The Learning Tree

One of TCM's recent spotlights was on coming of age movies. A film that was selected for the spotlight and has a prominent reputation, but that I had never seen, was The Learning Tree. With that in mind, I made a point of recording it to be able to do a post on it here.

Gordon Parks was a prominent still photographer and later cinematographer who grew up in Kansas in the 1920s. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about it in the early 1960s, and then turned that into a screenplay, which he was also tapped to direct. Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson), presumably based on Parks himself, is a black teen growing up in Fort Scott, Kansas, in the late 1920s, a time and place that was not as bad as the Jim Crow South is stereotypically portrayed as being, but also a world with a fair amount of racism from white people directed at blacks. Newt and a group of friends, including Marcus Savage (Alex Clarke), try to enjoy the summer. But part of that includes picking a few too many apples from the orchard of a white farmer, Jake Kiner (George Mitchell). Kiner is understandably unhappy and confronts the adolescents. Marcus beats Jake badly, and when the police pursue the group, they shoot another black man who had nothing to do with the crime.

Marcus gets sent to prison, while Newt tries to stay on the good side of the law. He's a bright young man with dreams of college, although his white teacher, claiming to have been prompted by a principal from 20 years earlier, suggests that blacks aren't college material. To try to make it up to Kiner, Newt offers to do work around the Kiner farm unpaid. This is going to come back to haunt Newt later in the movie. One day, Newt is eating lunch up in the hayloft, when he sees Kiner and another white guy come into the barn and get into a heated discussion that turns into a fight and the other man getting knocked out. But at the same time, Marcus' father Booker shows up and shoots Kiner dead. Police obviously presume that this other guy did it, and put him on trial for capital murder. Newt is the only witness to the crime, but does a young black man want to do something that's going to get a white guy off and a black guy strung up for murder?

Another subplot involves a young black girl, Arcella, to whom Newt takes a liking, and the feeling is mutual. But white Chauncey, the son of the judge, has other thoughts about it and knocks Arcella up, which is obviously a problem since she doesn't want to admit the truth of what really happened and everybody suspects Newt for understandable reasons.

The Learning Tree is a nice enough movie, but one that feels a bit meandering at time, which I think is largely because Gordon Parks handled so many duties on the movie, directing, writing, and doing the music. It's the sort of thing you could expect if you were watching an independently-produced film, but Parks had the full backing of Warner Bros. Still, there's a lot more to like than not to like, and The Learning Tree is definitely worth watching.