SW076 1950s’ Hollywood Films Carve Fanciful Views of Everglades Struggle to Remove Seminole; Introduce ‘Wilhelm Scream‘ to moviegoers

Listeners to this Seminole Wars podcast understand the rich scenic cinematic possibilities in telling the story of this long Florida-based conflict. The film makers in Hollywood did, too, back in the 1950s anyway.

Distant Drums, Seminole, and Naked in the Sun are three films taking some aspect of the war and presenting a fanciful view with great liberties to tell a compelling narrative. Distant Drums is the first film to use the so-called 'Wilhelm Scream.' We've all heard it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio (identified with the 3rd film to use the sound effect).

 

 

Illustration of Wilhelm scream.

 

The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in a number of films and TV series, beginning in 1951 with the film Distant Drums. The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height or is thrown from an explosion. The sound is named after Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 Western in which the character gets shot in the thigh with an arrow. 

 

The Wilhelm scream originates from a series of sound effects recorded for the 1951 movie Distant Drums. In a scene from the film, soldiers are wading through a swamp in the Everglades, and one of them is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator. The screams for that scene, and other scenes in the movie, were recorded later in a single take. The recording was entitled: "Man getting bit by an alligator, and he screamed." The fifth take of the scream was used for the soldier in the alligator scene. The fifth take, which later became known as the iconic "Wilhelm scream," was probably voiced by actor Sheb Wooley (who played the uncredited role of Pvt. Jessup in Distant Drums).

 

 

 

 

Yellowneck, a fourth film, in what we might dub a Seminole Swamp series of movies, focuses on Confederate deserters trudging through the Everglades and meeting hostile Seminoles as they pass through their reservation to the Florida coast. Seminole Medicine man and leader Josie Billie makes a cameo, portraying, who else, a Seminole. 

 

 

Two others, Seminole Uprising and War Arrow, portray the Seminoles in Oklahoma and Texas as antagonistic or supporting of the U.S. Army. But although they feature actors purportedly playing Seminoles, the plots of either film could have proceeded without trouble had any other American Tribe been selected.

In this episode, autodidact and cinephile Jesse Marshall returns to give us the run down on the good, the bad, and the ugly of these films, with greatest focus on the three films actually set in the Seminole Wars. They featured journeymen actors but also some genuine box officer superstars – Gary Cooper, Rock Hudson, Anthony Quinn. None were great films but they all harbored some redeeming value. Jesse Marshall explains why and also why Hollywood hasn’t made a Seminole Wars film in nearly three quarters of a century.   

Naked in the Sun is based on the Frank Slaughter novel, The Warrior. Also informing its story is the play, Florida Aflame.

 

Hollywood has not treated the Dade march as a fully focused movie, despite its vast cinematic possibilities and its compelling human story. Although Naked in the Sun portrayed an aspect of Dade's march, it lasted all of about 5 minutes on the screen.  Jesse Marshall suggests that Hollywood could do well by using Frank Laumer's 1968 account of the Dade Battle, Massacre!,  because of its engaging narrative that reads more like a novel than a work of non-fiction history.

Host Patrick Swan is a board member with the Seminole Wars Foundation. He is a combat veteran and of the U.S. Army, serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Kosovo, and at the Pentagon after 9/11. A military historian, he holds masters degrees in Public History, Communication, and Homeland Security, and is a graduate of the US Army War College with an advanced degree in strategic studies. This podcast is recorded at the homestead of the Seminole Wars Foundation in Bushnell, Florida. 

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