I watched this DVD with no preconceptions, and no knowledge of what it was about. That was probably just as well. I'm not sure yet that I know, but I certainly enjoyed it.
Now anyone with a better working knowledge of US geography and history is going to have to excuse me; I will apologise now. Because as far as know, the film is set in the Deep South, seems to be Louisiana (which I thought was near Texas) possibly New Orleans (which I thought was towards the East, though I'm possibly getting mixed up with Florida).
OK, to save myself further embarrassment I've just googled it, and New Orleans is where I thought it was and Louisiana isn't. Though it is near Texas. Moving on....
The film seems to be set in the 1960s - certainly post 1963 with the deaths of Kennedy and Martin Luther King which are referred to in passing - and racial tension is certainly running high. To the backdrop of lovely melodic swooping bayou music we see an African-American pursued by a guy on a tractor with a shotgun. Whoever might be in the wrong here, it doesn't look good. Sure enough, white (Cajun) farmer guy ends up dead, as, we are lead to believe, he richly deserves. But does he? The sins of the white man against the black go back decades, when even the farmer's father was a young man. And are they counted as being whites? This is where an English person probably misses some nuances. When the other son goes on about wanting to be 'all-American' - does that mean he doesn't think that he is already because he's Cajun? I don't know the answer to that. If he does, you have three groups of people here all set against each other; the group of blacks (the eponymous Old Men all doing the 'I'm Spartacus' thing and claiming to have shot the farmer), the whites represented by the young girl who owns the land and stands with her black workers, her boyfriend, and the Sheriff (Widmark in a laid-back role at the age of 73) and the Cajuns, a large family gathering with a bit of a Mob mentality.
It's a very well done film, more theatrical than movie-like: you can imagine this being done very successfully on stage. And it doesn't end badly as it so easily could have done, and that's good too. Though next time, I might watch it with subtitles because those accents are very...regional.
Now anyone with a better working knowledge of US geography and history is going to have to excuse me; I will apologise now. Because as far as know, the film is set in the Deep South, seems to be Louisiana (which I thought was near Texas) possibly New Orleans (which I thought was towards the East, though I'm possibly getting mixed up with Florida).
OK, to save myself further embarrassment I've just googled it, and New Orleans is where I thought it was and Louisiana isn't. Though it is near Texas. Moving on....
The film seems to be set in the 1960s - certainly post 1963 with the deaths of Kennedy and Martin Luther King which are referred to in passing - and racial tension is certainly running high. To the backdrop of lovely melodic swooping bayou music we see an African-American pursued by a guy on a tractor with a shotgun. Whoever might be in the wrong here, it doesn't look good. Sure enough, white (Cajun) farmer guy ends up dead, as, we are lead to believe, he richly deserves. But does he? The sins of the white man against the black go back decades, when even the farmer's father was a young man. And are they counted as being whites? This is where an English person probably misses some nuances. When the other son goes on about wanting to be 'all-American' - does that mean he doesn't think that he is already because he's Cajun? I don't know the answer to that. If he does, you have three groups of people here all set against each other; the group of blacks (the eponymous Old Men all doing the 'I'm Spartacus' thing and claiming to have shot the farmer), the whites represented by the young girl who owns the land and stands with her black workers, her boyfriend, and the Sheriff (Widmark in a laid-back role at the age of 73) and the Cajuns, a large family gathering with a bit of a Mob mentality.
It's a very well done film, more theatrical than movie-like: you can imagine this being done very successfully on stage. And it doesn't end badly as it so easily could have done, and that's good too. Though next time, I might watch it with subtitles because those accents are very...regional.
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