Regarding the previous threads about ag/farm movies...

Anybody remember "Baby Doll"? It was steamy for its time but mild by today's standards. I think the Catholic League of Decency banned it. Now, though, you could run it on A&E without bleeping a thing.

It was shot in and around Benoit, Miss., back in the 1960s but was set in a period somewhat before then. There was a big barn-burning scene (don't most farm movies have something like that?). My friend, Bill Parker, told me that his parents took him to watch the filming that night. It seems like the barn was on his grandfather's place. The old "Baby Doll House," as it's now called, is still there. The mansion dates from before the Civil War and has been in various states of disrepair in my lifetime.

Ben Wasson, the arts editor at the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville and William Faulkner's first literary agent, had all these connections in New York and Hollywood and talked the director into shooting the movie there. The movie folks painted the mansion for the movie. Ben said that the wood was so dry on the house that they heard the boards "sucking up paint all the way back to Greenville."

There's that one sequence in the movie when a character was desperately trying to get a part for his gin. Anybody who's ever owned or operated a cotton gin can relate to that.

I remember Faulkner's "The Reviers," shot in the Delta, too. It took place in pre-Depression Mississippi and Memphis. Folks got a big kick out of seeing skip-row cotton in the background when, in fact, skip row cotton wasn't developed until sometime in the 1950s. This was the closest he came to writing a children's book. It's a tradegy that his brother John's book "Dollar Cotton," has never been put to film.

The unofficial "state movie of Mississippi" is now "O' Brother, Where Art Thou?", and it's rich with agricultural scenery and misery. But the only farmer I think we meet is the cousin who turns in the three escaped convicts. He justifies ratting on them because he needed the reward and says, "You know, they got this Depression thing."

Most everybody who watches that movie has their favorite line. Mine is when George Clooney's character says, "It seems that I'm the only who who's currently unaffiliated."