I assume we all know the plot and story of this play. This remake of the previous film with Sidney Pottier (1961) does not change much. It adds a few short scenes to move from one situation to another, to make more explicit some elements like for example the envisaged abortion. But the use of a clandestine abortionist is not in phase with the period when the film was released. In 2008 there were clinics specializing in such a medical intervention everywhere in the USA. Of course, the addendum in this film makes it easier to show Ruth's change of mind. But Asagai was right in 1961 when he said, "There is something wrong when all the dreams of a household depend on a man dying." And he is even righter in 2008. The few added scenes all go that way: to make the "money stake" most important, and also most fragile. Money is so easily stolen. But note ten thousand dollars is not much in 2008 when the poverty guideline is for a household of five people $35,140 in 2023, and it was $24,800 in 2008.
The stake with this film in 2008, and it was not obvious in 1961, is the reactions of a white audience and that of a black audience. The integration of movie theaters was just starting in 1961 and will only be brought to completion after 1964.
"Around 1961-62, seeing the writing on the wall, Southern theaters started to quietly integrate, especially if they were owned by national chains worried about the bad press and picket lines calling out their complicity in Jim Crow. In cooperation with local civil rights groups, many theater operators adopted a strategy for peaceful integration that had first proven successful in Nashville. Without advanced publicity, exhibitors unobtrusively admitted Blacks during low attendance matinees, then into nighttime shows on weekdays, and finally on weekends. The managers then announced that the theater had been integrated - a fait accompli completed before local Klansmen could protest. Less accommodating venues ran up against the Department of Justice of the Kennedy Administration, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were American theaters totally integrated - though, of course, local custom and municipal geography still often dictated a de facto segregation in audience composition." (...)
But the question of the integration of drama, comedy, and music theaters is a more complicated question.
First, the desegregation of drama theaters (comedies, tragedies, musicals, etc.) is not richly exemplified in available data. I found the following elements for musicals:
"In the early days of musical theatre, audiences were segregated. Black people were not allowed to sit in the main auditorium but were relegated to the balcony or gallery. This was a reflection of the segregation that was prevalent in society at large. Black people were not considered to be equal to white people, and so they were not given the same access to the best seats in the house. However, as society has become more egalitarian, so too has the seating in musical theatres. Nowadays, audiences are usually not segregated, and black people are able to sit wherever they want." (...)
But most data concern the integration of theatrical productions, hence actors, actresses, authors, composers, etc., plus all other performers as soon as some music was concerned with conductors and orchestras or bands.
"Broadway began to desegregate in the 1950s, though it was a slow process. It was not until the 1960s that black performers began to be cast in mainstream productions. In the 1970s and 1980s, black performers began to win major awards for their work on Broadway. Today, black performers are a regular fixture on Broadway, and their contributions are celebrated." (...)
Along this line here is some information about integration within the production and performance of theatrical works on stages, hence in theaters.
"Throughout the country in the early 1960s, the issues of civil rights - voter's rights and voter registration for blacks, integration, and fairness and equality in the workplace - were in the news and on television nearly every day, but mostly absent on Broadway. In 1962, Richard Rodgers produced the first musical he had attempted since the death of Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1960, an original piece called "No Strings," for which he would write both the lyrics and the music. Set in contemporary Paris, "No Strings" was about a love affair between an expatriate writer and a fashion model. The model, an American, was played by Diahann Carroll, an exquisite and talented black actress and singer, who had made her Broadway debut in 1954. Although the interracial aspect of the romance was apparent to anyone who was watching, it was never mentioned specifically. Rodgers had Carroll's character refer to her growing up "north of Central Park." Well, so had Richard Rodgers, but clearly, he meant something else. A show that looked to be socially progressive appeared, upon reflection, to be finicky at best, cowardly at worst." (...)
In 2008, the audience was vastly integrated in New York, and since this production is for the cinema, in all cinemas in the USA. But how can the white audience react to the facts presented here, and yet the presence of the abortionist (hardly alluded to in the original play and film) dates the action? A white audience is confronted with a totally hypocritical society that denies a black family the right to buy a house and move into a white neighborhood. That kind of segregation is illegal, but yet still practiced, even if discreetly. The white audience is the target for the responsibility for this segregation because the blacks are the targets of the whites on the stage. We all know ghettos exist in America, and in many other Western countries, to only speak of our own threshold. Hence the last sentence of the white representative of the white community in which this Black family is going to move is no longer a warning. It becomes a menace. "I hope you people know exactly what you are doing."
