Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation

by Steve Ryfle

The year 1963 is well remembered as the watershed of the civil rights movement. The brutal fire-hosing of demonstrators in Birmingham, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington, and the murder of four black girls in a church bombing, followed by deadly riots, generated the political momentum for the adoption of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and affirmative action legislation over the next two years.

Forgotten, however, is that while the struggle for racial equality dominated headlines, a parallel war to improve the status of African-Americans in Hollywood was being waged. The NAACP had battled negative stereotypes on screen ever since the release of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), but in 1963 the organization’s fledgling Beverly Hills-Hollywood chapter (whose charter members included celebrities such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Charlton Heston, and James Edwards) launched an unprecedented public-relations campaign with the dual goals of improving the black image on film and increasing African-American participation in the studio ranks.

By the late 1960s, these efforts had arguably resulted in incremental progress for blacks in the medium of television, but on the big screen there was little evidence of change. Mainstream Hollywood’s prevailing concept of black film remained limited to Sidney Poitier and the increasingly irrelevant liberal-integrationist fantasies he starred in. At least that’s the conventional wisdom; in fact there were a handful of films produced during the civil rights movement, which attempted to reflect the country’s shifting attitudes toward matters of race. The major scholars of African American cinema, however, have failed to recognize the 1960s as a significant period. The reasons for this failure are threefold. All the films in question were critical and/or commercial failures, and have long faded from popular memory; the films were a mix of studio and independent efforts, with a wide range of thematic and esthetic differences that do not fit within a cohesive category or genre; and all lack, in the view of scholars of black film, the rather intangible quality of “authenticity”—loosely defined as sufficient involvement by blacks in front of and behind the camera to produce a work that legitimately represents the African-American experience.

Considering that the black films of the 1960s, few as they were, directly preceded and informed the first major modern African-American film cycle (the Blaxploitation pictures of the 1970s), the absence of serious critical study of this decade seems a major collective oversight by scholars of black film. Christopher Sieving, an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia, steps into the breach with Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation, a selective history of the nexus of racial politics and film spanning the most turbulent period of the civil rights era. Rather than survey all black films of the decade, Sieving focuses on five projects that held the promise of a major breakthrough in changing the black image on film, increasing black authorship and participation in motion pictures, and expanding the African-American movie audience. Yet these projects—Ossie Davis’s Gone Are the Days (1963), Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1964), Norman Jewison’s aborted The Confessions of Nat Turner (c. 1968), Jules Dassin’s Up Tight (1968) and Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970)—all had no significant impact, despite the seemingly favorable political climate and the economic and creative realignments in Hollywood during the Sixties, which could have been more favorable to such changes. Via meticulous investigation of archival documents and other sources, Sieving reconstructs the history of each production and notes the internal and external pressures that contributed to its fate.

Ossie Davis as Reverend Purlie Victorious and Alan Alda as Charlie in Gone are the Days

Sieving uses Gone Are the Days, an adaptation of Davis’s successful Broadway play Purlie Victorious, to illustrate the herculean difficulty of making and successfully distributing black films that did not conform to the Poitier model in the 1960s. The picture, a comic farce about a black con man posing as a southern preacher, was a thinly veiled satire of civil rights issues of the day; it featured a nearly all-black cast but was helmed by a white director and backed by white investors; its target was both the untapped African-American market (believed to be twenty million strong at the time) and the cross-over white audience. The box-office returns were abysmal, and subsequently a number of films about race relations that had been in development at various studios were dropped. Because it was the first race-themed film to appear after the civil rights movements’ apex, its “demoralizing demise,” Sieving writes, “served as a bad omen in the battle for African-American representation in Hollywood.”

The other case studies show that as the decade unfolded, the omen became prophecy fulfilled. The Cool World, a gritty tale of juvenile delinquency in Harlem told with the stylistic trappings of European art films and cinéma vérité—“a black film for the purpose of transforming white consciousness,” Sieving calls it—did well in limited art-house runs but failed to dent a wider white audience or to connect well with black moviegoers. Up Tight, a remake of John Ford’s The Informer, was Dassin’s first American film after his blacklisting and European exile; it was made at Paramount, the only studio film to address the waning of nonviolent protest and the ascension of black-power politics. Few critics, Sieving writes, “disputed the picture’s status as a milestone,” and the most significant movie about race relations to date. But the box office was just lukewarm, and public opinion was divided as to whether the film was too revolutionary or too integrationist.

Sieving rightly considers The Landlord the best of the racial impasse films of the late Sixties, “typical because it reflects the period’s tendency to depict black-white race relations as damaged perhaps beyond repair,” and “outstanding” because it benefited from unprecedented black-white collaboration. Based on a novel by black writer Kristin Hunter, with a script by black playwright Bill Gunn and a cast comprised of outstanding African-American actors known primarily for stage work, The Landlord was a postmodern inversion of the Sidney Poitier film, with a rich white man (Beau Bridges) unwittingly assimilating into a community of black tenement residents. Ultimately, United Artists struggled to sell this unconventional picture, while its other black-themed release that year, the cops-and-robbers yarn Cotton Comes to Harlem, was a hit. The die, it seemed, was cast.

Beau Bridges coming to dinner in The Landlord

The author’s account of the demise of The Confessions of Nat Turner, a proposed 20th Century-Fox adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, illustrates how continued pressure by the NAACP and other groups prevented a potentially major film, considered racist by its detractors, from being produced. A fictionalized bio of Turner, leader of a violent 1831 slave rebellion, Styron’s book was praised by white critics but reviled by black intellectuals for its depiction of the subject’s sexual proclivities (including his attraction to white women) and Hamlet-like reservations. Protest groups’ insistence on numerous changes to the script eventually led Fox to drop the project; ironically, the highly sexualized, violent black hero that failed to materialize in a potentially important film like Nat Turner later took shape in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (1971), Super Fly (1972) and other standardbearers of the Blaxploitation phase, a proliferation of exploitation films.

While the 1960s films have received little attention, it was a repudiation of Blaxploitation that inspired the first modern wave of black film scholarship (the titles of two major works of the period, Daniel Leab’s From Sambo to Superspade and Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, say it all). Film historians and pop-culture enthusiasts alike have largely painted Blaxploitation as a spontaneous movement that arose in the wake of black-power politics to feed the cash-strapped studios’ appetite for cheap program pictures, and as the genesis that would inspire later African-American auteurs such as Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Spike Lee and pave the way for more recent inroads African-Americans have made in the industry.

Shirley Clarke's 1964 portrait of Harlem youth, The Cool World

Soul Searching shatters that mythology by showing the black films of the 1960s, while few and fragmented, represented the first serious attempts to produce credible, progressive films about African-American life. And though the films Sieving analyzes have fallen off the popular radar (as of this writing, Gone Are The Days and The Landlord are available only as MOD DVDs; The Cool World and Up Tight have never had home-video releases), Sieving argues that they should not be dismissed by film scholars because of a perceived lack of “authenticity” or because too few blacks were involved in their making. “On the contrary, a more informed appreciation of all stages of black-themed film history,” he writes, “will only benefit those who are passionate about sustaining and building upon recent gains.”

Steve Ryfle is a film journalist, author, and DVD commentator.

To purchase Soul Searching, click here 

Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.3 2011

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