Starring: Lucas Till, Jake Abel, Lucy Hale, Cedric the Entertainer, Brian Dennehy, Julia Ormond, Sharonda Vanier
Distributor: Heritage Films
Runtime: 105 mins. Reviewed in May 2021
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Several films were in production well before the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the well-documented police killings of black men and women, and the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021. This means that looking back into the racism of the past is prominent in American consciousness – as well as around the world.
Son of the South shared release time with the United States vs Billie Holiday, One Night in Miami, and Judas and the Black Messiah. The Billie Holiday film takes us back into the 1940s and 1950s. One Night in Miami is set in February 1964, the night Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston, and Judas and the Black Messiah takes us into the late 1960s.
Son of the South is set in Alabama and Georgia in 1961, before the 1963 March on Washington and the introduction of Civil Rights legislation.
Based on the book The Wrong Side of Murder Creek by Bob Zellner, the movie is about the young Zellner (Till) who was brought up in the Jim Crow south, with his grandfather (Dennehy) a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Zellner’s father, on the other hand, though brought up in a Klan family, went on study tour to Russia, heard a black choir on tour there and had a conversion experience. He became a Methodist minister on his return home and has brought up Bob in this more open setting.
A study project at the university leads Bob to a black congregation, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and a change in consciousness about black lives. He staffed an office in Atlanta in the summer of 1961 and consequently becomes a key campaigner for Civil Rights.
Till’s Zellner dramatises his change of perspectives and his activity commitment – enhanced not only by Ralph Abernathy but his meeting with Rosa Parks in the years after her ‘disobedience’ in riding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
The drama is more intense as the film opens with a lynching party – and Bob as the target. The film will arrive at this point again, Bob and a defiant choice for his life’s work. There are photos and clips at the end of the film of the actual Bob Zellner.
The film is released 60 years after the events portrayed, and while there has been much change for the better, there is still so much racism ingrained and needing to be challenged.
Peter Malone MSC
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