All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood

There's probably no better testament to the iconic status of Thunder Road (1958) than the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name. Not because 'Thunder Road' and Thunder Road have anything to do with each other: one's a proto-carsploitation thriller about moonshiners, the other a lament of lost youth tied to 'one last chance to make it real'. What matters is that Springsteen saw the poster to Thunder Road when the film was making the rounds on the drive-in and grindhouse scene, and was so inspired that he wrote a signature song without even watching the whole thing.

The other bit of trivia I'll pretend to know about before watching Thunder Road: Robert Mitchum wanted Elvis Presley to play the role of his character's younger brother. 'Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch,' Ian Johnston drily notes of their meeting. Nothing came of it, since Elvis's notorious manager demanded a sum of money that would have exceeded the film's entire budget. And thus did the world come to enjoy the spectacle of Mitchum's son pretending to be his brother.

World War II veteran Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) has returned to the East Tennessee holler where he grew up. There, he is the best driver in the dangerous business of evading the FBI while running moonshine from the mountains to Memphis. A gangster from the city, Carl Kogan (Jacques Aubuchon), attempts to muscle in and bring the moonshiners, including Luke's father (Trevor Bardette), under his thumb. After he refuses to be swayed by Kogan's offers, Luke is in increasing danger, while also trying to keep his mechanic younger brother Robin (James Mitchum) from joining in his life of crime.

Mitchum's assured movie star performance helps sell all this, and the film works hard to make him the epitome of cool. It works, in a very fifties way: Mitchum strikes matches on the soles of his boots, wears leather jackets, and humiliates his enemies by repeatedly crushing their hats. There are not one but two women madly in love with him, femme fatale singer Francie Wymore (Keely Smith) and wholesome girl next door Roxanna Ledbetter (Sandra Knight). But since dialogue bluntly establishes Roxanna is all of eighteen years old, her unrequited longing also points to a central problem: Mitchum was plainly about a decade too old for the role, and casting his son as Luke's fool brother makes it worse.

On the plus side, though, Thunder Road is jolly entertaining. The story of working-class underdogs facing down a wealthy bully is hardly original, although the fact that all parties involved are criminals gives it an edge. The younger Mitchum's performance is no great shakes, and that causes undeniable problems in the film's last act; but his father's swagger holds it all together. What really makes the film click, though, is the action. Largely eschewing the rear projection that still dominated driving scenes in the fifties, Thunder Road has some outstanding car chase scenes that prefigure the carsploitation mania of the seventies, complete with terrific stunt driving and excellent fluid camera work from director Arthur Ripley.

It's a perfectly good low-key crime thriller, and it's no wonder it became a staple of grindhouses in later decades. Its outsized legacy elevates Thunder Road to a status it doesn't necessarily earn. Without this film, it's hard to imagine about half the oeuvre of the Drive-By Truckers, or the current deluge of country-rock bands with 'whiskey' or 'still' in their name. Mitchum's obsession with the project may not have paid off financially or critically, at least not in the short run. But it proved, in case that needed proving, the enduring appeal of cool.

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Elvis brought the Memphis Mafia, Mitchum a bottle of scotch. - See more at: http://louderthanwar.com/elvis-presley-the-decline-and-fall-by-ian-johnston/#sthash.jRzeTSm4.dpuf

Cardboard Appalachia

As an art form the miniseries is arguably well past its prime, at least in the United States (it's alive and well in Britain, as shown by innumerable BBC costume dramas). The gold standard for the American miniseries, to my mind at least, is North and South (1985), which despite thick layers of cheese had star power and soapy drama enough to satisfy. Last year's Hatfields & McCoys aims for similar territory, but it's hamstrung by its own incuriosity and excessive reverence.

During the American Civil War 'Devil' Anse Hatfield (Kevin Costner) and Randall McCoy (Bill Paxton) fight for the Confederacy together, but a rift develops between the men when Hatfield, recognising the futility of the fight, deserts and returns to West Virginia. He increases his wealth by buying up and logging woodland, while McCoy returns to Kentucky a broken man after years in captivity. His resentment increases when Harmon McCoy (Chad Hugghins) is found murdered, with 'Devil' Anse's uncle Jim Vance (Tom Berenger) the prime suspect.

