Cigarettes, Gary Cooper and Me
"As with most of his films, "Bright Leaves," Mr. McElwee's latest trip below the Mason-Dixon line, is about a number of interrelated topics -- most straightforwardly, the tobacco industry in North Carolina and the travails of smoking addiction. The film is set in motion when Mr. McElwee learns of the existence of a 1950 Hollywood melodrama called "Bright Leaf," starring Gary Cooper, Lauren Bacall and Patricia Neal, about a rivalry between two tobacco growers in post-Civil War North Carolina. At the suggestion of a cousin, Mr. McElwee becomes convinced that the character played by Cooper is based on his great-grandfather, John Harvey McElwee, a North Carolina tobacco tycoon who was ruined and run out of the business by his nemesis, James Buchanan Duke (whose legacy would encompass both the American Tobacco Company and Duke University.)"