But what can the reaction of a black audience be? They are bound to compare this slightly aged situation on the stage with the present reality. They have to know, or they cannot ignore, the following opinion:
"Housing discrimination is still a significant problem in Chicago. A 2017 Fair Housing 59-page study (...) looked into six community areas that had the most reported complaints of racial and income discrimination against renters: Jefferson Park, the Near North Side, Bridgeport, Hyde Park, Clearing, and Mount Greenwood.
"Sixty-three percent of the time, Black testers posing as potential renters holding CHA Housing Choice Vouchers experienced some form of discrimination. "The highest ratio of discriminatory acts to race-related tests occurred in the Near North Side neighborhood, where over half of the tests involved race discrimination," the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and the Chicago Lawyers' Committee found." (...)
Even if things have improved in more than 60 years (two generations) since 1961, we are far from a fair situation. Discrimination is everywhere in substantial proportions, and we should not reduce the concept to racial discrimination. But we think the whites are not burning a house with the black residents inside and with doors and windows nailed down anymore, but the rejection of whatever people out of some residential neighborhoods, and the existence of neighborhoods where the proportion of "colored" people is over 50% or even twice as much as the overall proportion of "colored" people in the city concerned, and at times a lot higher is a plain fact. The play then becomes, for a black audience, a call to action. Black Housing Matters, just as Black Lives Matter. At the same time, I am not sure, nor convinced, that the entrepreneurial approach to the improvement of one's life was or is the only solution, or even maybe the main solution. I am rather of the mind that entrepreneurialism is one element along with pride (the final scene of the film insists on this element), but not only pride of the people, pride as members of the people, yet self-pride is just as important. Nevertheless, and moreover, education is crucial, along with desegregation at all levels of society. Segregation is a lethal weapon for some, a curse for others, or evil for a third group but it always leads to fatal events like with COVID-19.
"According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Epic Health Research Network, based on data from the Epic health record system for 7 million Black patients, 5.1 million Hispanic patients, 1.4 million Asian patients, and 34.1 million White patients, as of July 20, 2020, the hospitalization rates and death rates per 10 000, respectively, were 24.6 and 5.6 for Black patients, 30.4 and 5.6 for Hispanic patients, 15.9 and 4.3 for Asian patients, and 7.4 and 2.3 for White patients. American Indian persons living in the US also have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19." (...)
The film then, like the play insists on an essential collective awareness of the danger of unfairness, and inequality. We are all capable of doing better than our fathers and mothers, but we are not all able to do the same things. You cannot ask a flea to fly, nor a fly to swim. The actors are definitely good even if the acting is at times slightly too demonstrative instead of empathetic. But we can wonder if this play has not become an agit-prop drama or even a Brechtian epic play. In both cases, it should lead the audience, black and white alike, to conscious knowledge of what has to be changed and action to get it changed.
Dr. Jacques Coulardeau.
The stake with this film in 2008, and it was not obvious in 1961, is the reactions of a white audience and that of a black audience. The integration of movie theaters was just starting in 1961 and will only be brought to completion after 1964.
"Around 1961-62, seeing the writing on the wall, Southern theaters started to quietly integrate, especially if they were owned by national chains worried about the bad press and picket lines calling out their complicity in Jim Crow. In cooperation with local civil rights groups, many theater operators adopted a strategy for peaceful integration that had first proven successful in Nashville. Without advanced publicity, exhibitors unobtrusively admitted Blacks during low attendance matinees, then into nighttime shows on weekdays, and finally on weekends. The managers then announced that the theater had been integrated - a fait accompli completed before local Klansmen could protest. Less accommodating venues ran up against the Department of Justice of the Kennedy Administration, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were American theaters totally integrated - though, of course, local custom and municipal geography still often dictated a de facto segregation in audience composition." (...)
But the question of the integration of drama, comedy, and music theaters is a more complicated question.
First, the desegregation of drama theaters (comedies, tragedies, musicals, etc.) is not richly exemplified in available data. I found the following elements for musicals:
"In the early days of musical theatre, audiences were segregated. Black people were not allowed to sit in the main auditorium but were relegated to the balcony or gallery. This was a reflection of the segregation that was prevalent in society at large. Black people were not considered to be equal to white people, and so they were not given the same access to the best seats in the house. However, as society has become more egalitarian, so too has the seating in musical theatres. Nowadays, audiences are usually not segregated, and black people are able to sit wherever they want." (...)
But most data concern the integration of theatrical productions, hence actors, actresses, authors, composers, etc., plus all other performers as soon as some music was concerned with conductors and orchestras or bands.
"Broadway began to desegregate in the 1950s, though it was a slow process. It was not until the 1960s that black performers began to be cast in mainstream productions. In the 1970s and 1980s, black performers began to win major awards for their work on Broadway. Today, black performers are a regular fixture on Broadway, and their contributions are celebrated." (...)