The hostility between the families worsens when Johnse Hatfield (Matt Barr) falls in love with Roseanna McCoy (Lindsay Pulsipher). Roseanna is thrown out by Randall, and 'Devil' Anse reluctantly allows her to stay with the Hatfields but will not allow Johnse to marry her. Johnse chooses loyalty to his family over the pregnant Roseanna, who is sent away to live with an elderly relative. Shortly after, three of McCoy's sons murder Ellison Hatfield (Damian O'Hare), and are in turn captured and executed by the Hatfields. The bloodiest phase of the feud begins when McCoy and his lawyer kinsman Perry Cline (Ronan Vibert) hire ex-Pinkerton bounty hunter 'Bad' Frank Phillips (Andrew Howard) to lead a posse into West Virginia and hunt down the Hatfields, who have withdrawn into the mountains.

Hatfields & McCoys boasts glorious production design: the costumes alone are worth the price of admission. It's generally well directed by Costner's longstanding collaborator Kevin Reynolds, with the noticeable exception of the fairly embarrassing Battle of Grapevine in the final episode. The editing is fluid, but Arthur Reinhart's cinematography - pointlessly pretty where the film should get right down in the mud with its protagonists - lets the project down a bit. Still, that would add up to a pass. It's the writing that really undermines the whole affair.

This is how producer Leslie Greif describes the theme of the miniseries: 'I felt that the story was bigger than just the Hatfield and McCoys. It talked about the tragic cycle of violence that's been throughout all of man's history, whether it's feuding with your neighbo[u]rs over the height of trees or the Crips and the Bloods or the PLO or the IRA or just a bully where both people are picking sides.' That's the problem: for the sake of 'all of man's history', Greif ignores the specificity that would have given her story shape. All that time and money could have been used to chronicle the feud before a backdrop of identity, honour and social change in late-nineteenth-century Appalachia. Instead, Hatfields & McCoys dispenses with a sense of place, giving us cardboard cutouts, a cliché-storm plot and unending tedium in front of a vast nothingness.

It's all stock characters wandering about, occasionally shooting each other. 'Greetings, fellow symbol of the human condition! I am angry. I am sad,' they might as well say in the worst Hollywood Southern writers Ted Mann and Ronald Parker can muster. Female characters fall into a Madonna-whore pattern so rigid it would have been considered unseemly in the silent film days. (Roseanna is good and pure, while her cousin Nancy is sexually rapacious and wicked. And so it goes.) Johnse Hatfield obeys his father without fail, then whinges about the injury done to his precious conscience: I sure do hate him, but I the script doesn't indicate whether I'm supposed to. The closest Hatfields & McCoys has to narrative arcs is that the 'good' patriarch - the austere, puritanical Randall McCoy - becomes an embittered alcoholic, while his mercenary counterpart is eventually redeemed.

All of that sinks the miniseries and most actors sink with it, delivering wooden, one-note performances. But there are exceptions, and the series' Emmy wins are right on the money. Tom Berenger, a grossly underrated character actor, is an absolute delight: impious and deadly yet jovial, his Jim Vance is a mesmerising old-school badass. Ronan Vibert is amazingly smarmy, while Andrew Howard's hammy villainy is almost infinitely enjoyable. It's Costner, though, that surprised me the most. The man's made a career of a certain brand of amiable dullness, but here he does great work as a cold and calculating man who nevertheless loves his family enough to know when the time has come to end the feud. They're worth watching, those guys. I just wish they weren't stuck in such a rote, joyless exercise.

And these signs shall follow them that believe

In 1966-67, then-twentysomething filmmaker Peter Adair and his crew spent a year with a Pentecostal Holiness congregation in rural Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting 53-minute documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) was not released to cinemas* but made some critical waves and survived on the rental market. (Today it's in the public domain, so you are without excuse.)

Adair went on to carve out a career far from the mainstream with Word Is Out (1977), the first significant documentary to present LGBTQ people on their own terms. His later films, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved in Death and Survival (1986) and Absolutely Positive (1991), chronicled the impact of the disease on the gay community, as well as Adair's own life under the shadow of being HIV-positive. He died in 1996, aged fifty-two.

