BEFORE: Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover carry over from "Beloved" - and MAN, I've managed to avoid this film for a VERY long time. It came out in what, 1985? That was over 35 years ago, and I've had ample opporunities, it just never appealed to me, or I forgot about the fact that I hadn't seen it. Damn, 11 Oscar nominations that year and not one win, what does that tell you? This Spielberg guy must be a hack or something...but since I'm doing follow-up Black History this year I'm going to cross this one off tonight. Yeah, that's my excuse, I never watched this film because I'm always busy in February watching romance movies, and then by the time I'm done with them, Black History month is always over! So this year I've moved it to part-April and part-May, with a break in between for political documentaries, but even then, we discussed voter suppression, the Obamas and John Lewis, and that's all part of Black History, too.
Final stats - tomorrow is May 1 and that means it's the last day of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, here's the line-up:
7:15 am "Watch on the Rhine" (1943)
9:15 am "Waterloo Bridge" (1940)
11:15 am "Weary River" (1929)
12:45 pm "West Side Story" (1961) - SEEN IT
3:30 pm "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962) - SEEN IT
6:00 pm "White Heat" (1949) - SEEN IT
8:00 pm "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) - SEEN IT
10:00 pm "Wuthering Heights" (1939)
12:00 am "The Year of Living Dangerously" (1982) - SEEN IT
2:15 am "The Yearling (1946)
4:30 am "Z" (1969)
Another 5 out of 12 isn't a majority, but it won't sink me at the last minute. I finish with 145 seen out of 361, which is 40.1%. Well, t's not half, but at least I finished above 40 percent. I'll have my format breakdown for April ready by tomorrow.
THE PLOT: A black Southern woman struggles to find her identity after suffering abuse from her father and others over four decades.
AFTER: Maybe it's the white guilt, but I'm just not sure what to do with a film like "The Color Purple" - obviously it means something to a whole group of people, but I'm not in that targeted audience, so I just sort of have to process it for what it is. It just seems designed to remind us all, over and over, that African-Americans got the shitty end of the stick for a long, long time in this country. But this film is set in the early half of the twentieth century, decades after the Civil War, so it's not all just white people keeping black people down. A lot of this is black people keeping black people down, like husbands and fathers dominating their wives and daughters, so freedom for black women didn't catch up for another hundred years or so. And these were religious people, what happened to the Golden Rule, love one another and all that? I never really understood how patriarchal Black America became, even after racial equality was in the books, the struggle for gender equality continued.
Celie is a black teenager who's become pregnant twice by her own father, with the children sold off to hide all evidence of the incest and abuse. Her father sets his sights on her younger sister, Nettie, and marries Celie off to a man who was more interested in Nettie. Man, that's the roughest possible beginning - again, I'm not going to argue with an author of a best-selling novel, but I just wonder if it doesn't feel a little forced, like piling on for the sake of drama. Then once Celie is married off to "Mister" she basically belongs to her husband, like property, and she isn't allowed contact with her sister, she's forced to take care of her husband's children, do all the chores, and be his sex object and punching bag. Slavery ended on paper in 1865, but somebody forgot to tell the married men, it seems.
Years later, after Celie's had all the fight beaten out of her, Mister's son Harpo has a relationshiph with Sofia, she's pregnant with Harpo's baby, but Mister is against the wedding, claiming the baby is not his son's - perhaps he just doesn't want to think of himself as old enough to be a grandfather? But when relationship troubles develop, Celie gives Harpo the horrible advice that he needs to beat Sofia to keep her in line. Is this supposed to be funny, an abused woman giving the advice that her stepson should beat his wife? The advice fails, because it was horrible, and the marriage fails, possibly because of the advice. Harpo instead decides to turn his house into a "Juke joint", which is a bar and concert hall.
There are parts that are supposed to be funny, you can tell that Spielberg is not great at directing comedies - because most of the jokes just don't land. Harpo constantly falling through the roof, or out of the rafters, not funny. This is not "The Money Pit", or a "Three Stooges" short. Albert not knowing how to use the stove in his own house isn't funny, either, and it's especially not funny when he tries to boost the flame with some kerosene. I'll say that Sofia working for Miss Millie is a little funny, because Millie insists on driving and weaves all over the road - but this bit is cut short when she drives Sofia to visit her kids on Christmas, and tells her she can spend all day with them. But then Miss Millie can't drive the car away without Sofia's help, and when the black men rush to help Millie out, she thinks she's being attacked by a gang of thugs. Yeah, implied gang violence based on white racism kills the humor here, as does the fact that then Sofia is forced to drive away with her, and misses her family time on Christmas, for the 8th year in a row. Not funny at all.
