Year Seven of Scarecrow Academy presents "Visions of America on Film," an ambitious ten-week online discussion series built around buoyant and bracing cinematic views of America. Each week we'll consider how some of the greatest filmmakers have pictured the US of A, through a variety of genres and eras.
Discussions are led by National Society of Film Critics member Robert Horton, author of the Seasoned Ticket column at the Scarecrow blog and Scarecrow's "Programmer-Historian in Residence." The Zoom sessions are free and open to all; there's no homework, but we encourage you to watch that week's movie, and please register online in advance. We meet on Saturdays at 2pm Pacific Time, beginning March 15, 2025.
March 15
AMERICAN MADNESS (Frank Capra, 1932)
March 22
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (Orson Welles, 1942)
The beauty of Welles' second film (after Citizen Kane!) is not just in its collection of vivid characters but also in its clear-eyed study of a Midwestern city as it endures the onslaught of the 20th century.
March 29
MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
Judy Garland stars in this sumptuous musical chronicle of a year in the life of an American family circa 1903. A glittering Technicolor dream, and an evocation of how Hollywood imagined America.
April 5
FORT APACHE (John Ford, 1948)
At a military outpost in the Southwest, two officers pursue differing views on Native Americans, one (Henry Fonda) disdainful, the other (John Wayne) respectful. Ford captures this divide, and also the sense of community and character that surrounds it.
April 12
ACE IN THE HOLE (Billy Wilder, 1951)
A hard-boiled reporter (Kirk Douglas) exploits the story of a man trapped by a cave-in; the circus that results is one of Wilder's most caustic and prescient portraits of the big carnival that surrounds modern life.
April 19
McCABE & MRS. MILLER (Robert Altman, 1971)
This "Pacific Northwestern" is a moody study of how a frontier town gets founded, and how even the most enterprising entrepreneurs (played here by Warren Beatty and Julie Christie) can be swallowed up by Manifest Destiny.
April 26
LONE STAR (John Sayles, 1996)
In a modern Texas border town, the ghosts of the past are all too nearby for a sheriff (Chris Cooper) dealing with the town's history of different races and nationalities—and a murder mystery, too.
May 3
WINTER'S BONE (Debra Granik, 2010)
Set in the present day, yet somehow stuck in time, Granik's gripping film tracks a teenager (Jennifer Lawrence) navigating her family's tangled web in the rural Ozarks, an American byway lost to history.
May 10
BLACKKKLANSMAN (Spike Lee, 2018
Two detectives, one black and one white (John David Washington and Adam Driver), team up to infiltrate a Ku Klux Klan branch, in this true story directed with Lee's usual exuberance and fury.
May 17
FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt, 2019)
In 1820 Oregon, a couple of have-nots decide to corner the market on biscuits — a scheme that works until it doesn't. Reichardt's work is gentle but fierce, an American story sketched in small but telling strokes.
