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History Now
Jump in Your Car and Come as You Are
The Drive-in is thrivin’ all across America
For those of you who think the drive-in movie theater is a thing of the past, we have good news. There are still more than 400 drive-ins operating today (40 of them have been built or reopened in the last five years), and most are showing first-run films. (See drive-ins.com for a searchable list.) Even though this is significantly fewer locations than were open during the drive-in’s heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the experience they offer remains magical.
Those who haven’t been to a drive-in lately might be surprised to find a few changes. At most drive-ins, the sound is now broadcast into the car through its radio, and the quality is much better than what came out of the little metal speaker that used to hang on the window. (A few drive-ins still offer the speaker as well as radio sound.) The concession stands sell a wider variety of food and candy; depending on your location, you’ll find everything from hamburgers and hot dogs to lobster rolls, pizza, barbecue, tacos, fried chicken, and cotton candy. Or if you prefer, you can always bring your own food and beverages to the drive-in—something you can’t do at an indoor theater.
My wife, Susan, and I have written two books (Drive-in Movie Memories: Popcorn and Romance Under the Stars and The American Drive-in Movie Theater) and made a documentary film, and in search of the elusive drive-in, we’ve traveled around America. Here are some especially notable ones.
The Brazos Drive-in
Granbury, Texas
This one-screen location opened in 1951. It’s virtually unchanged and has a small-town feel. The cheeseburgers are great, and you can enjoy them while sitting on vintage metal lawn chairs in front of the concession stand (www.thebrazos.com/home.htm, 817-573-1311).
Best Western Movie Manor Motor Inn/Star Drive-in
Monte Vista, Colorado
This classic drive-in has a first-class playground and great food. A bonus is that you can watch the movie through a large picture window in your motel room. Another bonus if you’re watching outdoors: cool Colorado nights (800-771-9468, 719-852-2613).
Rodeo Drive-in
Port Orchard, Washington
This drive-in has it all: three screens, a playground, swap meets, and FM sound. The cloudy skies of northwestern Washington help keep ambient light to a minimum, making for good picture quality (www.rodeodrivein.com, 360-698-6030).
Silver Moon Drive-in
Lakeland, Florida
Stop in here for homemade pizza and beer seven nights a week. This is one of Florida’s first drive-ins, and it still uses the original 1952 neon sign. You can shop at the swap meets on Saturday and Sunday mornings (www.silvermoondrivein.com, 863-682-0849).
66 Drive-in
Carthage, Missouri
Completely restored and re-opened in 1997, this one is located directly on old Route 66. It has its original glass-block ticket booth and neon sign (www.comevisit.com/66drivein/, 417-359-5959).
Hull’s Drive-in
Lexington, Virginia
In 2001 townspeople founded Hull’s Angels in an effort to keep their drive-in open. Its grass field slopes nicely to provide a great view of the screen. It’s the country’s only nonprofit, community-owned drive-in. Open only on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, April to October (www.hullsdrivein.com, 540-463-2621).
Capri Drive-in
Coldwater, Michigan
The original family runs this two-screen theater, which has great food as well as an excellent FM sound system (www.capridrive-in.com, 517-278-5628).
Becky’s Drive-in
Berlinsville, Pennsylvania
The same family has run this theater for 50 years. It is one of the earliest drive-ins in America and has never closed. Great family atmosphere, complete with pony rides (www.beckysdi.com, 610-767-2249).
Skyline Drive-in
Barstow, California
Reopened in 1996 after being dark for nine years, this drive-in is proud of its pristine and comfortable concession stand. And how about those beautiful California nights! (www.rodkey.net/skyline_drivein.htm, 760-256-3333)
49er Drive-in
Valparaiso, Indiana
Enjoy your popcorn at the brand-new, air-conditioned concession stand. This theater opened in 1956 and is still thriving (www.49erdrivein.com, 219-462-6122).
What began in Camden, New Jersey, on June 6, 1933, changed moviegoing forever. Thanks to Richard Hollingshead, the inventor of the drive-in movie theater, you can still jump in your car and come as you are to enjoy an outdoor movie. And you can even bring your cell phone.
—Don Sanders
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Screenings
Dashiell Hammett
So far it’s been a good century for Dashiell Hammett. Last year saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Red Harvest, and this year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of his most famous and best-selling book, The Maltese Falcon. Vintage Books celebrated with new editions of all of Hammett’s titles, including a previously unpublished novella and a collection of his early pulp stories.
Hammett’s influence not only pervades the genre of crime fiction —as Raymond Chandler shrewdly observed, he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”—but extends beyond it. Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, the Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and even the cyberpunk science fiction writer William Gibson all owe debts of varying degree to Hammett.
Incredible as it seems, Hollywood never asked Hammett to adapt one of his own books for the screen, but he had sensational luck with other screenwriters. The Maltese Falcon had already gone through two successful versions before John Huston’s 1941 film, the one we remember today; it was Huston’s first directorial effort and one that he later admitted he translated for the screen by simply ripping out pages from the book and circling lines of dialogue.
Huston’s real contribution was, as the critic Pauline Kael noted, “a hard, precise directorial style that brings out the full viciousness of characters so ruthless and greedy that they become comic.” The film set the standard for private-eye movies up to the present day and established Humphrey Bogart as the most durable and intriguing leading man in American movies.
