to create, “one of the more lasting and pervasive images in American popular iconography” [Harkins, op.cit.]. Given that areas like Appalachia with its coal-dependent economy are cyclically prone to recurrent “booms and busts”, poverty is a familiar reality for very many of those residing in such places, accordingly Hollywood has traditionally seen hillbillies as soft targets, comfortable in showing up their unworldliness and illiteracy for a laugh…the Beverly Hillbillies of that popular American TV comedy of the same name are “dirt-poor” until Jed makes a fortuitous discovery on their ‘worthless’ land which transforms the ‘Hicksville’ family into “oil-rich tycoons”.

‘Monstrous mountaineers’ and other ‘psychopaths’
The comedic hillbilly has proved a rich source of material for movies and television, but as a variant from time to time Hollywood has also presented a very different, menacing on-screen hillbilly persona – the classic cinematic example of this is perhaps the 1972 Deliverance movie. Deliverance portrays hillbillies as sadistic, lawless types bereft of any semblance of moral compass, ‘inbred’✪ nefarious individuals who commit acts which are both morally and sexually depraved⍍. In hillbilly movies of this type, in place of the benign and fun-loving “Good Ol’ Boys”, are more brooding and sinister Southerners, sometimes isolated loners, psychotic serial-killers and even corrupt sheriffs. Meredith McCarroll, in a study focusing on the Appalachians [Unwhite: Appalachia, Race and Film, (2018)], has identified several distinct tropes of hillbilly movies. McCarroll’s typology includes Monstrous Mountaineer [Deliverance, Wrong Turn (2003), Timber Halls (2007)]; Heroic Highlander [Next of Kin (1982)], Killing Season (2013); Lazy Hillbilly [Our Hospitality (1923), Kentucky Moonshine (1938)]✜.

Where are the “black hillbillies?” “Honorary non-whites?”
McCarroll in her just published book focussed on the fact that the hillbillies portrayed in Hollywood movies and television are phenotypically white…the towns of Hillbilly films and TV comedies typically, are uniformly devoid of black people, eg, The Andy Griffith Show/Mayberry, R.F.D. (despite the reality, a concentration of large numbers of African-Americans in the South!?!). Leaving aside the anomalous element of that scenario for a moment, in Unwhite McCarroll argues that the depiction of white hillbillies on the screen – characteristically disparaging – signifies that the TV and film-makers are applying the same kind of negative trope traditionally employed by Hollywood to vilify non-white minority groups (native Americans, Black and Hispanic peoples), as part of the ‘other’ in society [McCarroll, cited in ‘McCarroll’s book debunks myths about Appalachia’, (Lucas Weitzenberg), Bowdoin Orient, 28-Sep-2018, www.bowdoinorient.com].

The 2018 independent documentary Hillbilly (Sarah Rubin and Ashley York) offers a similar critique on the vilification of specifically Appalachian, but of Southern culture generally. Decrying the screen prevalence of negative hillbilly stereotypes (represented as promiscuous, “buffoonish alcoholics” and “trailer trash”), at the same time York and Rubin make a link between those stereotypes and the corporate exploitation of the Appalachian Mountains’ natural resources [‘”Hillbilly” Reclaims Appalachia’s Identity Against Lasting Insidious Stereotypes’, Pop Matters, (Argun Ulgen), 21-Nov-2018, www.popmatters.com; ‘”Hillbilly” explores stereotypes of Appalachia’, Times-Tribune, (Brad Hall), 19-Sep-2018, www.thetimestribune.com].

Escaping to an imagined and idealised South
Hollywood’s hillbilly stereotypes extend to a romanticisation of the hillbilly, often their lives are romanticised as simple and uncomplicated (much as native and Black Americans and Mexicans are!). The hillbilly is shown as backward and quaintly pre-industrial, embodied in the famous river bank scene in Deliverance of hillbillies lazing about with nothing better to do than mindlessly pluck banjos [McCarroll, op.cit.]. Allied to this perception, Hollywood’s hillbilly tropes are a component of “using the South as a foil for modern life”…for Americans living in the Sixties and Seventies it was a confrontational time, full of harsh realities and worrying big issues such as the conflict over the Vietnam War, race riots, poverty and the Cold War. Feeding the viewing public a diet of idyllic and irenic images of Southern harmony, a distorted sense of life not being too serious, provided a palatable form of escapism for Americans in the big cities. So we got shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres and The Dukes of Hazzard, presenting fictional Southern ‘Hicksville’ towns with names like ‘Mayberry’ and ‘Hooterville’, peopled by harmless hayseed sheriffs and shopkeepers [‘The Weird History of Hillbilly TV’, (Gabe Bullard), www.bittersoutherner.com].

