The Autobiography of Gordon Parks: A Review of the learning tree (1969)

By Nicholas Stix

(Spoiler Alert)

(The only change the imdb.com Gauleiter made was to delete my one-star rating [out of ten].)

I’d like to review this cinematic “thing,” but I can’t, because amazon’s Gauleiter would block me. Thus follows a self-censored version.

Parks ripped off Richard Wright’s autobiography, black boy (according to another customer reviewer), he obviously ripped off The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and he ripped off the murder of Emmett Till.

In the Malcolm X book, a racist, White school teacher tells the young Malcolm Little that he’s “ugly.” (Malcolm was actually very handsome.) In Parks’ “thing,” a racist, White school teacher cheats the young Parks (named “Newt” here) on his grades, and tells him that because he’s black, he should forget about going to college, because he’s just going to end up being a train porter, anyway.

Neither woman existed in reality.

The Emmett Till connection is due to Parks depicting the teenaged Marcus Savage character as coming out of reform school (for stealing) with a permanently disfigured face.

That character also never existed.

The most incompetently shot scene is one in which black Booker Savage (Marcus’ father), who had told white Silas Newhall that he wanted to murder a White, beats White Jake Kiner to death with a crow bar. Parks mistakenly positioned the camera, so that each time Savage swings the crow bar, we see it pound the stall’s dirt. Apparently none of the crew had the nerve to tell Parks he’d screwed up.

The Learning Tree is a long lecture, in which Gordon Parks rants and raves about how much he hates White people.

The truth is that Parks would have accomplished nothing without Whites’ help.