Daniel Petrie (1961)
The Talk of the Town (1942) is a funny movie but it’s a sobering thought that I reckoned George Stevens’ comedy much better than any of the new films I saw alongside it at the recent London Film Festival. They-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to feelings persisted in this first post-Festival visit to BFI, for A Raisin in the Sun. Interesting to watch it so soon after Malcolm Washington’s version of The Piano Lesson – to compare and contrast these screen versions, more than sixty years apart, of successful stage plays by African-American writers. I much prefer the older film.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson are both centrally concerned with the competing claims of cultural tradition and ambition – and the seismic debates these generate – within a Black American family. Wilson’s piano once belonged to the man who also owned the Charles family’s ancestors, as slaves in Mississippi. More recent ancestors stole the piano, which now stands in the Black family’s Pittsburgh home. One of the younger Charleses wants to sell the piano with a view to buying land once owned by the slavemaster. At the start of A Raisin in the Sun, the Younger family, who live in a poky apartment on Chicago’s South Side, await the arrival of a life insurance cheque. The insurance policy has paid out $10,000 – an unheard of amount for the hard-up Youngers – on the death of the deceased paterfamilias, whose widow, Lena (Claudia McNeil), now means to buy the house that she and her late husband always dreamed of getting together but never did. Lena’s son, Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier), is anxious to quit his job as a white man’s chauffeur, and to invest in a liquor business with a couple of pals. His sister, Beneatha (Diana Sands), a medical student, is eager for funds enough to finance the remainder of her studies. Walter’s wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee), favours Lena’s plan to move to a bigger place in a better neighbourhood: Ruth’s priority is the future of her and Walter’s young son, Travis (Stephen Perry), and of the second child she’s now carrying.
The films of A Raisin in the Sun and The Piano Lessons have casts dominated by actors reprising the roles they’d played in a recent Broadway production. Hansberry’s play opened on Broadway in March 1959; Daniel Petrie’s film, for which Hansberry did the screenplay, reached American cinemas in May 1961; all the main adult parts were played by the actors from the original Broadway cast. The Piano Lesson was revived on Broadway in 2022; Malcolm Washington’s cast includes all the main male actors from the revival but not the main actress. There are two particularly conspicuous differences between these screen adaptations. Inevitably for a Hollywood production of the time, A Raisin in the Sun had a white director. The second difference is the extent to which the films open up the play’s action into locations other than the main one – which, in both cases, is the family home.
I’m guessing Lorraine Hansberry’s play takes place on a single set throughout and the film of A Raisin in the Sun largely stays put – unlike that of The Piano Lesson, with its repeated excursions from a Pittsburgh home of the 1930s into visualised flashbacks in and around a Mississippi plantation house, two decades earlier. When Daniel Petrie does move outside the Youngers’ two-room apartment – to a local bar, where Walter Lee drinks with two friends and, later, his mother finds him drowning his sorrows because she’s gone ahead with buying property – it feels quite natural. The only instance where a change of location draws attention to itself comes in the family’s visit to the house Lena’s going to buy (which looks palatial not just to the Youngers but to most pairs of eyes on the British side of the Atlantic). It isn’t the case that these differing attitudes to stage drama – how much can it be trusted to stand up as screen drama? – reflect nothing more than the film-making priorities of different eras. The opening-up dilemma was, if anything, more of an issue for Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s, when screen versions of high-profile Broadway hits seemed to happen almost routinely – and the choices that film-makers made, varied widely. It helped that in this case Lorraine Hansberry was able – to the credit of producers Philip Rose and David Susskind – to adapt her play for the screen rather than obliged to hand it over for treatment.
Petrie’s largely unchanging scenery doesn’t result in a film that’s static or stagy: he and his cast exploit the confines of the family’s apartment very effectively. Sidney Poitier is the most important contributor to this. His terrific physical energy is all the more expressive in a cramped space. His line readings are similarly dynamic but dexterous, too: Walter Lee is remarkably volatile – sometimes funny, often furious. A Raisin in the Sun is further proof of what an exciting actor Poitier was at this stage of his career – before he became, in the later 1960s, an irreproachable figure in mainstream Hollywood drama and, as such, an emblem of the industry’s ‘acceptance’ of African-American talent. Perhaps the crossover film in Poitier’s career was Ralph Nelson’s Lilies of the Field (1963), for which he became the first Black winner of a Best Actor Oscar. I’ve still not seen Nelson’s film but hope to rectify that soon: it’s good news that BFI will be running a Sidney Poitier season in early 2025.
