The new movie adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's magnum opus All the King's Men is coming out soon. While I'll neither condone Huey Long's authoritarian or corruption streaks, I don't condone his assassination. What may get lost in the non-debate we'll see, in which Long will be posthumously reviled for looking out Chávez-like for the poor, is that Long authored the New Deal. FDR revised it slightly, then implemented it. Now Bush™ is systematically dismantling it--a process that's gone much farther than you think. That's the tragedy here, because we need not only the old New Deal but new New Deal. Huey Long's career was fundamentally about the class war, the one being waged against most of us right now by the fascistic corporatist monied elite who want to rule a globalized police state in which you must obey their every whim.
But that's not why I posted about this. What initially struck me was that the director got the accents right. If you're not a Louisianian, that may mean nothing to you. But for ages, film crews have shot here and, despite the accents of the help which they never seem to hear, they never portray Louisiana accents accurately. We don't have southern accents. We have an odd blend of French, English and Italian (and even German and Irish) accents that are more akin to those of Brooklyn than anything in the South. Thanks for getting it right.
No comments:
Post a Comment