Prior to WWII, seminal films like “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone with the Wind” (1939) helped formulate popular misconceptions of the Reconstruction with ahistorical portrayals of the antebellum South. This problem has some precedents in Hollywood. And “ The Best of Enemies” is the latest proof that Hollywood needs to find new ways to tell these stories.
There are exceptions, but in the crudest cases, the black person in question is usually just a narrative device for an emotional arc built around the white character’s transformation. The formula is often the same: Stories are set in the Civil Rights era - from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s - and center on black-white relationships, with a white protagonist who is transformed by a relationship with a black person. For better or worse, race-reconciliation movies are a longstanding Hollywood tradition.
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