Holy Ghost People opens with decontextualised snapshots of a Pentecostal service: music is played, a girl dances frantically, someone holds a serpent, an old woman looks at the camera, a Bible reading is cut off mid-sentence by the editing. It's not too bold, I think, to call it a critique of the sort of sensationalist reporting on extreme religious phenomena that leaves us understanding less, not more. The rest of the film is a careful examination of the forces shaping the church's practices, an aetiology of Pentecostal worship in Appalachia as much as it is a record.

The film steps back, and Adair's narration sets the scene over footage of the area around Scrabble Creek shot from a moving car. The poverty of rural West Virginia in the sixties is frankly shocking: in the heart of the world's richest nation, these communities look more like the villages I've seen in the backwoods of Bolivia and Paraguay. Adair explains that while the church's raucous, unstructured worship practices are legal in West Virginia (but not in neighbouring states), adherents are often ostracised by their own communities. He stresses that snakebite, though common, is not usually fatal.

Most of the film is taken up by a lengthy service that unites the Scrabble Creek congregation with fellow believers who have travelled over sixty miles from Virginia. Adair starts us off slowly, showing most of the worship leader's somewhat rambling notices - tributes to those in attendance, prayer requests, and remarks on the film crew in attendance. (In classic cinéma vérité style, Adair draws attention to the presence of the camera.) From there, the service gradually escalates from singing and testimonies to wild dancing, speaking in tongues, convulsions, falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') and eventually snake-handling.

A key part of the film comes just before that, though, in the form of individual interviews with four congregants. One man first spoke in tongues at the age of thirteen, but grew up to be 'a very mean fellow' and spent a year praying in vain for the return of the gift after his release from prison, before finally receiving tongues again during a service. Another was dissatisfied with the evangelical churches he attended, and eventually found 'the Holiness way' through his father-in-law's influence and the powerful experience of a supernatural wind sweeping through his body at night. A woman talks about the happiness brought by the Holy Spirit, and her first experience drinking strychnine during a worship meeting. The last interviewee is a middle-aged woman who is wracked by convulsions and breaks into glossolalia in the middle of sentences she shouts with a preacher's cadence and inflection, rendering her all but incoherent.

Letting these people explain themselves in their own words, without interruption or cuts, is indispensable in setting out the background against which their worship takes place. It turns them from an incomprehensible - and, given their practices, possibly terrifying - Other into ordinary, sympathetic protagonists. As anthropologist Margaret Mead, who invited Adair to introduce the film to her students at Columbia, writes: 'The people in the film are work-worn and show the marks of malnutrition, poverty, and poor medical care, and yet, on a recent showing to a very sophisticated audience, someone on my right exclaimed: "What beautiful people!"' That's a privileged perspective, of course. But it reflects Adair's success in breaking through the liberal sneer at rural people preferred by the light entertainment that passes for public discourse.

In the face of their small number, legal trouble and hostility from neighbours, adherents resist by appealing to authenticity: the free, unfettered flow of God's spirit. In worship at least, the myriad hierarchies and restrictions on their lives disappear. In his testimony, one congregant lambastes people who 'think it's a disgrace to touch a serpent'. He is unashamed because 'I don't want to be highly esteemed among men. I gotta be just what I am, glory be to God.'

While Adair emphasises that serpent-handling only occurs when adherents feel led by the Spirit and far more time is dedicated to prayer and other charismatic manifestations, the congregation eventually do pick up venomous snakes, lifting them in the air, throwing them across the room and dancing with them. It's unsurprising that this requires hype, but it's still an astonishing display of faith (at least quantitatively). Near the end of the meeting the worship leader is bitten by a copperhead on camera. While he cleans the blood from his hand with a borrowed handkerchief he calmly declares: 'If I die with this snakebite, it's still God's word, just the same. God's word is just the same... Whether we die by it or live by it, it's still God's word.' Is that an impressive reliance on God's grace - whatever the folly of deliberately provoking venomous snakes - or a deeply problematic flirting with death?

Shot on the cheapest 16mm film stock known to man, Holy Ghost People's rough and ready look reinforces its down-to-earth setting. (The poor lighting and sound recording is inevitable in a low-budget documentary, but the awful digitisation isn't - what is this 'file size' you speak of?) Structured carefully and without sensationalism, Holy Ghost People nonetheless transports the wild atmosphere and sense of real danger to the screen (I challenge you not to squirm during the snake-handling scenes.)

