[Gordon Parks, Sr.] made a short, Flavio, about a boy in a Brazilian favela, in 1965. It was well received, but it took him more than three years to put together his first feature, The Learning Tree…. Finally Hollywood was ready for its first prominent Black director. The Learning Tree (1968) based on Parks's own memoirs, is a visually stunning evocation of his childhood in Kansas in the twenties. Because the setting is Midwestern, the story is also rather novel, successfully avoiding the clic...

The pleasures of "The Learning Tree," an awkward but greatly affecting movie, are all bound up with nostalgia for a vanished land in which barefooted farm boys could do cartwheels through unbounded fields of yellow flowers, in which a preacher could implore the Lord to "deliver our young from cigarettes, from dancing, from drinking, from flapper skirts," in which an amorous young man could give his girl a bottle of violet water and a card, especially made up to go with it, that s...

Gordon Parks is a still photographer. He directed The Learning Tree, his first motion picture. It is still born. Dare I say primitive? Gordon Parks is black. If he wasn't nobody would pay much attention to his picture. But he is, and everybody is giving the film much more attention and praise than it deserves…. I am also sorry that the first massive, lavish, technicolor, mass distributed film by a black man should be so reassuring … like Green Pastures. Parks' remembrance of his ...

[A] film that must be rated a failure despite its high aspirations is Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree, based upon his autobiographical novel. The fact that a Negro has been able to recall his own past with considerable affection and nostalgia is, I suppose, a good sign, and certainly the fact that a major studio … has encouraged him to do so is virtually a cause for celebration. But the celebration stops abruptly as cliché piles on cliché, as the past becomes bathed in the ineff...