Band of Angels Reflection

Band of Angels starring Clarke Gable as Hamish Bond and Yvon De Carlo as Amantha Starr was truly an extraordinary film. I tend to enjoy older movies because of the things I learn about the era it was made in and how that affects the movie. This is a movie about a caucasian looking girl whose life changes when she finds out her father passed away and that she is not fully white. 

Following this Amantha Starr gets stripped of her lavish southern life and shipped off onto a slave trading ship to be sold to the highest bidder. Once arriving in Louisiana she is put up on the auction board and sold to Hamish Bond for five thousand dollars! With Amantha and the whole auction room in shock, Hamish takes her back to his estate in the city. 

Now Hamish was not like a regular southern slave owner he actually treated his slaves with the utmost respect as if they were his own family. What we then learn to realize is that one of the slaves named Rau-Ru believes that Hamish is putting this act on all for show. During this Amantha is wondering the same thing but she eventually finds her place in Hamish's estate and eventually enjoys it.

Yvon De Carlo and Clark Gable as Amantha Star and Hamish Bond

The ending of the movie shows us that Hamish actually used to be very cruel to his slaves previously and that now he just treats them well because of his own self-guilt. Rau-Ru decides to gather a crew and destroy Hamish. There Hamish reveals to Rau-Ru that he is in fact his son. The movie eventually ends with Amantha deciding to stay with Hamish instead of going back home to her roots and they live happily ever after.

Now this movie was very important in the eyes of slavery. Before in movies, you did not see this point of view of a white woman actor being shipped into slavery and being treated as if she was black. That in fact was the truth, because since Amantha's mother was a slave, she was considered half slave, therefore, she was not considered to be fully human. What I also learned is that there were nasty slave owners that actually went out of their way to find the histories of some people that had slave descent and they would capture and expose their true identity. In the end this movie just like Gone With The Wind gave me a fascinating new view of what it was like portraying slavery in cinema in the early-mid 1900s