‘Hicksploitation’ reality obsession
In the age of reality TV saturating our screens, the subject matter of hillbillies has far from abated. The trope has perpetuated itself within this sub-genre of television with a string of titles pitched fairly and squarely at the LCD in society…Swamp People, Moonshiners, Bayou Billionaires, Hillbilly Handfishin’, American Hoggers, and even Lady Hoggers, as well primus inter pares, the much-hyped docu-drama Duck Dynasty. Reality hillbilly shows keep faith with the standard formula, peopled with folk who are not exactly what you’d call cerebral, rather they are raucous, profane, intolerant, “anything goes” ‘rednecks’…so lots of guns around, wild animals of various kinds, ‘Down-South” stills producing copious amounts of “sly grog”, “hunting-and-a-fishing”, excessive facial hair, Confederate flags, lack of respect for authority, etc. Despite the often appalling and sometimes degrading behaviour exhibited in “redneck reality TV”, viewers continue to subscribe in meaningful numbers to this brand of “televisional fare”. Testimony perhaps to the fact that “people will (always) tune in to see themselves on screen or the extremes of another culture” [“‘Redneck’ reality TV is one big ‘Party'”, (Patrick Ryan), USA Today, 09-Dec-2014, www.usatoday.com].

PostScript: “Warring Hillbillies” folklore
One of the well-trawled narrative sources for hillbilly films and TV programs has been the historical feud between the Hatfield and the McCoy clans (1860s-1890s). The protracted conflict between the two neighbouring mountaineering families, stretching from West Virginia to Kentucky, a part of Appalachian folklore, caught the imagination of Hollywood, providing it with ample material for screen productions over the years. This has included both comedies and dramas, ranging from Abbott and Costello’s farcical Comin’ Round the Mountain to the more recent (2012) Hatfields and McCoy miniseries.[see also the following article – ‘The Much Mooted ‘Hillbilly Wars’ of Appalachia : The McCoy v. Hatfield Feud’]

∇ Ma minus Pa – the Kettles’ swan-song


✱ the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture points out that the word ‘hillbilly’ is often used interchangeably with several other derogatory epithets – eg, ‘redneck’, ‘white trash’ and ‘cracker’
⌑ despite being depicted as quintessential ‘hillbillies’ (as defined by popular culture), Ma and Pa Kettle, both in the original book and in the films live in a rural locale somewhere in Washington state…not Appalachia or the Ozarks or anywhere in the South (although one of the series entries is The Kettles in the Ozarks). Not confining itself to the negative profiling of hillbillies, the Kettle movies delve even deeper into stereotypes with a thorough “hatchet job” on the series’ two dim American ‘Indian’ characters – ‘Crowbar’ and ‘Geoduck’
✥ although people labelled as ‘hillbillies’ don’t necessarily have to live in the mountains per se to be thus categorised
✪ remember, Elvis made a ‘hillbilly’ movie called Kissin’ Cousins
⍍ we see through Hollywood’s lens suggestions of promiscuity, of inbreeding, bestiality, all manner of sexual deviance, attributed to the on-screen hillbilly [Hall, loc.cit]. To balance the negative slant slightly, as Tom Porter notes, on rarer occasions screen depictions do exist which present mountaineers more positively – as rugged and even heroic folk living outside societal norms living independently on their wits (somewhat akin to filmic representations of the “Wild West” prior to the 1970s), Porter, loc.cit.]
✜ McCarroll also nominates an infinitely smaller list of “hillbilly movies” which manage, to greater or lesser degree, to avoid the standard stereotypes [eg, Winter’s Bone (2010), Norma Rae (1979), Matewan (1987)]

The “Arabian Nights” Film in the West: Hollywood’s Inconsequential Oriental Adventureland

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Cinema, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture
1001 Nights archetype city

The earliest tales of traditional Middle Eastern folk tales, commonly subsumed under the umbrella title of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights are thought to have have come from the Indian Sub-continent and Persia. The collection was built upon in piecemeal fashion in other Islamic lands throughout the Ottoman Empire, then at some point the compiled stories were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla wa-layla (or The Thousand Nights) [‘One Thousand and One Nights’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

The Arabian tales reached Western audiences in book form and ultimately the (English language) cinema courtesy of the work of many western scholars over many years – of which British explorer and orientalist Sir Richard Burton was but one important contributor, not to overlook the work of Henry Torrens the first translator of the 1001 Nights from Arabic to English⊙.