Along this line here is some information about integration within the production and performance of theatrical works on stages, hence in theaters.
"Throughout the country in the early 1960s, the issues of civil rights - voter's rights and voter registration for blacks, integration, and fairness and equality in the workplace - were in the news and on television nearly every day, but mostly absent on Broadway. In 1962, Richard Rodgers produced the first musical he had attempted since the death of Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1960, an original piece called "No Strings," for which he would write both the lyrics and the music. Set in contemporary Paris, "No Strings" was about a love affair between an expatriate writer and a fashion model. The model, an American, was played by Diahann Carroll, an exquisite and talented black actress and singer, who had made her Broadway debut in 1954. Although the interracial aspect of the romance was apparent to anyone who was watching, it was never mentioned specifically. Rodgers had Carroll's character refer to her growing up "north of Central Park." Well, so had Richard Rodgers, but clearly, he meant something else. A show that looked to be socially progressive appeared, upon reflection, to be finicky at best, cowardly at worst." (...)
In 2008, the audience was vastly integrated in New York, and since this production is for the cinema, in all cinemas in the USA. But how can the white audience react to the facts presented here, and yet the presence of the abortionist (hardly alluded to in the original play and film) dates the action? A white audience is confronted with a totally hypocritical society that denies a black family the right to buy a house and move into a white neighborhood. That kind of segregation is illegal, but yet still practiced, even if discreetly. The white audience is the target for the responsibility for this segregation because the blacks are the targets of the whites on the stage. We all know ghettos exist in America, and in many other Western countries, to only speak of our own threshold. Hence the last sentence of the white representative of the white community in which this Black family is going to move is no longer a warning. It becomes a menace. "I hope you people know exactly what you are doing."
But what can the reaction of a black audience be? They are bound to compare this slightly aged situation on the stage with the present reality. They have to know, or they cannot ignore, the following opinion:
"Housing discrimination is still a significant problem in Chicago. A 2017 Fair Housing 59-page study (...) looked into six community areas that had the most reported complaints of racial and income discrimination against renters: Jefferson Park, the Near North Side, Bridgeport, Hyde Park, Clearing, and Mount Greenwood.
"Sixty-three percent of the time, Black testers posing as potential renters holding CHA Housing Choice Vouchers experienced some form of discrimination. "The highest ratio of discriminatory acts to race-related tests occurred in the Near North Side neighborhood, where over half of the tests involved race discrimination," the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and the Chicago Lawyers' Committee found." (...)
Even if things have improved in more than 60 years (two generations) since 1961, we are far from a fair situation. Discrimination is everywhere in substantial proportions, and we should not reduce the concept to racial discrimination. But we think the whites are not burning a house with the black residents inside and with doors and windows nailed down anymore, but the rejection of whatever people out of some residential neighborhoods, and the existence of neighborhoods where the proportion of "colored" people is over 50% or even twice as much as the overall proportion of "colored" people in the city concerned, and at times a lot higher is a plain fact. The play then becomes, for a black audience, a call to action. Black Housing Matters, just as Black Lives Matter. At the same time, I am not sure, nor convinced, that the entrepreneurial approach to the improvement of one's life was or is the only solution, or even maybe the main solution. I am rather of the mind that entrepreneurialism is one element along with pride (the final scene of the film insists on this element), but not only pride of the people, pride as members of the people, yet self-pride is just as important. Nevertheless, and moreover, education is crucial, along with desegregation at all levels of society. Segregation is a lethal weapon for some, a curse for others, or evil for a third group but it always leads to fatal events like with COVID-19.
"According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Epic Health Research Network, based on data from the Epic health record system for 7 million Black patients, 5.1 million Hispanic patients, 1.4 million Asian patients, and 34.1 million White patients, as of July 20, 2020, the hospitalization rates and death rates per 10 000, respectively, were 24.6 and 5.6 for Black patients, 30.4 and 5.6 for Hispanic patients, 15.9 and 4.3 for Asian patients, and 7.4 and 2.3 for White patients. American Indian persons living in the US also have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19." (...)
The film then, like the play insists on an essential collective awareness of the danger of unfairness, and inequality. We are all capable of doing better than our fathers and mothers, but we are not all able to do the same things. You cannot ask a flea to fly, nor a fly to swim. The actors are definitely good even if the acting is at times slightly too demonstrative instead of empathetic. But we can wonder if this play has not become an agit-prop drama or even a Brechtian epic play. In both cases, it should lead the audience, black and white alike, to conscious knowledge of what has to be changed and action to get it changed.
Dr. Jacques Coulardeau.