Blood Done Sign My Name

The lesson of his death
By Michael O'Sullivan
Friday, Feb. 19, 2010

Based on the real-life murder of a young black Vietnam vet by white Southerners, "Blood Done Sign My Name" is the story of an outrageous, if familiar, tragedy.

In 1970, Dickie Marrow was shot and beaten to death in North Carolina for alleged flirtatious comments made to a white woman. But in the movie, by writer-director Jeb Stuart, the character (played by A.C. Sanford) isn't so much a person as a device. Stuart uses his death as a lesson: The struggle for racial equality often placed politics above the personal.

"You think Dickie Marrow's murder is the worst civil-rights lynching ever? It doesn't even come close to the things that I've seen," says Golden Frinks (Afemo Omilami), the dashiki-clad "stoker," or agitator, who arrives from up North to fan the flames of local resentment. Frinks doesn't care about Dickie, the man. As he explains to Dickie's friend Ben Chavis (Nate Parker) -- yes, the same guy who in real life went on to lead the NAACP and later founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network -- "What's special about [Dickie's] death is it gives us an opportunity to make things better."

In that sense, the audience isn't really asked to care much about Dickie. Don't get me wrong: Stuart wants to tick us off -- and the film does that, effortlessly, beautifully -- it's just that the anger is less about Marrow than about the civil rights movement.

That anger finds its expression chiefly in the travails and hand-wringing of a sympathetic white pastor, the Rev. Vernon Tyson (Rick Schroder), and, for the most part, not in the emotions of Dickie's family and friends. Tyson is really the main character here. His frustration in his efforts to teach tolerance to the town's rednecks, and his initial failure to understand why some whites might blame him for the unrest in the wake of Dickie's murder, at times threaten to dislodge the film's center of gravity.

Who's the film about?

But the emphasis on the Virtuous White Man is only mildly irritating in this story about black suffering. And, truth be old, it's fairly understandable, when you learn that the movie is based on a book by the minister's son, Tim Tyson.

Despite its earnestness and valuable lessons, however, "Blood" feels a little like preaching to the choir. Its intended audience is anyone with enough heart to be horrified by the events it depicts, but also with enough plausible deniability to point the finger of blame at someone else.

It's a movie you can feel good about feeling bad about.

Contains scenes of violence, and crude and racist language.