Product Description

In an attempt to carry on in his great Rhett Butler tradition, Gone With The Wind star Clark Gable once again flexes his muscular charms in another Civil War-era movie about the torrid romance between a plantation owner and a half-caste beauty. Directed by Raoul Walsh, and also starring Yvonne De Carlo and Sidney Poitier, the film is highlighted by a stunning musical score by Gone with the Wind composer Max Steiner.

DVD Features:
Featurette
Theatrical Trailer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12371 in DVD
• Brand: WARNER HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 125 minutes

Amazon.com
Sidney Poitier, in the beginning of his career, fires up the screen in the Civil-War-era bodice-ripper Band of Angels. The movie follows Amantha Starr (Yvonne De Carlo, later on The Munsters), a Southern belle whose fortunes fall when her father dies and family secrets come to light. She ends up under the protection of Hamish Bond (Clark Gable, close to the end of his long, remarkable career and still radiating an easy, charismatic masculinity), a plantation owner with secrets of his own. For much of the movie, slavery and the Civil War are just a colorful backdrop for a turgid romance--but just when you're ready to write the movie off, a scene unexpectedly digs into something more emotionally and politically complex. Poitier plays Bond's plantation foreman; every time he appears, Band of Angels turns into something fierce and promising. That promise never fully takes hold--Clark Gable is the movie's hero, not Poitier--but those crackling scenes (combined with a surprisingly sexual frankness in a 1957 feature) make Band of Angels more than just an embarrassing collection of manly swaggers, flashing eyes, and lugubrious spirituals. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

I don't understand why this film isn't better known
Band of Angels is a very well-written screenplay about the oddities of race in America. I would have to compare it with "To Kill a Mockingbird" only I think Band of Angels is more thought provoking.

The plot involves a pre-Civil War Southern belle (whose father has sent her to school in the north which should give you a hint) who returns to Kentucky when her father falls ill. She arrives to see him being buried, and immediately afterwards hears first that her father was bankrupt and all the slaves will be sold and then that she herself is the child of a slave woman and therefore she too will be sold. It seems her father had an affair with a mulatto slave and raised the child as if the mother had been white and married to him. He has (somewhat unbelievably) concealed this from his child, who doesn't understand why her mother is buried outside the family cemetery. Our beautifully-dressed belle ends up being literally sold down the river -- she leaves pleasant Kentucky to be sold on a New Orleans auction block. (The further south you got, the worse conditions were: the other slaves are probably going to end up on a mosquito-infested sugar cane plantation and face a much worse fate than she does, but the movie fails to make this point). It's an eye-opener how particularly shocking the slave auction is when an apparently white woman is being auctioned -- which gives a lot of insight into subliminal racism.

Although a bit dated at parts (the music at the beginning, for example, and the scenes with the slaves singing like a choir), this is a very thought-provoking and yet entertaining movie. I highly recommend it.

A Film Ahead of Its Time
It would be interesting to know how audiences reacted to this movie when it was first released in 1957. I never knew that African slaves got packed into ships like sardines until I saw the miniseries "Roots," yet in this movie Clark Gable reveals the shameful story of how Africans were captured (sometimes with the help of other Africans) and packed into slave ships, and how cruelly they suffered. It is like seeing the other side of Rhett Butler, a very dark side. I don't consider this movie to be so much a romantic story as it is a story about forgiveness and the hope of a new and better era. I never knew that Sidney Poitier and Clark Gable had been in a film together, and it is a treat to see two such great actors confronting each other. Poitier plays his character superbly--he is rightfully impatient for freedom and justice, yet he knows he has to watch his step or else he will be crushed. "Gone with the Wind" seems very shallow compared to this movie.

the best clark gable movie!
This is Clark Gable's best movie, aside from "Gone With The Wind". Very sharp acting, great script. A must see! You'll love it every time you watch it. This is one great, great movie!