Hollywood first visited the “Arabian Nights” world for subject matter early on during the silent era…including the related fascination with Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik character, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became a regular feature of Hollywood cinema✳. By the early 1950s the popularity of the sub-genre had passed its high-water mark and pretty much tapered off after that point. Subsequently Hollywood has shown only sporadic interest in the sub-genre.

‘Sword of Ali Baba’ (1965): Robin Hoodesque Ali

Cinema’s (especially Hollywood’s) harvesting of the “1001 Nights” for script material has been restricted to a handful of the better known stories, predominantly Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s Magic Lamp and the frame narrative of the storyteller Shahryar and Scheherazade. In typical eclectic Hollywood style, filmmakers have “cherry-picked”, incorporating several of the Arabian Nights story narratives into the same film…with the character of Ali Baba generally given the predictable “Robin Hood” treatment, depicted as a liberator redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor!

1940 British production values

1940, The Thief of Bagdad: The spark for a steady stream of American “Arabian Nights” films♤
The 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad (made in the UK but distributed internationally by American company United Artists) seemed to be a catalyst for the “Arabian Sands of the Desert” film. Itself a remake the 1924 silent flick with the same title starring Douglas Fairbanks Snr, the 1940 Thief of Bagdad was British made but completed in California because of the disruption of Hitler’s War in Europe. The British Thief of Bagdad had high production values, a big budget and technical innovations…Technicolour and the first significant use of bluescreening in films; elaborate sets and costumes; high calibre acting and top-notch British filmmakers Alexander Korda and Michael Powell.

Low-budget Arabian adventure flicks with a cast of exotics
The box-office and critical success of The Thief of Bagdad provided an impetus to Hollywood studios to try to cash in on its success. Columbia eventually responded with its own Arabian A-picture 1001 Nights (1945) [‘A Thousand and One Nights/1001 Nights’ (1945), www.1000misspenthours.com], but the Forties through to the early Fifties saw a spate of mainly B-flicks on the Arabian Nights theme. In essence these were blatantly escapist romantic/adventures which rehashed Arabian stereotypes through mainstream American eyes (see PostScript). These Middle Eastern adventures provided a new (exotic) setting and new material for studios to feed a public perhaps feeling a bit jaded from a surfeit of Westerns (“cowboys and indians” films). They were also a fresh alternative to the string of World War 2 pictures and historical costume dramas being churned out of Hollywood.

‘Arabian Nights’ (1942)

Universal Pictures in particular took to the sub-genre with gusto, casting exotic types of players to headline these movies, eg, using and re-using the likes of Dominican Republic born Maria Montez, Mysore born Sabu and Vienna born (of Turkish and Czech Jewish origins) Turhen Bey in US Arabian B-pics, starting with Arabian Nights (1942). This three-piece ensemble was always accompanied by the distinctly un-exotic, “All-American hero” Jon Hall! Universal’s approach was usually to alternate their adventure locales – a standard Arabian Nights pic would typically be followed by a “South Seas island adventure” (almost invariably with the same “front four” and with titles such as White Savage and Cobra Woman) – just in case the punters were getting tired of the studio’s fixation on all those dudes in flowing robes and endless sand hills!

‘Sinbad the Sailor’ (1947): D Fairbanks Jnr doing his best “Errol Flynn impersonation” – Sinbad as romantic swashbuckler!