(Does it seem a little strange that Oprah is in this film and her character marries a man named Harpo? Obviously one name is the other spelled backwards, isn't that weird? Like, I know it's the name of her production company, too, and she's probably not a fan of Harpo Marx. What's weird is that a little research shows that's Oprah's birth name isn't really Oprah, it's ORPAH, for real. The story on her Wiki page says that most people in her life misread it as OPRAH instead of ORPAH, so she just changed it. This story sounds very suspicious, I'm not sure I believe it. Then again, I'm not sure WHY I don't believe it, but it all seems like too big of a coincidence.)
This brings me to Shug Avery, a character played by Margaret Avery, another odd coincidence. This woman is a singer who is Mister's mistress, and when she takes ill he brings her home to stay with him, which is a bold move, to move his girlfriend into the same house as his wife, but men ruled the roost back then, I guess. Shug's a very open-minded woman who then has a sexual relationship with Celie, so things started looking up for her for a while, I guess. Why these three just couldn't get past their hang-ups and have a happy, committed three-way relationship is beyond me, but I guess they were so repressed back then that things like this just weren't talked about in polite company, so there was Shug and Mister going on, then there was Shug and Celie, and those two things had to be kept separate. For some reason, this film doesn't get much attention for being its ground-breaking lesbian sub-plot, back in 1985 this would have been very forward and radical for a Hollywood movie, right? Yet I barely knew this was an important part of the plot, and mostly any impact that it has sort of gets shrugged off, like it's no big deal.
Just when I thought that the film had forgotten about Celie's sister, Nettie - to be fair, there's like a full hour and a half where this character isn't even mentioned - Shug intercepts a letter from Nettie, and Celie learns that her sister is alive, living in Africa, and Mister has been keeping letters from her as part of her ongoing torture marriage. And man, if I thought this movie was slow-moving before this point, it really started to drag once the plot focused on Celie just reading all those old letters for about 20 minutes. They tried in vain to dress this up with a few fantasy-like sequences, but it's still watching someone READ LETTERS for a long spell, and that's just an interesting place for a movie to dwell. I just don't agree with this as a narrative choice.
I get the logic here, the longer that the movie shows us Celie being put down, the greater it's going to feel when she finally gets the strength to fight back, to leave Mister, to tell him off and strike out on her own. But Jesus, this movie's running time is nearly as long as "Beloved", it's almost two 1/2 hours overall. How about a little bit of editing to speed things up a bit? We all know it's going to happen, why can't we get there a little sooner, Steven? Then a series of unlikely coincidences befall Celie, and not only did they collectively feel way too sudden, it felt like the director realized that the end of the movie was coming up fast and he had to make sure she got everything she deserved.
This one part near the ending was very strange, this musical number that focused on Shug, and she's not the main character of the movie, so why take focus away from the main storyline? She was all the way over by the juke joint and started singing along with the music from the church, which was miles away, instead of with the music from the band that was right next to her. Then she started making her way over to the church, and instead of everyone thinking she was crazy, they just followed her until they became a huge progression that burst into the church, with the jazz musicians joining the church choir. I guess it was meant to be symbolic, about somebody finding their way back to the church, but it just wasn't clear to me, what was Shug's relationship to the Reverend, was that her father, her ex-lover? And who was the girl singing in the choir, was that Shug's daughter or a symbolic representation of the girl she used to be? I just didn't get it.
Anyway, this film definitely had its place in the 1980's pantheon, and it was Oprah Winfrey's first movie, and essentially Whoopi Goldberg's first, too, so there's that. And it's on that list of the 1,001 Movies That I'm Supposed to See Before I Die, so I've now seen 439 of the 1,001 - I'm still working off the 2019 list, but there might be a new version of the list this year, I'll have to remember to check.
Also starring Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Margaret Avery (last seen in "Magnum Force"), Akosua Busia, Desreta Jackson (last seen in "Sister Act"), Adolph Caesar (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Willard E. Pugh, Rae Dawn Chong, Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Carl Anderson, Grand Bush, Dana Ivey (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Bennet Guillory, James Tillis, Leonard Jackson, Susan Beaubian, Phillip Strong, Peto Kinsaka, Lelo Masamba, Margaret Freeman, Howard Starr, Daphaine Oliver, Jadili Johnson, Lillian Njoki Distefano, Leon Rippy (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), John Ratch Hart, with a cameo from Gayle King (also last seen in "The Accidental President").
RATING: 5 out of 10 homemade biscuits
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