The first charismatic service I went to ended with an altar call to come forward and receive the Holy Spirit. I stayed in my seat, not just because I was a firmer cessationist then than I am now but because I was frankly intimidated by the manifestations I'd just witnessed. Yes, they could easily be explained by appeal to religious euphoria, but it wasn't just implausibility. Charismatic worship requires an abandonment of self-control that is pretty alien to the bourgeois ideal of the individual (which is why it appeals to so many people). Holy Ghost People lays bare both why I find the charismatic movement fascinating and why it isn't for me.

*So far as I know, at least; I've been able to find woefully little information on the film online. Anyone who knows more, don't hesitate to pitch in.

The earth a common treasury for all

I believe that the earth was created for all people, not just some. Not just the 'right' people. Not just the people with guns and money. When there is a conflict between the powerful and the disenfranchised, the oppressor and the oppressed - say, coal miners striking for better pay and conditions - there's only one side you can be on without losing your integrity, forever. To be neutral in such a situation is to side with injustice.

Forgive that grandiose introduction, gentle reader. You see, the only grounds on which anyone could criticise Harlan County U.S.A. - indeed, pretty much the film's only feature to have attracted condemnation - is that it refuses to even pretend neutrality in the manner of certain other documentaries: it stands squarely on the side of the miners. But that is a strength, not a weakness. A neutral film about the Harlan County War would be an immoral monstrosity.

Its passionate partisanship is a key part of Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, but the film is also an artistic marvel. After a terrific sequence showing the everyday work routine of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky (Kevin Keating's cinematography in this scene alone would have made him a serious awards contender in a better world), the film's story begins with the miners at the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant affiliating to the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1972. The miners demand the same contract other UMWA members enjoy, but Eastover Coal, owned by Duke Power, won't budge. Thus begins an extended strike.

The conflict escalates when the company uses Basil Collins and his hired thugs to keep the road open for scabs by setting up a machine gun and intimidating the pickets with clubs and firearms. Collins is the sort of character who'd have to be invented if he wasn't real: venal, brutish, egotistical and racist, he's exactly the man you want for your dirty work. As one reviewer noted, the film doesn't tell us what became of him: 'I don't say this because I worry about the man's welfare; I just want to know he’s dead so I can sleep at night.'

The sheriff and the courts are on the bosses' side, but the company scores an own goal when a young miner called Lawrence Jones is killed by a shotgun blast, leaving behind a sixteen-year-old wife and five-month-old daughter. (This leads to the film's most harrowing scene, in which a grieving and angry miner points out bits of Jones's brain matter on the asphalt.) Eventually the bosses fold and the Brookside miners get their UMWA contract.

Barbara Kopple and her team lived with miners' families for years, observing almost every aspect of their political organisation. In the cinéma vérité style the film adopts, the camera is not a neutral observer but an active participant; Kopple makes no effort to hide the numerous moments in which her presence affects events, leading, for example, to Collins attempting to conceal a pistol in his trouser pocket. In a celebrated scene, the pickets are attacked before dawn by the gun thugs, shots are fired, and Kopple is pushed to the ground with the camera.

'Know that nigger?', yells Collins in reference to an African-American picket. 'That "nigger" is a better man than you'll ever be', replies a miner. Traditional structures of marginalisation and domination among the strikers break down. 'We done make every colour when we went in; you all be look the same when you came out', says a black miner about the thick layer of coal dust and grime on their faces at the end of a shift. 'We's all brothers when we out', replies his white colleague, and the easy banter and obvious affection between the men gives the lie to the drivel Blue Labour and the Heil feed us about working-class racism.

Not, of course, that all's rosy among the workers. Kopple does not gloss over the internal conflicts and personal recriminations that break out when the going gets tough, but the community emerges strengthened as it is transformed by struggle. Patriarchy takes a back seat when women, who turn out to be more energetic than the men, begin to coordinate the strike. Chain-smoking Sudie Crusenberry, a mother of two whose husband is retired with black lung, reignites the flagging struggle; Lois Scott becomes the effective leader before long, brave enough to face down Collins and his thugs and with righteous wrath to spare.

