Band of Angels

Noted director Raoul Walsh captures the epic sweep of the novel by Robert Penn Warren and tells a dramatic tale of the Civil War South, as love and war collide. Academy Award winners Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier star with Yvonne De Carlo in this story of an aristocratic young woman who falls from the heights of Southern society to the absolute bottom—and of the forbidden love that redeems her in Band of Angels. New Orleans, 1860s. Southern Belle Amantha Starr (De Carlo) is away at an exclusive girls' school when her father dies unexpectedly. She learns she is now penniless: Her father had lost everything—their money, their plantation and their slaves. Worse, the truth comes out that her mother was part African American—and under the law of Louisiana, Amantha must be sold into slavery. She is purchased by plantation owner Hamish Bond (Gable), who soon falls in love with his beautiful new slave—earning Amantha the resentment of overseer Rau Ru (Poitier). When the United States' Civil War breaks out, Bond loses his plantation and reveals to the newly freed Amantha that he earned his fortune as a slave trader.