Cinema: Acute Ghettoitis

A Raisin in the Sun (Columbia) is essentially a writhing, vital mess of tenement realism. Unfortunately, in this film translation of her 1959 Broadway hit. Scenarist Lorraine Hansberry apparently felt obliged to sprinkle the mess occasionally with Mammy’s own brand of brown sugar, douse it frequently with the skim milk of human kindness that too often passes for social concern, and then serve it all up as a sort of pablum for progressives. Even so, the mixture makes pretty strong medicine for a society afflicted with what the author calls “acute ghettoitis.”

The ghetto involved here is Chicago’s black belt, where Scriptwriter Hansberry lived as a child. The hero (Sidney Poitier), his wife (Ruby Dee), his twelve-year-old son (Stephen Perry), his mother (Claudia McNeil) and his sister (Diana Sands) are all jammed together in three small rooms, toilet down the hall. Wife and mother do cleaning for white folks, sister is a pre-med student, hero drives a Cadillac for a downtown business executive—and hates it. At night he paces his low-rent prison and snarls at the walls: “I got to change my life! I’m chokin’ to death!”

The hero sees his deliverance in a $10,000 check his mother gets from the company that insured his father. But Mamma won’t allow “no liquor stores,” which is what he wants to sink the money in. “Man!” he screams, “I’m a volcano … a giant surrounded by ants!” When Mamma takes $3,500 and plunks it down on a house, the giant blubbers so pathetically that she hands him the rest. With boundless enthusiasm, the hero hands the wad to the first con man he meets. But in the end, with a sudden, improbable access of intelligence, he “comes into his manhood.”

The film smells of the theater, though less than most photographed plays. Most of the action takes place in one small room, but that pent-up, gotta-get-outa-here feeling is essential to the story. Regrettably, the actors—all the principals have been held over from the Broadway production—often seem to be shouting past the spectator, as though still playing from habit to the back row, balcony. Only Actress Dee, as the wife, projects her existence without hollering her head off. Actress Sands, as the sister, has a wonderful tomboy charm and most of the funny lines: “I’m not interested,” she bellows at her Nigerian boy friend, “in being somebody’s little episode in America.” But Actress McNeil, worshiped by Broadway critics as an Earth Mother, too often on the screen suggests a mean old man in a wig. And Actor Poitier, though always exciting to watch, never quite starts living his role, never quite stops playing the black Brando.

The strongest element in the picture is the Hansberry script, which has the towering merit of presenting the Negro not as a theatrical stereotype or a social problem, but as an all-too-human being. For the rest, the film is a charming, passionate, superior soap opera in blackface.