Movie Reviews : Social Consciousness Cuts Through the ‘Heart of Dixie’

“Heart of Dixie” (citywide) has nailed down its time and place right to the last detail, as anyone who was attending a college in 1957 within shouting distance of the Mason-Dixon Line can attest.

It was a time when fraternities and sororities maintained an iron rule over campus social life and were a primary force in shaping values, for better or worse. It was an era when most women felt a tremendous pressure to be engaged to be married by the time they were graduated.

Yet we were responding to Elvis Presley, even if it wasn’t cool to admit it in your fraternity house, and we were aware that this young black woman, Autherine Lucy, had stirred up a tremendous ruckus when she became the first black to register at the University of Alabama in 1956.

Adapted by Tom McCown from Anne Rivers Siddons’ novel “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Heart of Dixie” is set at the fictional Randolph University in Alabama, and it centers on Maggie Deloach (Ally Sheedy), a sorority girl pinned to a handsome scion (Don Michael Paul) of a rich old plantation family. Although outwardly conforming, Maggie, a journalism major, is more questioning, more reflective than her friends. Her life is transformed when she witnesses, during a Presley concert, an unprovoked, brutal police attack on a black man.

“Heart of Dixie” (rated PG) opened without press previews, probably because it’s an old-fashioned, unabashed heart-tugger with an all-stops-out ending. Perversely, director Martin Davidson, of two other period pieces, “Lords of Discipline” and “Eddie and the Cruisers,” was perhaps too straight on. Youthful audiences today may well find it hard to believe that many people who were their age 30 years ago did act and think the way the young people in this film do. As with the 1987 Matt Dillon film “The Big Town,” you may have to be over 50 to connect with “Heart of Dixie.”

In any event, the cast is terrific and includes Treat Williams as an AP photographer who tries to raise Maggie’s consciousness and Virginia Madsen as Maggie’s sorority sister, who has Kim Novak looks and Scarlett O’Hara dreams. You have to have a soft spot for a picture that has Diana Dors (presumably in “The Unholy Wife”) on the local theater marquee and has the kids take off to the notorious Ma Beechie’s, a reference to Phil Karlson’s 1955 classic Alabama “Sin City” expose, “The Phenix City Story,”.