Meu Pecado Foi Nascer

This film is a typical pre-Sixties look at the Civil War. They are very progressive for the time, having one black actor in a major role and several in bit parts, but even still the film is startlingly unwitty. It would be great to study the politics behind this film. It follows the early Hollywood mode of having white actors play black roles, and I would not hesitate from assuming that they had Evon De Carlo to play the role because of the taboo of a black person kissing a white person on the screen. Sidney Potier delivers a fairly decent performance, while Evon De Carlo and Clark Gable could not get out of the Rhett Butler/Scarlett O'Hara mold. The film has some fairly good scenes, but overall it is just barely watchable.

Warner Brothers spared no expense in this lavish film production of a young woman of mixed parentage who falls in love with the man who buys her at an auction but denies her racial heritage. Clark Gable dominates the film as an ex-slave trader and plantation owner in the antebellum South. Yvonne De Carlo is the mulatto who becomes Gable's mistress and Sidney Poitier as a proud man who was raised as Bond's son. Gable and De Carlo make an appealing pair in the film but they spend a great deal of time quarreling with each other. Gable has a dark secret about his past that he'd like to forget and De Carlo struggles to accept the truth about her racial origins. Gable later is a fugitive from Union justice for burning crops and stores, thereby risking the hangman's noose. The film's title refers to a newly-formed Union regiment of black soldiers in the waning days of the Confederacy. The film has an excellent music score by Max Steiner, great technicolor lensing by Lucien Ballard and a solid supporting cast.

It's obvious that Warner Brothers decided to duplicate the success of Gone With the Wind when they hired Clark Gable for the lead role in Band of Angels. As Hamish Bond, former slave trader, and now plantation owner in the Louisiana delta country, Gable is an older and more worldly wise Rhett Butler. A man deeply concerned about the sins he committed in this life as a slave trader, living it down as best he can.

One of his new charities is Yvonne DeCarlo who received one rude shock when her father died. Her mom was black, one of the plantation slaves and she is technically one also. She's not the mistress of her father's plantation, she along with the rest of the property, real and human, is to be sold for back taxes.

Gable buys her and sets her up in his New Orleans home. Also in that house is a young black man named Ra-Ru played by Sidney Poitier. Poitier, in violation of the laws of the time, has been educated. And he's acquired enough education to appreciate the situation he's in. He's got a great hate for his benefactor who he really sees as no different than other, crueler slave holders.

Today's audience which has seen Steven Spielberg's great true film Amistad about the illegal African slave trade, can appreciate far better Gable's dilemma. It's as if the owners of the Amistad grew a conscience. Gable's description of life in the slave trade when he levels with Yvonne DeCarlo is a high point of the film as is his description of the rescue of an African baby who grew up to be Sidney Poitier.

The film does borrow liberally from Gone With the Wind in terms of Gable's character. But it also borrows from Birth of a Nation. Catch the scenes at his plantation on the delta when his slaves greet him and DeCarlo coming off the riverboat. Very much in keeping with that flawed classic. Had Gable done this film at his former studio MGM, I'm sure Ava Gardner would have been cast opposite him. Though DeCarlo is fine, Ava would have made the part a classic.

Actually it's Poitier who walks off with the acting honors here. His Ra-Ru is filled with fire and passion. What Gable thought of as an act of kindness, is not perceived by Poitier as that. He's educated enough to see exactly the institution of slavery for the dehumanizing force that it is. His confrontation with another plantation owner, Patric Knowles, when he tries to force himself on DeCarlo is not something one with the slave mentality would do. Knowles makes a big mistake in assuming Poitier thinks that way.

Actually Patric Knowles has another important scene with Gable after Poitier assaults Knowles and escapes. Gable has no use for him at all. He's originally from New England and doesn't like southern aristocrats as a group. Though Knowles is reputed to be a dead shot as a duelist, Gable faces him down and makes him turn tail in my favorite scene in the film.

Band of Angels did not get the best of reviews at the time it came out. I think it was ahead of its time and can be better appreciated by audiences today.

It's with some sense of poignancy that, in the late 1950s, the old guard of Hollywood began to finally fade away. With Band of Angels we have a middle-aged Clark Gable in one of his last ever archetypal he-man roles, Raoul Walsh, one of the few directors left who had been around since the beginning, and John Twist, a writer of adventures and romances who had started back in the silent era. These men were professionals of their day, still able to turn out a good production, and yet it was also clear they were becoming hopelessly out of time.

Band of Angels is one of many pictures from this time to take a stand on racial issues, and yet even by the standards of the time it is a woefully misguided attempt. Rather than using Yvonne De Carlo's situation to demonstrate the horrors of slavery and make the point that a person's colour is skin deep, it seems to present her being branded black as something horrifying in itself. It holds up kindly masters in mitigation of slavery, and even goes so far as to condemn a slave (the Sidney Poitier character) who is ungrateful for this condescending attitude. There's also a full supporting cast of cringeworthy stereotypes – including a "mammy" – and all the drawling and eye-rolling that cinema had mostly put-paid to by this time. The makers of the movie meant well, I'm sure, but it is clearly a case of old Hollywood trying to do The Defiant Ones while still stuck in Gone with the Wind mode.

And yet there is much to be said for old Hollywood. Walsh's dynamic direction brings an iconic look to scenes like Gable and De Carlo's kiss during the storm. He brings real intensity to the duel between Gable and Raymond Bailey, stealthily moving the camera forward as the two men get closer to each other (a trick he first used in his 1915 feature debut, Regeneration). Despite his age Gable is still very much the virile, eye-catching lead man, and this is a decent performance from him – check out the look in his eyes when he slaps his rival at the slave auction. There is also some achingly beautiful cinematography from Lucien Ballard, with some gorgeous Southern scenery and really effective lighting of interiors, achieving a look with candlelight and shadow that was hard to pull off in Technicolor. Band of Angels is, if nothing else, a movie to be enjoyed visually – and in this way more than any other harks back to a bygone age.

I've often felt that a movie--even a bad one--can be enjoyed on many different levels--for example, the acting alone, the script, the direction, photography, atmospheric effects, etc. It's hard to find anything to say about BAND OF ANGELS except that it was photographed in excellent technicolor and Max Steiner actually manages to create an interesting score--though definitely not one of his best.

Indeed, no one is at their best in this film--not Clark Gable, as an older and tired looking version of Rhett Butler, nor beautiful Yvonne de Carlo--each given some of the worst dialogue any actors have ever been saddled with. It's a murky tale of a plantation owner in love with a woman of mixed ancestry. Patric Knowles and Sidney Poitier try to bring some semblance of dignity to the acting but there's simply too much tripe to allow anyone to look good. And by the way, it's not based on a Frank Yerby novel, as someone has said previously. It's based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren which I hope was better than the movie. Had to be.

Only the Steiner score provides a point of interest. Certainly nowhere near the level of that other Civil War epic starring Gable. No way!