Even though the strike is victorious, Kopple ends Harlan County U.S.A. on an ambiguous note. As the reform movement within the national leadership of the UMWA crumbles, the miners realise they may be banned from conducting future strikes without approval at the national level. But Kopple's point is that the struggle itself - the Luxemburgian dialectic of spontaneity and organisation we see operating throughout Harlan County U.S.A. - is crucial even when it is defeated. As one of my favourite passages in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath puts it (forgive the gendered language and philosophical idiosyncrasy):

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back... This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live - for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live - for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know - fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe. (Ch. 14)

Kopple never once abandons her story's particularity for the great forward march of history, but she does focus on the miners' political organisation at the expense of their personal lives. Considering she lived with her subjects, it's remarkable how rarely we see children or the inside of people's homes. There are, instead, a lot of meetings and interviews with several generations of Harlan people, from veterans of the vicious struggles of the 1930s to the teenage wife. 'The union' and solidarity have been fought and died for, and as a result they're deeply embedded.

Life in Harlan was hard even in the 1970s, before Reaganomics took their toll; in the film, the county looks like a third-world enclave inside the West. The legacy of neoliberalism was to bring the Global South home, globalising sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor. Kopple's miners have no confidence in government: they're fully aware that they'll only get what they fight for themselves. Call it all things held in common; call it democracy. Call it freedom: the freedom countless people have fought and died for through the ages, their names forgotten because they robbed, evicted and bombed no-one.

'The Gunfighter' (Justified, Season 3, Episode 1)

(Contains spoilers.) It may have become obvious here and there that this blog is a massive fan of FX's Justified. The Season Two finale, 'Bloody Harlan', was not the best episode of a generally terrific season, but it was still an action-packed hour of television that boldly killed off several characters and removed others from the action for the foreseeable future by non-lethal means. As such, the first challenge Season Three set itself was to get the show's dynamic back together.

It's no surprise, then, that Tuesday's season premiere, 'The Gunfighter', mostly rearranged the pieces. The show, as you may know, is about old-school US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), who is forced to return to his native south-eastern Kentucky after publicly shooting a Miami gun thug in dubious circumstances. There, he must deal with crime both organised and disorganised and the family feuds he can't escape.

With the Bennetts taken out, Boyd Crowder's (Walton Goggins) reassembled Crowder clan has seized Mags's marijuana. After Boyd is arrested for attacking Raylan, his incompetent accomplices Devil (Kevin Rankin) and Raylan's father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry) try to sell the weed to a Tennessee dealer, but find that since they've failed to dry it it's now thoroughly mildew- and mould-infested and hence worthless. It seems that in the medium term, Boyd will definitely need to find some smarter underlings.

Meanwhile, Frankfort mobster Emmitt Arnett (Steven Flynn) finds himself beset by Robert Quarles (Neal McDonough), a man sent by certain people in Detroit who lent Arnett a lot of money. Turns out Arnett is behind on repaying a loan, and he sends Fletcher Nix (Desmond Harrington) to come up with the money by robbery and murder. Soon, Fletcher crosses paths with Raylan, who's still recovering from the gunshot wound he sustained in 'Bloody Harlan', and grumpy because he's been relegated to desk duty.

It's a somewhat ragged episode, but it sets up the season effectively and entertainingly. It's a shame that Harrington's mesmerising psycho doesn't make it out alive, but otherwise we know who our players will be. There's Raylan, who's thinking about getting a new place with his pregnant ex-wife/current girlfriend Winona (Natalie Zea); Boyd, now in prison; the new player from Chicago, who demonstrates his total ruthlessness at the end of the episode; and there's Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns), an ever-delightful minor player in previous seasons who looks to be moving to the centre.

And then, last but oh so definitely not least, there's Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter). Previously a weak character - primarily a damsel in distress in Season One, largely inactive in Season Two - Ava was previously not helped by Carter's uncertain, stereotypical performance. But it looks like with Boyd in prison, Ava will take over the business; she establishes her authority over Devil, who's unwilling to follow Boyd's orders in his absence, in a brutal and direct way that seems a statement of intent on the writers' part as much as anything else. And it's awesome. I'm already a fan of new Ava. It seems that the writers have decided to tackle the show's most persistent problem, its weak female characters, both by upgrading existing ones and by the addition of the legendary Carla Gugino in future episodes. It'll be excellent.

