Cajuns in movies & TV

The last few weeks I've been watching a 1950s TV series called The Adventures of Jim Bowie.





It's a standard western of the time, except for one big difference: it's set in 1830 Louisiana, which gives it a unique vibe among TV oaters.

Bowie (who is curiously played by an English actor) is sometimes seen in New Orleans, and other times along the trail where he gets involved in righting wrongs, rescuing widows and orphans, romancing damsels in distress, and the all the usual hero routine. He owns a plantation and often says he "has to get back to Opelousas" but we seldom see him there (at least he pronounced it right -- in one episode he tells somebody to "go to Natch-i-toatch-iss").

And in some episodes he meets up with those strange creatures known as Cajuns. In the Cajun-centric episodes I've seen, the Cajuns (for the record I am MS Baptist) are portrayed respectfully, but not quite assimilated and suspicious of "Americans" (any outsiders) -- one episode deals with Cajuns wanting to secede and rejoin France!

It's certainly preferable to a 1960s TV movie called The Hanged Man, where Cajuns (with French accents of course) travel to the contemporary NO Mardi Gras in an old Gypsy horse and wagon.

One of the most surprising things I learned from this board is that some people in South LA, even Cajuns, actually like Southern Comfort -- you'd think they'd want to burn down Hollywood just to make sure they kill everyone connected to that film. Southern Comfort does have one of my all time favorite lines: Our heroes are hiding at a Cajun picnic, and Powers Boothe is still worried the villains may find them. Keith Carradine reassures him: "Relax -- these are the good Cajuns".

Meaning there are roaming bands of bad Cajuns out there terrorizing the bayous.

There's also an infamous episode of The Fall Guy which I have never seen, where Heather Whats-herface is kidnapped by "Cajuns" (acting like rejects from the Dukes Of Hazard) and told she will learn the hard way what it means "to be a Cajun". This episode inspired many outraged letters to The Times-Picayune back in the day.

There have been other, less sensationalized portrayals: the sincere but rather boring Belizaire the Cajun, the patronizing oil company propaganda of Louisiana Story, a silent version of Evangeline, and a DW Griffith film from around the same time called The White Rose which was filmed on location, including some scenes shot at Shadows On The Teche.