Les tripes au soleil (1959) Online

This was a truly odd French-Italian effort to reveal-expose-deal with American racism. The visual depictions were so far off but striving to depict the stereotype made them fascinating to observe.

Nothing "looked" American southern. In fact, for some odd reason, the story was set in the town of Cicada (for those who don't know, this is a beloved locust that noisily arrives in the south every seven years and sheds its skin, leaving behind transparent orange shells in the form of the bug, much to the delight of children. I've also heard stories about tying strings on these live bugs and listening to them make their screeching noise as they fly about.), but Cicada seemed to be situated in the American mid-west. Perhaps to not be too obvious? But plainly it was the segregated, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Margaret Mitchell, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty south. The sayuth of the suh-thuh-nuhs.

But again, nothing looked right. It was plainly not a southern town. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be, but it was clear that it was.

The movie began with a strange tour going through town. We are given the lazy, drunken locals, we hear they are full of pride (that good ol' suh-thun pride, ya'll), but again no one looks accurate. The Beverly Hillbillies were more factual than this depiction.

We are shown a church, which again, is not the po' southern churches that were commonplace at this time.

We are told that the races are segregated by 'this gate.' Now any fool knows that segregation was re-inforced usually by railroad tracks (the one I am most familiar with) but it seems it could also occur with a river or stream as well. Rarely a gate or fence.

Once the buffoonery of the tour is out of the way, we are handed the plot; a white ex-serviceman pursues a black woman at a local dance.

He is later beaten up, and a white prostitute says that blacks did it, when she knows it was white guys.

A white mob, some of whom beat him up, are looking for a lynching. They don't care who they lynch, just so long as they get someone.

We are shown a black man whom the sheriff would arrest so he could have someone to play cards with. This fellow becomes the likliest target.

What transpires with our vet is astonishingly good, to say the least.

We are then shown two men, one black and one white. I think the white guy had gone for help.

They return to town, the black guy is shot. So they all leave town together, the white guy who had gone for help, the vet, the 'dead' black man.

This bit didn't piece together very well, but there was substance here. An idea, an impression and a plot.

Unfortunately, this movie was packaged as being something that might turn up on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which is unfair and inaccurate.

Again nothing portrayed was accurate all the way to the people leaving at the end in a straw wagon (it would have been a pick-up. sigh.), but someone definitely had a story and it was here.

Checkerboard (1959)

** (out of 4)

After a bizarre pre-credit sequence where we get to read a bit, we then hit the town of Cicada and meet some of the rather bizarre people who live there. We learn that a tourist group is being led through the town, which is away from most things and they see how evil white people try to hold the black people down with racism and violence.

CHECKERBOARD is without question one of the strangest films that you're ever going to see and my plot description really can't do the film justice because it's just so bizarre and outrageous on so many different labels. This French-Italian co-production was probably made by people who saw headlines of what it was like in the Southern portion of the United States so they wanted to make a movie on it.

The problem is that the film really isn't all that well made and it's certainly not a good or realistic look at the South. I mean, showing how evil some Southern people were is right on the mark but everything here is so exaggerated as far as the characters go that it's hard to take it too serious. There's a very bizarre and sometimes weird view of the white people from them looking weird or just acting in strange ways. One man has a severed cow's head on his counter that shoots water out of its mouth!

The performances are mostly forgettable and I'd argue that the film goes on a bit too long at 93 minutes. Technically speaking the film really isn't all that impressive but at the same time the story is just so weird and bizarre that it's hard to not keep watching and scratching your head wondering what the hell they were thinking. The frank and brutal look at racism and racist words is something quite rare for this era.

CHECKERBOARD is a really poor little French drama with a controversial subject matter exploring race relations between the two sexes. What this all boils down to is some fairly repellent material in which black women are abused by white men while the film supposedly shines a light on racial attitudes of the day. It's cheap and scuzzy, throwing in a few then-explicit moments in a bid to shock, but the end result is anything but shocking, more boring in fact.

This film will make your brain ache--unless you happen to be schizophrenic!! The film is a surreal mess and it's practically impossible to adequately describe it.

The film begins in the fictional paradise of Cicada--a land almost completely isolated from the outside world. A tour guide is taking some foreigners through town. As he describes it glowingly, the people see a wide variety of repellent images--with lots of deliberately gratuitous nudity and violence in this dirty crap-hole. In addition, you get to see a severed cow head that spouts water from its nostrils and it's used like a faucet! Wow...pass the LSD! What follows after the tour group leaves appears to be a parody of the American South--with its strict (at times) segregation, racist attitudes and white folks trying to get in the pants of black women. It's all very coarse as well as stupid. So, instead of actually making a statement about a need for change, it's just an incredibly bizarre and cheaply made crap film. Probably not worth your time unless you've already seen every movie already made and are looking to see the last!