Beaulah Land was a ratings success for NBC, especially as it was new product at the start of a strike affected season. But it was controversial and I don't think NBC ever repeated it, I wonder if it was shown again elswhere?
It aired Tues/Wed/Thurs/ Oct 7-9 1980
"Peyton Plantation."' Or maybe Tara's Vulgar' or Auntie Betlum."
Trouble in 'Beulah Land'By ALEX KENERS
Frankly, my dears, it's hard to understand all the fuss that has attended "Beulah Land" over the last few months. "Beulah Land" (NBC Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights) is epic doo-dah, potboiler schlockpulp squeezed out of Lonnie Coleman's best-selling "Beulah Land" and "Look Away, Beulah Land." Still, NBC thought it best last spring to postpone the six hour authentic re-creation of soapy melodrama. That was after an ad hoc Black Committee against the airing of "Beulah Land" made it clear that it didn't like what it hadn't seen, but what it had received reports of. "We do not deny our role in slavery in all its demeaning forms," the committee said then. "We do deny being such gleeful participants without visible sign of coercion."
Black politicians barraged the network with telegrams of protest while the miniseries was on location in Natchez, Miss. Last month the critical black groups saw the finished product, but that didn't pacify them either. Despite changes, members of the coalition, which represents the NAACP, Urban League and other black groups, have found the film to be "psychologically and politically dangerous." There are rumblings of a sponsor boycott. One black actor from the miniseries, James McEachin, who plays a faithful, old house slave, Ezra, has asked that his name not appear in the credits. "If this is the kind of garbage I'll be known for, then I hope I never work another day," McEachin has been quoted as saying. Of a scene that shows a slave woman suckling two children, one black, one white (it was not uncommon in the Old South), writer and coalition member Robert Pryce has said, "I would have liked to have seen how the man who slept with that slave woman felt about it, and how she fell about it. Did she do it willingly?If so, why? There is no black point of view in this movie.
Indeed, Beulah Land — the Georgia plantation of the title — could be a theme farm for slavery, a demonstration plantation which blacks, if they are not exactly happy, shuffling Steppin Fetchit "darkies," are not only resigned to their lot, but often devoted to their firm but largely benign owners. Aside from Beulah Land's original villainous white overseer and his two mulatto sons (nastiness seems to be a genetic trait) and an occasional Cracker, the worst whites here are your Yankee soldiers) but that's bellum. NBC responded to the criticisms, and to the fact that no blacks had been consulted during the making of the movie, by soliciting the imprimatur of a highly respected black scholar, Yale Professor John Blassingame, editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers and an authority on the pre-Civil War period. Blassingame suggested changes to guarantee "historical accuracy" and advised NBC to trim one scene, which it did, to correct the impression that four slaves who are granted their freedom in the will of Beulah Land's first mistress (Hope Lange) don't want it,
Of the series in general, Blassingame has said, "I think as entertainment, it works, but if I had to choose a film to show on slavery, this would not be the one. I think that what happens in 'Beulah Land' is plausible. But only as long as we're talking about a unique plantation, a unique set of masters. You could point to plantations that had some of the elements of Beulah Land,' none that had all of them " "Beulah Land" is certainly unique. It may not be "Son of Mandingo," but it seems as much concerned with garnering ratings as with establishing historical authenticity as it parades before us one steamy-sordid Harold Robbins-egg blue episode after another: assorted rapes — again it's the Yankees who are the most savage — adulteries and other sexual deceptions, quasi-incestuous and unwanted pregnancies, trauma upon trauma, shootings, suicide, an axe murder, arson, plantation burnings and pillaging, not to mention ail those deaths by natural causes And it's all more than a bit confusing as the three families of "Beulah Land" and its neighboring plantations and their retainers and slaves wed, reproduce and grow up and old, as their lives interwine in greed and passion, as they pop in and out of the epic sweep of "Beulah Land," often at the drop of a phrase like "I was really sorry to hear about the death of . ."
The acting herein is well, Sysiphian, which is to say, a labor against all odds: against a script that, for example, calls for Floyd, the black freed man who replaces Roscoe as overseer, to return after years in the North — he left Beulah Land as a young man because he was falling in love with Sarah — remarkably unchanged by his experience. As for the movie's elaborately staged scenes, such as the evacuation of Atlanta, they are merely backdrops for the melodrama,By now it must be clear that "Beulah Land" is not an examination of slavery in the South, but a formula vision of plantation life, and to say that it trivializes slave suffering when it distorts nothing less than reality seems parochial
By
Paul Raven ·
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