Robert Buckner

Robert Buckner (May 28, 1906 - August, 1989) was a film screenwriter, producer and short story writer. He wrote the screenplays for films including Knute Rockne All American (1940). As a producer the Crewe, Virginia-born Buckner worked on the 1946 John Garfield film Nobody Lives Forever and Confidential Agent (1945) with Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall and Mission to Moscow (1943), an unabashedly pro-Soviet propaganda film. Buckner studied at the University of Virginia and the University of Edinburgh. Buckner began his professional writing career at age 20, as London correspondent for the New York World. He specialized in westerns at the end of his career.

His westerns include the popular Santa Fe Trail (1940), whose blatantly racist overtones and gross historical inaccuracies are typical of many "historical" movies of the era. The movie is drastically critical of John Brown, portraying him as a bloodthirsty villain and blaming him for causing the Civil War, thereby exonerating the Confederacy for seceding. African-Americans are portrayed as practically content to be slaves. After being freed, some African-Americans in the film chant "We's free! We's free!", but later freed slaves say "We don't want it" with regards to freedom. In the movie, John Brown eagerly endorses breaking apart the union of the United States, as though abolitionism was the threat to the union rather than slavery. The American Civil War and abolition of slavery are presented as an unnecessary tragedy caused by an anarchic madman. The heroic protagonists such as Flynn's Jeb Stuart and Reagan's Custer seem unable to conceive how the issue of slavery could place them at odds in the near future, even though by 1859 hostility between the pro/anti-slavery states had reached a boiling point. In this regard, Buckner's Santa Fe Trail is no less fantasy than his glossy portrait of Stalin's totalitarian state in "Mission to Moscow". It has been argued that his blatantly racist fiction provided justification to the Southern segregationists apposed to the American Civil Rights movement in subsequent decades.

In his later life Buckner lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He was a fine artist and recognized leader in the art community there. He died and was buried in San Miguel in 1989. He is survived by his son Robert Buckner Jr. last known to be living in Portland, Oregon area.

Works

• The Man Who Won the War, 1936 (Short Story)
• Love Me Tender, 1956 (Screenplay)

External links

• Robert Buckner at IMDB