The 1934 film version of Hammett’s The Thin Man was not merely a monster hit but created a franchise of several successful sequels, all of them featuring the cynical, sophisticated married private eyes Nick and Nora Charles, played by William Powell and Myrna Loy. In 1942 The Glass Key, Hammett’s tale of big-city political intrigue, became the last of his novels to be made into a feature film, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
Only one Dashiell Hammett novel has never been filmed: Red Harvest, published in 1929. That book was immediately recognized as a masterpiece; Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, wrote in a review, “It is doubtful that even Ernest Hemingway has ever written more effective dialogue.” André Gide, of all people, admired it in The New Republic. David Selznick bought the film rights and assigned the project to Ben Hecht, but Red Harvest proved to be too violent and its depiction of police and union corruption too nasty for Hollywood to handle. The script was written and rewritten until it finally became what the studio called “an action comedy,” Roadhouse Nights, the screen debut of Jimmy Durante—not exactly the protagonist Hammett had in mind.
Hammett’s tax problems, and opposition to his Communist politics, kept the story from being adapted in his lifetime. It remains unfilmed, but many believe it has inspired several films in different genres. Its plot is easily recognizable to old Western movie fans, despite the twentieth-century gangster trappings: A mysterious, unnamed gun-for-hire arrives in a remote mining town named Personville—or “Poisonville,” as the locals call it—and the place is torn apart by two equally corrupt warring factions. The stranger hires offto both sides, plays them against each other, and eventually leaves in the wake of a cleansing carnage.
It’s the same basic story line used by Akira Kurosawa in his samurai film Yojimbo (1961) and by the Italian director Sergio Leone in his Western A Fistful of Dollars (1964). In fact, the two films were so similar in plot that Kurosawa sued Leone, forcing an out-of-court settlement, but neither director acknowledged his debt to Hammett. In 1996 Walter Hill purchased the rights to Yojimbo from Kurosawa’s estate and turned the story into a gangster film, Last Man Standing, with Bruce Willis, thus bringing the theme full circle.
In a double borrowing from Hammett, the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990) takes the protagonist played by Alan Ladd in The Glass Key and places him in an urban face-off between Italian and Irish mobs. The Coens have never been shy about their love for Hammett: Their first film, Blood Simple, took its title from a line in Red Harvest. So adaptable is Red Harvest’s theme that some see it as the basis for the decade’s most-talked-about new television series, Deadwood, set in a real-life Poisonville of a mining town that preceded Hammett’s vision by half a century.
—Allen Barra
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What Happened at Fort Pillow?
Trying to understand the Civil War’s ugliest incident
Andrew Ward, a frequent contributor to these pages, has just completed River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (Viking). The editors asked him why he had chosen to spend years studying this very grim subject.
On April 12, 1864, about 40 miles up the mississippi from Memphis, Confederate cavalry under the audacious command of Nathan Bedford Forrest overran a vastly outnumbered garrison composed in roughly equal portions of white Tennessee Unionists and escaped slaves turned Federal artillerists.
If the result of this collision of Southerners was the most notorious atrocity of the Civil War, it owed a measure of its infamy to the machinations of Radical Republican congressmen, who delectatiously broadcast the lurid details of hundreds of soldiers slaughtered after they surrendered, of wounded men murdered in hospital tents, of captives burned and buried alive, of black men hanged along the Rebels’ triumphant line of march. The South in turn responded to this mixture of fact and fantasy much as it had responded to the prewar brickbats of the abolitionists: by hunkering down, denying everything, and accusing the victims of barbarity.
Wading through waters consecrated by Northern mythology, bloodied by Forrest’s cavalry, and muddied by his defenders has not been easy. The black troops proved to be neither the ciphers nor the mythic heroes of either side’s propaganda. They could not have been guilty of the outrages against local civilians that Forrest accused them of committing: They had next to no horses and were under strict orders to remain not just at Fort Pillow but within their own works lest they incense local whites or collide with their white comrades. The black troops fought bravely, but some of the more dramatic episodes touted by the North—of a black trooper saving his regiment’s colors by tucking it under his shirt to bind his wounds, of his dead commander’s widow ceremoniously returning the bloodstained colors to his men—were apparently invented or staged. And far from inspiring thousands more blacks to join the Army, the Fort Pillow massacre, and the Union’s official refusal to retaliate, actually slowed Western black recruitment to a trickle.
I also found that Forrest’s men were not the poor backwoods whites that Northerners represented them to be. Most of them owned, or stood to inherit, substantial property, including slaves. And none of Forrest’s black prisoners were hanged along his line of march. Once the Rebels’ rage subsided, the black survivors fared far better than their white comrades. Blacks were valued as recovered property, whereas most of their white counterparts died in the Andersonville prison camp, where, as Southern Unionists, they were subjected to especially harsh treatment.
Few of the briefs submitted by Rebel officers in defense of themselves and their commander stood up to scrutiny. For instance, in 1877, as a newly elected Mississippi congressman, James Ronald Chalmers, Forrest’s field commander at Fort Pillow, asked his colleagues how anyone could believe in the blood guiltiness of a man of his erudition, temperance, and manifest decency. But a decade after the war, Chalmers had demonstrated a continuing capacity for mayhem by leading a band of Confederate veterans in a massacre of some 40 black civilians who had peaceably assembled in support of their sheriff.
From the massacres I have studied, I have learned that even when there is no prospect of prosecution or punishment, the perpetrators never admit to them, in large part because they refuse to allow a criminal act to define them. Men who commit murder in war are as unlikely to consider themselves murderous beasts as the rest of us are to deem ourselves inveterate liars for a falsehood we told last Wednesday. They cannot imagine how their own existence could boil down to the instant when, in the flash of a pistol or the glint of a blade, they put an end to somebody else’s existence. This was especially true of citizen soldiers who, in their terror, horror, bigotry, and rage, committed atrocities. Afterward they might return to what they had been before they were pulled into the sanguinary current of the war—farmers, most of them; churchgoers; citizens; family men—but with this difference: an inadmissible knowledge of themselves in extremis.
—Andrew Ward
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