Great Moments in Black Acting

Forty years later, the passion and the ordinariness of miscegenation are still seldom addressed in Hollywood. The notable exceptions include: the 1975 film Mandingo, a startling mixture of trash and radical breakthrough in which a slave (played well by boxer Ken Norton) was depicted as the one man on a plantation who could deliver Susan George of a much-needed orgasm; 1991's Jungle Fever, in which director Spike Lee seemed unable to get past his own censorious feelings about the subject; 1992's Love Field, in which the romance relied on Michelle Pfeiffer and the admirably subtle Dennis Haysbert finding plausibility in an awkward script; and the blockbuster The Bodyguard, which is hokey as hell but a true achievement for having Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston get it on and feel better afterwards--without ever having to discuss the topic of race. We have yet to see film take on a profound black-white love story, one that involves sex, marriage, money, children and disillusion--all the American ingredients.

There are a number of careers worthy of more comment than can be made here--for instance, those of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, who met on No Way Out and have been superlative character actors for decades; Jackie Robinson, who played himself in the 1950 The Jackie Robinson Story with the same dignity he showed on the baseball field; Juanita Moore, whose some-what overblown performance in the old Louise Beavers's part in the 1959 remake of Imitation of Life earned a Supporting Actress nomination. There are also the odd movie careers of Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis Jr. There is even, as far back as 1942, one small example of a black actor playing a character with true presence who just happens to be black: Dooley Wilson as the pained onlooker Sam in Casablanca.

By the 1990s so much seems to have changed. There are the striking screen careers of black comedians or comic actors--Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg. Nor could anyone resist the argument that Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne and Andre Braugher are five of the best American ac-tors available. These actors work steadily, in lead roles, and Denzel Washington is an unquestioned star. Yet how often do they get to play roles that are simply those of Americans caught up in some extraordinary story? Yes, Freeman in Seven. Washing-ton in Crimson Tide and Courage Under Fire. The lovely exuberance of Jackson in Pulp Fiction leaves his fellow players blind to his color. And Andre Braugher seems resolved to be an intelligent, prickly man who flat-out refuses to notice that he is black.

But for all these achievements, there is the archaic situation of A Time To Kill (not that far removed from the ethos of The Defiant Ones, and a light-year away from the culture of O.J. Simpson's trial), in which the very smart Jackson is expected to dumb down, to be not just black, but Black. And in The Pelican Brief, doesn't all the logic of movie-ness indicate a romance between Julia Roberts and Washington, and isn't that chemistry avoided just because the filmmakers or me studio or both feared they wouldn't get away with the mix? There are many reasons for making a picture like Glory--it is educational and necessary (see it with a six-year-old if you doubt that), and it con-tains magnificent pieces of acting from Washington and Braugher. Still, Glory remains a "white" film, helplessly self-satisfied and patronizing.

We have always needed and deserved a black cinema, a kind of movie in which the ways of thinking are as black as they are in great jazz. Actually, for decades, that existed. In the era when there were special theaters set aside for black audiences, there were films made for that market. Oscar Micheaux was a leading director of such work, and his career deserves far wider appreciation. Then in the late '60s and early '70s, in the flourish of "Black Power," there were films made that had an authentic swagger and panache. I think of Gordon Parks's Shaft, Ossie Davis's Cotton Comes to Harlem, Parks's Leadbelly and his son's Superfly. There is not a great film in that group, maybe, but there is a new force and confidence, Richard Roundtree may not stand as an actor in the class of James Earl Jones's tragic, arrogant Jack Johnson-like boxer in The Great White Hope, or Paul Winfield's gentle, long-suffering sharecropper father in Sounder, but in black leather, moving to the pulse of Isaac Hayes's music, he was an authentic sensation, such as no one had dared before. And why shouldn't black actors act like flashy idiots, when whites have been doing it for so long?

Today there are valuable black directors -- Spike Lee, John Singleton, Charles Burnett, Carl Franklin--and they have given us such performances as Samuel L. Jackson's in Do the Right Thing, Denzel Washington's and Delroy Lindo's in Malcolm X, Laurence Fishburne's in Boyz N the Hood, Danny Glover's in To Sleep With Anger, and Cynda Williams's in One False Move (what happened to her, by the way?). It is only on looking at newsreel film of Malcolm X, for instance, that one grasps the astonishing skill of Washington's performance. Equally, Williams in One False Move manages to suggest a victim of life, yet someone utterly unburdened by her color.

There is no way a short survey can escape becoming a list when respect must be paid to so many remarkable portrayals, like Louis Gossett Jr.'s exact portrait of military discipline in An Officer and a Gentleman; Forest Whitaker's Charlie Parker in Bird (not nearly as tough as the real Parker, yet so much in flight as a musician that we understand the nickname better); Laurence Fishburne's archetypical black adventurer Ike Turner, swept away by his own myth in What's Love Got to Do With It; Alfre Woodard's performance in just about anything she does--heartbreaking, yet often very funny; Scatman Crothers's caretaker in The Shining (there was something liberating in finding his character in his own luxe bedroom beneath black pinups); Jim Brown's embodiment of white dread and fascination in James Toback's Fingers; Regina Taylor's modest, solid women in TV's "I'll Fly Away" and Courage Under Fire; Dexter Gordon's jazz great in Round Midnight (arguably the purest display on-screen of a life dismantled by drugs, yet with some sweet melodic line persisting).

Then consider Harry Belafonte's "Seldom Seen" in Robert Altman's Kansas City. What an edgy, dainty performance, and what a mocking name, as if to tease us and the actor about all that was lost in a career of great promise and little work, Belafonte, they say, could have been Poitier. His 1959 film noir Odds Against Tomorrow, full of racial conflict between him and Robert Ryan, was streets ahead of The Defiant Ones, but is less than seldom seen. But then, Belafonte was politicized and less given to the real-life acting that American society wants from its black citizens.

It's clear that the black presence in American movies is relatively secure and hugely worthwhile. But still restricted. Why? One answer lingers, driven by the way substantial legal and cultural progress has still left so many real blacks in a forlorn and unimproved life. Could it be that the movies themselves are a white medium, not just owned by whites and controlled by their tastes, but so fixed on white notions of beauty and meaning that blacks are always there on special, debilitating terms? So many blacks must be sickened by the long run, and long for an explosive, purging authenticity. Could it even be the case that a truly nonracist society may need to do away with movies First?

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David Thomson wrote about Morgan Freeman in the October issue of Movieline.

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