Long and dark December

Usually it's worth being wary of Sundance: award-baiting generic indie fare isn't anyone's idea of a good time. But sometimes a real gem slips through and gets the accolades it deserves. Thus it was with Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010), and although the film failed to make a splash at the box office (earning $6.53 million on a budget of $2 million), critical reception more than made up for it.

Granik's drama stands out for its evocation of a place: an important part of any film, but Winter's Bone is all about the Ozarks, the hill country of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. It was shot in location in Christian and Taney Counties, MO., and the filmmakers were willing to rewrite lines to ensure an authentic representation of Ozarks culture. If that almost anthropological attention to detail is a strength, it's also the film's Achilles' heel - but I'll get to that.

Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is struggling to look after her younger siblings (Ashlee Thompson and Isaiah Stone) and her severely depressed mother (Valerie Richards) in rural southern Missouri. One day the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) pulls up outside and tells her that her father, Jessup, has skipped bail after being arrested for cooking meth. If Jessup doesn't turn up for his court date, the family will lose their house, which has been put up for bail. Ree, who knows her family will have nowhere to go, resolves to find her father and persuade him to turn himself in.

As she goes to ask relatives and neighbours about Jessup's whereabouts, though, she finds them guarded and uncooperative. Her uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), warns her that asking people 'about shit they ain't offered to talk about' is a 'real good way to end up bit by hogs' (Deadwood shout-out?). Even after being shown the meth lab in which her father allegedly blew himself up, Ree remains unconvinced, and her continued investigation eventually leads to a run-in with the clan of local crime boss Thump Milton (Ron 'Stray Dog' Hall).

The plot, though, isn't the single greatest contribution to the success of Winter's Bone. That would be the cinematography. As shot by longtime Debra Granik collaborator Michael McDonough, Winter's Bone looks frosty and crisp (it's no surprise it was filmed on the Red One digital camera). It's often deliberately overlit, capturing the long shadows and pale, cold daylight of winter. This is all the more effective as the film eschews the shopworn tropes of winter cinematography: there's no snow anywhere to be seen, for example. (Principal photography took place in late winter, concluding in March 2009.) The colours are desaturated but not washed out, as if they had retreated to their essence. Winter's Bone looks, in other words, like a dream.

That's appropriate since the film is essentially a fairy-tale, and Ree's search for her father is a quest. Her repeated refusal to heed warnings of a dangerous place in the woods, which drives the plot, is distinctly reminiscent of the genre, and the film's climactic scene, which takes place on a lake in the middle of the night, is a test of the heroine's commitment to her cause. Creating a drama about poor rural Americans not in the obvious mode - social realism - but as fairy-tale is perhaps the most interesting artistic decision Granik took, and it pays off in the viewing experience.

The performances, too, are mostly if not uniformly excellent. Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of Ree rightly catapulted her onto the A-list. She doesn't suggest that Ree is a vulnerable teenager beneath a hard exterior: rather, she has long shed doubts and fears, becoming tough in order to survive in a bleak world. The second standout is the terrific John Hawkes. His Teardrop is a man who has become so mean and threatening that Ree finds it difficult to trust him. Significantly, as Hawkes himself pointed out, he does not become a different character by the end of the film: rather, it's our perspective on him that changes. Dale Dickey is also mesmerising in the role of Merab, who regards Ree with sympathy but knows she must safeguard the interests of the Milton clan first.

Even so, there are a few reasons to feel uneasy about Winter's Bone. Its depiction of poverty is frankly pornographic. We're treated in lavish detail to the Dolly family's inability to feed itself: and while the rise of insecurity in the west should give us pause for thought, I'm not sure I like the outsider's perspective. There's an almost ethnographic feeling to the way in which rural America - shown as a society of patriarchal clans, as in much recent pop culture - is fictionalised here; and in presenting the Ozarks to an urban, liberal audience as strange, the viewer's perspective is affirmed rather than challenged. The backwoods are seen but not empowered.

