Cane River

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Tuned in for scenery and music-but in spite of not hearing creole musics and tunes, thoroughly enjoyed the movie. btw, I think it's pronounced "Nack a tecsh"..might be natch a dough chess in Texas, but not in Louisiane. good job.

TCM showed Cane River a few months back. I'm glad this film was rediscovered. I enjoyed this early 80s indie film that happened to be filmed in my state of Louisiana

Richard Roman comes down to Louisiana to do some sightseeing. He and Tommye Myrick fall in love. Yet while he is certain about their future together, her mother, brother, and she have issues. It is the revelation of those issues that forms the story of this movie, and the beauty of New Orleans and its environs makes a lovely backdrop. The conflict -- and you can't have a compelling story without a conflict -- is their class differences. If this movie has a point, it's that Black culture is not monolithic. In fact, Roman's character is what is slighted these days as an 'Oreo' -- Black on the outside, white inside. His is a world of possibilities, while Miss Myrick's is a broken world of circumscription that makes her distrustful. If this movie has its weaknesses, it is the too-pretty world of gardens that their romance takes place against, and the manner in which the back stories are revealed when they become necessary for the plot. It's too neat to have much verisimilitude. Still, it satisfies all of the requirements of a romance, and the players are all more than competent. and the need for self-respect, for being able to take care of oneself is a key point of the subtext.

The movie itself wasn't too bad. The acting was just super bad.

A lost film finally receiving release almost four decades after completion, "Cane River" offers a dfferent story of Afro-American romance, dealing with an unusual clash of cultures. Instead of miscegenation, this is a story of a romance between a Black girl and a Creole hero, latter a football star who gives up the prospect of a pro ball career to instead focus on his plan to become a writer and poet. Rural setting, plus a colorful trip to New Orleans where the heroine is matriculating to college, is enhanced by lovely photography in a bucolic mode, also useful to setting up the historical background to the story. Acting by a cast of unknowns is strident at times, but manages to conjure up interesting characters, though the plot and action is way too laidback to hold the interest of most 21st century audiences. Earnest is the best adjective to describe this picture, representative of the early years of the now-familiar modern Independent Film movement, and while hardly compelling it is of historical note.

Hate to write a less than fulsome review of a serious indie film whose first time director died right after completing it, but one cannot deny that "Cane River" is a potentially interesting examination of class differences within black American culture that is lost amid a plethora of Louisiana travelogues and extended love scenes set to cloying late 70s/early 80s Barry White type soul ballads rather than, as an earlier reviewer noted, Creole or Cajun tunes that would mirror its setting. Also not helping things are rather stilted performances from the two leads. Give it a generous C plus

Horace Jenkins' Cane River was essentially unknown until its long-delayed release in 2020, derailed by the director's sudden death, and it's hard now not to view the film somewhat sentimentally. That's not untrue to the prevailing tone - it's suffused in pleasantly unchallenging R&B music, and Jenkins has a weakness for pretty pictures. But the film also has a strong vein of historically conscious toughness, rejecting any fuzzily unitary view of black identity and affinity. Richard Romain plays Peter, returning home to rural Louisiana after turning his back on a possible pro football career; on his first full day he runs into Tommye Myrick's Maria, and they strike up an immediate flirtatious connection which goes on from there. Except that he's a Creole with a relatively privileged background and family name, and she's a simple descendant of slaves; he by some assessments is "too good" for her, and her mother refuses to believe his interest in her daughter could be anything other than exploitative and opportunistic. The division is real - he can afford to walk away from football money because he doesn't like the ambiance, pursuing a vague notion of being a poet; he has relatives who live on sprawling family estates, and so on: ironically, his circumstances allow him to withdraw into a sentimental notion of home, where her lack of comparable advantage demands that she look outward, to attend college in New Orleans and establish a distance from family (their religions are also pointedly different). Nothing in the film is really tied up (including a subplot about Peter's attempt to regain some familial land that he believes was stolen), and it ends on a throwaway romantic note that seems unequal to what came before. But the film's peculiarities and objective weaknesses are inherent to its appeal, speaking to continuing open wounds of race and class that can't be smoothed over, to an authenticity that refuses narrative strictures.

Trailer—Cane River