I was less keen on Claudia McNeil but am not surprised her performance as the matriarch Lena was widely praised. A large, imposing presence, McNeil brings to mind Junoesque Sharon D Clarke in this autumn’s BBC dramatisation of Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman (in which Lennie James, as Clarke’s errant husband, is brilliant, by the way). Both Lena Younger and Clarke’s character have crosses to bear and the actresses bear them emphatically: they strike deliberate, tragic attitudes; their voices resound with pain. Ruby Dee developed similar tendencies, at least as an older performer, but as worn-down Ruth she hasn’t many opportunities to grandstand, and gives a very good performance. Even better is Diana Sands, who’s vocally supple and shows lots of wit. As a doctor-to-be, Beneatha embodies the Youngers’ potential social advancement but she’s also given to fads – that, at least, is how the other members of the family see Beneatha’s new-found passion for all things African, though it’s much more than a fad. Diana Sands blends her character’s wilfulness and genuine strength of feeling persuasively.
The remaining men’s parts in A Raisin in the Sun are relatively minor but well played. Eight-year-old Stephen Perry is excellent as Travis. Louis Gossett Jr is George Murchison, Beneatha’s decent, humourless suitor; and Ivan Dixon is Joseph Asagai, the assured and charismatic Nigerian, a fellow medical student, to whom she’s attracted. Joel Fluellen and Roy Glenn are, respectively, Bobo and Willie Harris, Walter’s drinking buddies and partners in the liquor store venture. John Fiedler is Mark Lindner, the sole white character. Fiedler, more than anyone else, gives the impression of repeating a performance he’d given plenty of times before on stage. He is at something of a disadvantage, though. Lindner appears just twice; the actor playing him hasn’t the scope for getting into the performance rhythm that others in the cast enjoy.
Lindner is a significant character, nevertheless. He represents the Clybourne Park Improvement Association – in other words the exclusively white residents of the nice area the Youngers plan to move to. He comes to the South Side apartment to offer these prospective Black newcomers a bribe to pull out of the purchase. The financial value of the piano in The Piano Lesson seemed astonishing (enough to buy a piece of land) and $10,000 evidently went a long way in late 1950s Chicago. Lena spends only $3,500 as a down payment on the Clybourne Park property; she gives the remainder to Walter, instructing him to save $3,000 for Beneatha’s student fees and invest the remainder as he chooses. He entrusts the whole $6,500 to Willie Harris, who promptly leaves town, taking the money with him. Walter, in shame and desperation, is on the point of accepting Fiedler’s offer, despite his family’s urgings not to sacrifice their self-respect in this way, but changes his mind at the last minute. The film ends with the Youngers preparing to move to Clybourne Park, aware of the problems they face but hopeful their determination and family solidarity will see them through. (They leave the South Side apartment in the company of Laurence Rosenthal’s rather strenuously uplifting score.)
Although Lindner’s proposition to abandon the move is presented as a racist bolt from the blue, this doesn’t quite make sense. As soon as Lena mentions Clybourne Park, her son and daughter-in-law are doubtful about moving to an all-white neighbourhood. The film then puts those doubts on the back burner until Lindner’s diabolus ex machina arrives – by which point Walter Lee and Ruth appear to have forgotten their warnings to Lena. In nearly every other respect, though, A Raisin in the Sun is an impressive dramatic construction, full of fine dialogue. Lorraine Hansberry was, as well as a civil rights activist, a committed Pan-Africanist – and assimilation-versus-Africanism is a major theme here. While you’re left in no doubt of the importance of the debate to Hansberry, she’s too good a writer to use her play as a podium. The arguments are mediated through the character of Beneatha and with a deal of humour. Beneatha rejects George Murchison because of what she sees as his inability to understand what his African-American identity really means. But when Joseph Asagai makes a dual proposal – of marriage, and that she return to Nigeria with him – Beneatha is in two minds. One of the high points of the film comes when, draped in a Nigerian robe that Joseph gives her, she dances to African music. Walter Lee comes in after an evening’s drinking. He competes with his sister in moving and drumming his fingers to the beat of the music, and wins. He probably won’t even remember this in the morning.
A Raisin in the Sun takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem, ‘Harlem’. (The phrase is part of a question – ‘Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?’ – that follows the famous question of the poem’s opening line, ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’) Lorraine Hansberry died in January 1965 at the age of thirty-four, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963. The following year, as part of a speech to winners of a creative writing competition, Hansberry said:
‘Though it is a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic — to be young, gifted and black.’
That last phrase became, through Nina Simone’s song, at least as famous as the phrases in ‘Harlem’. Lorraine Hansberry’s own creative writing, and the quality of the younger actors giving expression to it, make A Raisin in the Sun, devised as a theatre piece, a thrilling experience in the cinema.
26 October 2024