Bloody Harlan

 
In a key scene of the second season of FX's Justified, a representative for a coal company faces a meeting with the people of Harlan County. She argues that the corporation will bring jobs to Harlan, 'make it fertile in infertile times', but people are not convinced. In an extraordinary performance, Mags Bennett (Margo Martindale) argues that blowing off mountaintops will bring 'the spoil', chemical devastation of local water and flora, and threaten the region's unique and isolated culture.

It's this compelling evocation of a place that, as I've said before, quickly turned FX's Justified into one of my favourite TV series. The latter half of the first season was excellent, using the serial format to build towards a bloody climax and a perfect closing scene. After cleaning up the fallout from the Season One finale, the Season Two opener, 'The Moonshine War', introduces us to the Bennett clan. Mags and her sons Dickie (Jeremy Davies), Doyle (Joseph Lyle Taylor) and Coover (Brad William Henke) grow and sell marijuana in Harlan County, and seek to expand their operations after the demise of the Crowder clan.

Let's give it up for Margo Martindale: in Mags, she has created a mesmerising villain. Behind a motherly, folksy exterior (at one point, she invites all of Harlan to a 'big 'ole whoop-tee-doo'), Mags is ruthless, enforcing the family's rule position and internal discipline without mercy. She wreaks terrible vengeance on one of her sons in retaliation for a foolish venture; later, she asks a hostile local, 'Wherever your boys grow up, do you think they’d be better off doing it with or without their daddy?'.

At the same time, Mags is capable of great love: she raises fourteen-year-old Loretta McCready (Kaitlyn Dever, in a promising performance) after murdering her father, and is looking to create a better future for her grandchildren's generation. She feels guilty for raising three miscreants: Doyle, a bent policeman, is the nearest thing to a good son, but Dickie is overambitious, vindictive and reckless (he is even treated to a variation on The Godfather's 'Never let anyone outside the family know what you're thinking' speech), while Coover, though a savant when it comes to marijuana, is by Mags's own admission a 'nitwit'. (In one of the season's funniest scenes, he throws a dead rat at Raylan's car to express contempt.)

 None of this raving is to disparage last season's villains. M.C. Gainey as Bo Crowder was a brilliant, quietly menacing presence, but unlike the Bennetts, he was given less time to make his mark. Mags Bennett and her kin are present throughout the second season, ready to respond to every action by Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant). And of course there's another sometimes-villain, sometimes-hero: Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), finally promoted to regular cast, moves in with Ava (Joelle Carter) and struggles with the lure of his old outlaw ways.

It's the delicacy of the state of affairs that gives Justified its particular tension. In the insular world of Harlan, every action has consequences. The attempt by coal representative Carol Johnson (played with aplomb by the absurdly sexy Rebecca Creskoff) to buy properties held by Mags and Raylan's father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry, still brilliant and now with more to do) increases tension between the parties and threatens to rekindle the feud between the Bennett and Givens clans. Raylan's promise of help to Loretta, whose storyline is reminiscent of last year's indie hit Winter's Bone, draws him into the machinations of the Bennetts, leading to violence.

Season Two deepens the world of Harlan County, bringing it to life more and fleshing out characters and tensions, and it is in this sense absolutely better than Season One. Granted, like the first season, it has a couple of stand-alone episodes that drag down the overall experience: 'The Life Inside', the best of these, deals with a pregnant convict who escapes to give birth in freedom; the worst, 'For Blood or Money', tries and fails to give Raylan's colleague Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel) more definition.

There's Justified's biggest problem: it has a couple of characters whom the writers cannot or will not develop. Rachel and Tim Gutterson (Jacob Pitts), both billed as main stars, are well portrayed by their respective actors, and one would very much like to know more about them: but the writers do not integrate them properly. Since they are of equal rank with Raylan, it's somewhat irritating to see them play second fiddle to the lead. (An exception, late in the season, is Tim's 'nanny duty' to stop Raylan from going after a group of criminals, which reveals that Raylan is quite possibly the least mature and responsible person at the Marshals office.) Raylan's ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) also continues to be a weak character despite the actress's capable performance.

