Band of Angels (1957)

Director: Raoul Walsh                                 Writers: John Twist & Ivan Goff
Film Score: Max Steiner                              Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Starring: Clark Gable, Yvonne De Carlo, Sidney Poitier and Rex Reason

Twenty years after Gone With the Wind, Warner Brothers made an attempt at something similar. They returned Clark Gable to the antebellum South, combined with Max Steiner’s music, this time to explore the theme of race. In Band of Angels Yvonne De Carlo has far more to deal with than Vivien Leigh, as she finds out not fifteen minutes into the film that her mother was black, a slave, and by law that makes her a slave even though she was brought up to believe she was a fine Southern white woman. Her father’s plantation is sold to pay his debts and she is taken to New Orleans by Ray Teal, a slave trader who has his eye on De Carlo as a sex slave until he gets to the city to sell her.

Clark Gable is a former slave trader living in New Orleans and owns several cotton plantations. He salves his conscience by buying slaves and treating them well, little compensation for a life without freedom. He pays five thousand dollars for De Carlo and buys her clothes, treats her well, and plans on allowing her to go to the North, to freedom, before the Civil War begins. But of course they’re in love, so she stays. It’s a difficult melodrama to watch. Gable and De Carlo are okay in their respective roles, but most of the other actors are cartoon characters, especially the blacks. Steiner also made the unfortunate choice of adding vocals to the score, ala Showboat, and it only makes the proceedings even more unbearable. Sidney Poitier is Gable’s right hand man, a strange take on the sort of defiant roles that defined his career.

Patric Knowles is a wealthy plantation owner of the traditional style. He’s after the affections of De Carlo, just so he can humiliate Gable. The whole thing is a soap opera that tries so desperately to deal with blacks in a way that exposes the truth, but it doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t explain anything and ultimately doesn’t resonate in any way. Gable justifies his early life by his later actions, which I suppose is good, but he’s certainly no abolitionist. I suppose the main emphasis of the picture is for white audiences to identify with De Carlo and imagine the degradation of being treated as black. But try as she might, De Carlo never really sells it. She’s too willing to submit at the beginning, and too ashamed at the end. It’s a very strange script.

Ultimately it’s difficult to know how to feel about this film. Whatever message that existed in Robert Penn Warren’s original novel, doesn’t seem to come across here. The novel was written in first person from the De Carlo character’s point of view, and we seem to get none of those thoughts and feelings in the dialogue. Also, one of the main characters was her boarding school teacher who was onscreen for only a few minutes. The De Carlo character doesn’t even go to college as she does in the book. It’s a simplified version that seems to have left out all of the best parts of the story. The film seems like a missed opportunity and apparently audiences at the time felt the same way as it was the Clark Gable film that lost the most money. Band of Angels certainly had the potential to be an important film, but it became mired in melodrama by the screenwriters and wound up as a failure.