Many of the top male stars in Hollywood had a stab at playing the swarthy Arabian hero role during the sub-genre’s heyday…Ronald Colman in Kismet (1944); Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, following in his illustrious father’s swashbuckling footsteps in RKO’s Sinbad the Sailor (1947); Rock Hudson in The Golden Blade (1953); Jeff Chandler in Flame of Araby (1951); Tony Curtis (teaming up with Piper Laurie always outfitted as a harem girl) in The Prince who was a Thief (1951) and The Son of Ali Baba (1952). On the female lead side, Universal and United Artists gradually moved from using Dominican Montez to Canadian brunette Yvonne De Carlo as its main Arabian princess/heroine in films like The Desert Hawk (1950) and Fort Algiers (1953)◈.

Columbia’s foray into the “Arabian Adventureland”
Columbia Pictures maintained a sporadic interest in the sub-genre. It made three adventure features over a 19 year span around the heroic character of Sinbad, each heavily imbued with fantasy elements. In this series comprising The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger(1977), Sinbad, played by three different actors, all have to confront and triumph over all manner of malevolent mythical creatures (dragons, gigantic birds, supernatural monsters, etc) with the odd, nefarious wizard or grand vizier thrown in along the hero’s journey.

“Arabian Nights” meets “Sword-and-Sandals”
By around 1960 sword-and-sandal epic films (sometimes called Peplum) films were in vogue especially in Europe (see article ‘Review of The Epic Film’, March 2015 blog). At the centre of the “Sword-and-Sandal” flick was the invincible strongman-hero who would typically flex his massive muscles and battle Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian or some other despot from a mythical land. In a merging of Classical and Arabian adventure motifs, studios would occasionally reassign their contracted stars of “Peplums” to “1001 Nights” pics…so in the 1961 Italian made Il Ladro Di Bagdad) bodybuilder Steve Reeves trades his Classical Greek white tunic for some robes, a turban and a scimitar!

X-rated ‘Arabian Nights’, the Pasolini Arabesque

Continental “Arabian Nights”
Enthusiasm for Arabian “desert and minaret” films was by no means restricted to Hollywood film sets and the US, nor did the sub-genre entirely disappear after the 1950s. Among the subsequent efforts there was The Conqueror of the Orient, a 1960 Italian adventure flick shot in the De Laurentiis Studios in Rome; Shéhérazade, a 1963 French production with Anna Karina; Captain Sindbad (1963) an independent production starring Guy William’s (better known as TV’s Zorro) was made in Munich. And of course there was the sexed-up, X-rated Continental version of The Arabian Nights (1974) by the always different, always polemical and confronting Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini – the third in his trilogy of takes on the greats books of the world literary canon (following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales).

Sub-continent Hindi, Bengali and Tamil “Arabian Nights”
Considering that the South Asian Sub-continent played a formative part as an early contributor to the compilation of Arabian folktales, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that Indian cinema had embraced the Arabian Nights sub-genre. The Wadia brothers made Alibaba Aur 40 Chor in Hindi/Urdu in 1954 (remade in 1966 by Homi Wadia). Additional entries from India include Alibabavum 40 Thirudargalum (‘Alibaba and the Forty Thieves’), a 1956 Tamil-language “fantasy-swashbuckler” and a Bengali version of the Ali Baba story, Ali Baba and his Wonderful Lamp (1957).

Mr Magoo’s ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ animated feature

“1001 Nights”, longevity in animation
The one movie genre where the Arabian Nights movie has achieved real staying power and ongoing popularity has been in animated feature films. There has been numerous attempts at telling the Arabian tales through animation on the big screen. In the US, Columbia led the way with its 1959 1001 Arabian Nights, very loosely based on the Arab folktale of Aladdin, but essentially a vehicle for the popular, myopic TV cartoon character Mr Magoo. The big box-office inroads in Arabian Nights animations were made by those that came later… especially the Disney classic, eg, Aladdin (1992), which spawned successful sequels, Aladdin 2: The Return of Jafar (1994) and Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996). Hanna-Barbera also produced its comic cartoon critters take on “The Book of the 1001 Nights” with Scooby-Doo! in Arabian Nights (1994, made-for-television). Another in the animated category was the Indian/US co-production, Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists (2000).

Aladdin, he of the lamp with remarkable transformative powers, has been well served cinematically in animation features, viz a Soviet (Russian) fantasy version of Volshebnaya lampa Aladdina/Aladdin’s Magic Lamp in 1966; a French version, Aladin et la Lampe Merveilleuse/Aladdin and His Magic Lamp in 1970. There has even been a Japanese manga anime feature on the 1001 Nights theme, Doraemon: Nobita’s Dorarabian Nights (1991).