It was a foregone conclusion that Justified would eventually touch on Harlan County's history of coal mining and trade union struggles, well known from the Oscar-winning 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA. We knew that Raylan and Boyd 'dug coal together' when they were nineteen, and Season Two sees Boyd returning to deep mining, with the possibility of death or injury, as well as the temptation to lay hands on the company's wealth, ever present. The locals plainly do not believe the philanthropy the mining company feigns to gain access to their coal, and the anger over their poverty and impotence provides a crucial backdrop to crime in the region.

The season ending is, perhaps, a little too neat, providing far more closure than the finale of the first season. But with the deep wounds many characters have sustained this time around, a breather, a new beginning, is not the worst of things. When Justified returns in 2012, I'll be watching.

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky

I'm a country bumpkin. I grew up in a village of 250 people which was nevertheless something of a metropolis in the area, boasting a church, a pub, a shop, a fire station and a bank (except for the church and the fire station, these have all closed). When I was eleven years old, we went to Paris on student exchange. Before we left, my mother asked one of my friends to look after me on the trip. It was my first time in a big city, you see.

Maybe that's why I like all things hillbilly. I certainly fell in love with Justified, set in rural eastern Kentucky, rather quickly. Ultimately, I think that's down to a sense of place the show absolutely nails: its fictionalised Harlan County feels like an actual community, with all the rifts and tensions that implies. Everybody knows everybody, and loyalties and grudges go back a long way, just like where I'm from. Although we don't shoot each other as much.

In the pilot, based on an Elmore Leonard short story, Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) shoots a gun thug in Miami after giving him twenty-four hours to leave town, and for his sins is transferred to his home state of Kentucky. In Harlan, white supremacists led by Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) bomb a church. Raylan is assigned the case because Boyd and he 'dug coal together when we were nineteen'. Now Raylan must bring down Boyd and protect Ava (Joelle Carter), who has just shot her husband, Boyd's brother Bowman, to death at the dinner table.

Raylan is rooted in eastern Kentucky, much though he would prefer he wasn't. His ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) lives there, as does his estranged father Arlo (Raymond J. Barry). On Justified, actions cause ripples throughout family, work and criminal networks, often coming back to haunt the characters. When Boyd tells Ryan that 'you get out of Harlan County by tomorrow noon, or I'll come looking for you', he confirms the claims, rooted in history, kinship and violence, that the parties have on Harlan.

The characters' feuds are often rooted in hopelessness and economic deprivation. As Ava says of her late husband's violence towards her, 'that all started as soon as he realised he was never getting out of Harlan'. Boyd's explanation for his racism, too, appeals to loss and defeat:

It's all changed. Mining's changed. No more following a seam underground - it's cheaper to take the tops off mountains and let the slag run down and ruin the creeks. You remember the picket lines, don't you? The courts backing the company scabs and gun thugs... Whose side do you think the government's always been on, Raylan, us or the people with money? And who do you think controls that money? Who do you think wants to mongrelise the world? The Jews.

That's not to suggest Justified is an austere social drama. In painting Harlan as a feuding society, the show creates something remarkably akin to the world of the Icelandic sagas: hard men and women competing with each other for power, money and influence by appealing to kinship, friendship, history and plain fear. And  chase scenes, standoffs and shootouts as well as verbal duels that can be as dangerous as those involving guns make for thrilling television.

It's fortunate that the series ultimately prefers wry humour to grimness. When the characters come under sniper fire on the Mexican border in 'Long in the Tooth', one comments that 'Well, that's not going to help tourism!'. Another scene, in which Raylan tells a chap wearing his hat that 'Mister, that's a ten-gallon hat on a twenty-gallon head', also springs to mind.

Timothy Olyphant gives a compelling performance as Raylan Givens. He has cowboy swagger enough and to spare, but that's not all he brings to the table. As Winona puts it, 'You do a good job of hiding it, and I suppose most folks don't see it, but honestly, you're the angriest man I have ever known'. Olyphant portrays Raylan as a man whose cool exterior masks the frustrations that he takes out on criminals. That sort of character could easily tip into outright villainy, but the actor and the writers have not dropped the ball yet.

It's not all sunshine and roses: as of Season One Winona is a seriously underwritten character, and Raylan's colleagues Rachel (Erica Tazel) and Tim (Jacob Pitts) mostly remain ciphers. But after the excellent series finale, I'm looking forward to catching up with the second season.