Band Of Angels (1957)

After her father (William Forrest) dies, the privileged daughter (Yvonne De Carlo) of a Kentucky plantation owner discovers the secret her father had been keeping from her. Her mother had been a slave! When the plantation is sold to pay her father's debts, she is sold as a slave despite her Caucasian looks and is bought by an adventurer (Clark Gable). Based on the best selling novel by Robert Penn Warren (ALL THE KING'S MEN) and directed by Raoul Walsh (WHITE HEAT). It's a mishmash of a movie. With Gable in the lead and its Civil War setting, comparisons to GONE WITH THE WIND were inevitable. But in spite of its ambitions, it lacks the romance and scope of that 1939 epic, not to mention its sassy and ambitious heroine which propelled that movie forward. The most interesting characters are not the two leads but two supporting characters: Sidney Poitier as Gable's adopted "son" who is educated and treated well but who realizes that he is still a slave owned by a white master and that instills a deep resentment and hate toward him. Then there's Gable's black former mistress (Carolle Drake) also a slave, who still loves him despite being tossed aside for De Carlo. Not having read the source novel, I can only assume the movie simplified the more complex issues of the book. With Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Rex Reason, Torin Thatcher, Andrea King, Juanita Moore, Ray Teal and Patric Knowles.