A tornado sweeps across the Kansas plains. Lost in his own thoughts, a young man sees the signs of the twister too late and dashes for cover from the flying debris. This is Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson) and he’s dashing through a scenario similar to a pivotal scene The Wizard of Oz. Writer/director Gordon Parks had to be conscious of the parallels with the most famous Kansas-set movie of all time, but he’s working from his novel The Learning Tree and from his own memories of his boyhood growing up in Fort Scott, Kansas in the 1920s.
The Learning Tree may open with a first act twister, but Newt isn’t transported away from his prairie home to a magical land (although he does lose his virginity while sheltering from the storm, so perhaps metaphorically…) He’s bound to Kansas, a land in full, gorgeous Technicolor from the start of the movie. Specifically, he lives in Cherokee Flats, a community with kind faces and propensity for violence at a moment’s notice. After getting caught swiping some apples from a neighbor’s tree, an altercation that sends the neighbor to the hospital and Newt’s fiery, angry rival Marcus (Alex Clarke) to juvenile detention. Before long another unarmed Black man will be shot to death by local law enforcement while escaping an illicit craps game. Kirky, the town sheriff (Dana Elcar) hires Newt and his friends to fish out his body. Kirky’s just murdered a man in front of them and wants them to dredge up the corpse, but he’s gruffly magnanimous about doing it in lieu of running them in for stealing apples earlier. “I’m doing you boys a favor,” he growls.
Seemingly not a place and time you’d want to click your heels and revisit. Yet when Parks was tapped as the first Black director for a major studio project, he chose to do just that, down to filming in Fort Scott itself. While scouting ahead of production in 1968 he found many of the locations intact from his childhood memories as well as much of the racism. Parks and his assistant were at first denied a hotel room in town and later threatened by a white farmer who took umbrage with “that dirty, lying book about white folks lynching Negro people!” The town eventually came around, after a helpful reminder to the mayor of the half-million dollars the production intended to spend in the area. Even the menacing farmer won a bit role in the film.
Lying on the cultural fault line between the North and the South, Kansas is often portrayed as the middle of nowhere, a sepia-toned sea of grass that a bored young white girl might sing about escaping. Parks films another version, a complicated, colorful place where a third generation still wore scars from compromises that resulted in Bleeding Kansas and then the Civil War. On leave from his staff photography post at Life magazine, Parks (with Bonnie and Clyde DP Burnett Guffey whom Parks recruited out of retirement) lenses Kansas with an eye to catch as much color it has to offer. There’s the famous wide-open sky of course, seen early on in a dusk silhouette that defines and humbles the humans below it. Newt and his friends often dress in bright blue denim, as though they’re pieces of the cloudless Kansas sky itself.
Parks is informed by a healthy dose of nostalgia despite the relentless danger – making love in the midst of a cyclone is an apt opening. The young New enjoys movies, but always from the Colored Only balcony. The swimming hole that Newt and his friends frequent on carefree afternoons is also the site of the movie’s violent bookends. Parks’ greatest accomplishment is conveying a Fort Scott teeming with alcoholism and racism that can still produce nostalgia even in a clear-eyed observer like himself.
Like the farmer that would years later bedevil the filmmaker, the white characters of Fort Scott (renamed Cherokee Flats in The Learning Tree) have a tenuous grasp on their role in the town’s problems. Evil and good deeds alike get strained through a racial mesh. Kirky, the trigger-happy sheriff is a ubiquitous figure who most obviously commits terrible acts, yet he’s the sole representative of law in the city and called upon by citizens of all races to intervene. A kindly principal intervenes when Newt argues with a teacher who discourages his college ambitions, but in a departure from the book where the teacher comes around to appreciate Newt’s abilities, the conflict ends with the principal’s explanation of the teacher’s perspective coming from another era. He sounds genuine, but the dead end of the scene makes him into an apologist for racism rather than an active helper.
Justice is further complicated by the white/black divide when Newt secretly witnesses the murder of a white farmer. The crime is pinned on a white town drunk even though Newt saw that Marcus’s father (also a drunk) was the real killer. Newt is reluctant to come forward with the truth because he knows saving an innocent man’s would put a match to the town’s racist kindling. And indeed when Booker is pointed out in court, slurs and cries for his immediate death follow immediately. Booker steals a weapon and turns it on himself before the mob gets their chance. Another white authority figure acts as post facto conscious as the judge chides the crowd.
When Marcus attacks Newt in the film’s climax, it’s Kirky who gets called to rescue. Newt fights for his life against an enraged Marcus, but when they hear Kirky’s motorcycle approach Marcus implores Newt to help him escape. Newt tries to redirect the lawman, but it’s no use. Kirky shoots the fleeing Marcus in the back in the same river where he killed a Black man near the start of the film. “Guess he won’t be bothering you anymore,” he says cheerfully to Newt before offering him a ride. Newt declines. “I’ll go my own way.”
His would-be killer becomes his ally moments before his would-be rescuer kills him in cold blood. Few filmmakers juggle the contradictions of living in segregated Kansas so well, where all interactions held the burden of racism, dulling kind acts and interrupting happy moments with senseless violence. Like Newt, Parks left Kansas as a teenager for places farther north. Newt may have declared he’d go his own way, but the choice by Parks to return and give Fort Scott the chance to play itself adds an intriguing coda to the story. There’s no place like home, or so you can hope.
Nifty historical note: This is the first major studio film helmed by a Black director. Parks recalls being recommended for the job at Warner Bros. (then Warner Bros.-Seven Arts) by John Cassavetes who managed to put in a good word despite not being on speaking terms with studio head Kenny Hyman.