PostScript: Hollywood’s stereotypical representation of Middle Eastern Muslims

❝(Aladdin) from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.❞
~ opening song from the original theatrical release of Disney’s 1992 Aladdin (due to protests Disney subsequently modified the offending lyrics but kept the ‘barbaric’ reference✤)

The bulk of Hollywood movies like those above have resorted to over-simplified, usually demeaning, representations of Arabs and of the Arab world回. Lebanese-American academic Jack Shaheen pioneered research in this area, unearthing the extent to which Hollywood filmmakers manipulated the images and perpetuated orientalist stereotypes on the screen¤. So, in the typical 1001 Nights movie, we get totally formulaic story-lines which have become an established trope in the trade…the (often eponymous) hero suffers an injustice (imprisonment, exile, etc) at the hands of an evil cabal of usurper sheiks/caliphs (aided and abetted by greedy merchants who covet all the wealth and power for themselves). The princely hero recovers and ultimately overthrow the tyrant/regime, and in the process of course wins the beautiful, entrapped princess!

The Harem Girls’ pool shot in the 1942 film

The films are usually decorated with an obligatory harem of young, gorgeous and seemingly empty-headed girls lounging round doing nothing, occasionally belly-dancing or reclining in a pool (kind of your Arabian equivalent of the bikini girls in the 1960s beach movies). Universal’s Arabian Nights for example is full of sexy, seductive veiled dancers. Not exactly Islamic orthodoxy here! Sightings of the Taj Mahal in the 1942 film also illustrates how Hollywood mangles geography in the Arab World…the same goes for history, many plots involve ahistorical scenarios, eg, in the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries the 8th century AD narrator recounts stories in which 17th-18th century muskets are in use [Arabian Nights (miniseries), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org; ‘Veils, Harems and Belly Dancers’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].The settings for the movies are equally formulaic – bustling bazaars with narrow, crowded alleys full of pickpockets, cardboard palaces that look like flimsy, fake Alhambras. Genies, flying carpets, robotic guards – a scene of frivolous adventure and fantasy. Outside of the city everything is amorphous desert, endless sand hills punctuated by outposts of tents and a caravan of camels❦ [‘Ancient Egypt and Desert Landscapes’, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, (Arab American National Museum) www.arabstereotypes.org].

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⊙ the most popular of the 1001 Nights tales, and the most utilised by movie-makers – the Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin and his lamp, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves – were not part of the original collection of stories but were added by the French translator Antoine Galland in the 18th century
✳ I would hesitate to describe the “Arabian Nights” movie as a genre in itself, it would be more correct to call it a sub-genre, in the same way that road films and biopics are sub-genre films. Arabian Nights films are sub-genres, usually of the genre of Adventure or Adventure/Fantasy (occasionally Adventure/Comedy)
♤ Americans insist on the spelling ‘Bagdad’, rather than the traditional Anglo/Commonwealth preference for ‘Baghdad’…just as they prefer ‘Sinbad’ rather than ‘Sindbad’, as it is sometimes rendered
◈ movies such as Fort Algiers also cross-over into related-type territory, the North African Bedouin/French Foreign Legion desert film
✤ the Disney animated version makes a further sin of omission common to cinematic portrayals of the character Aladdin – making him a boy of Arab appearance. One of the few screen adaptations to heed the textual evidence which indicates that Aladdin is a Chinese boy is the 2000 Arabian Nights miniseries, casting a Chinese-American in the role
回 Hollywood has shown itself to be notorious at marginalising “the Other” on-screen, note the very strong parallels between its characterisations of Arabs/Muslims and of Native American ‘Indians’ and Mexicans
¤ Shaheen spent decades scrutinising not just the Arabian Nights movies but all Hollywood films and television that dealt with Arabs and Muslims, concluding that Hollywood depicted Arabs in overwhelmingly negative terms – as bandits, as duplicitous, naive, rapacious and malevolent people of a savage, nomadic race (and after 9/11 in particular, as one-dimensional terrorists) [JG Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilified a People (2001)]
❦ Hollywood productions reinforce the European orientalist construct, as identified by Palestinian scholar Edward Said, reducing the Orient to no more than “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences”