The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
I bring up this ancient history, not in a mood of wound-licking, but because we must again resist these old creaky methods of human suppression; still coming down on us, forever refurbished with...
...It tried, I thought, and succeeded to a degree, in bringing intramural questions like obedience, church questions like good order, down to earth, where they belong...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...So 1 tried flipping my reactions around, for sanity's sake...
...Where do we go from here, you, I, all of us who have been sweating out these weeks in various stages of despair, frustration, fury, hope...
...I liked their paper...
...Because of that lack of sleep, she nods off in the bathtub while Rupert is waiting for her to get ready for the date...
...But pitching you overboard, in the immortal image of the book of Jonah, is no acceptable way of calming the storm...
...In the other episode, at the opposite end of the film, the dilemma created by Rupert's first arrival on the scene is at last resolved...
...Only after he has turned on the charm extraheavy does she relent and take him inside to witness the arguments and suffer the insults of her children...
...We don't know how long we'll be able to keep this phase of the voyage going...
...Even in the big chase scene at the end, where Steve clings to the luggage rack of a car from which hoodlum Greechie Dan (Harry Belafonte) is shooting at him, the camera work minimizes the action and accentuates the character acting...
...He changes his mind and decides to stay with them...
...Needless to say the fellow tries to get his ticket back, persisting in his search even when the ticket turns out to be in the possession of a bunch of gangsters...
...Including the principals, that's a total of eight stars in this movie, or, as a little simple math will tell us, a new character every thirteen minutes...
...When he does, however, Claudine isn't home yet, and since her daughter won't let him in, Rupert has to go back to wait in his car...
...Though this might sound like an action film, a thriller of some sort, it isn't...
...Besides Poitier and Belafonte, the black comedians and character actors who get to do their shtick in the movie are Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, Paula Kelly, Calvin Lockhart and Roscoe Lee Browne...
...But that hasn't happened...
...you too should wash one another's feet...
...Claudine's existence in this film is pretty much confined to the subsistence level--the level where all Earth Mothers operate...
...It calmly said in effect that the question of obedience, whenever it was removed from the hands of local communities, became a cancerous question...
...still coming down on us, forever refurbished with new rhetoric, fearful of human probings, interventions, communitarian impulse, criticism--the light and warmth and unsettling spontaneities of the truth...
...During the same decade, I was urged on at least four occasions, with varying degrees of anger and frustration, to withdraw from the order...
...Then her son, as if to even things out, comes home to recuperate from a vasectomy...
...The argument the kids are having the first night Rupert comes, for instance, is about whose turn it is to use the bathroom...
...What happens in between these two scenes all goes to show how badly Rupert is needed...
...As soon as he gets her out of the bathtub and through a chicken dinner, she is ready for a philosophical discussion...
...Even her date with Rupert has for its background the advice of some friends that she can't sleep at night because she's sex-starved...
...But as soon as he spots Claudine coming across the street, he hops out to try again...
...Hadn't the gospel said so, long ago, and hadn't the Lord so advised and so proceeded...
...This time Claudine is already home and, far from forgetting he is coming, she has been standing hopefully at the window even though she had no reason to expect him...
...If her daughter doesn't come home drunk and puking, she comes home pregnant and crying...
...but you are not so to act...
...Absolutely everything that happens in Claudine's life involves some basic bodily function...
...No, the guidelines said coolly that everyone was in the S.S...
...If Uptown Saturday Night or Claudine are any indication, it now seems more likely that the black film will die from blandness instead...
...Well, what place did all this leave for superiors...
...The gentiles lord it over one another...
...A standoff ensued...
...When the stereotypes are upset or are played in unexpected ways, the results can be funny...
...Finally, it insisted that the Brotherhood was not made up, locally or otherwise, of unconcerned professionals and freaky zealots...
...On the other hand, Roscoe Lee Browne's Congressman Lincoln fulfills all our easiest expectations about the two-faced politician.with a reversible portrait in his oftiee showing Nixon on one side and Malcolm X on the other, depending on who his caller is...
...18 October 1973:66...
...Again Rupert drives up in his convertible, but now he has come to say goodby--to say that he can't marry Claudine and give the kids a father after all because he just can't afford it...
...And he has the same uplifting effect on her kids as well...
...The plot has to do with an honest but poor man named Steve (Poitier) who has stolen from him a lottery ticket which, a few days later, wins the million-dollar prize...
...What's more, instead of Rupert's having to fight to establish himself in the house, mom and all of the kids file out to join him in the car...
...Not every role can score a hit either...
...the first of whom were fated to tolerate the second, an inevitable evil, given the times...
...It's a gesture of acceptance on their part that Rupert can't resist...
...They were invited, by implication, to keep out of the way, to disappear even...
...It implied moreover that authorities were guilty of such interference precisely to the degree that they zeroed in on local situations without sharing neighborhood table, altar, meetings...
...Not much in fact...
...A word seems to be in order too about those famous guidelines that the Woodstock Jesuits developed in the late hot sixties, a kind of community stakeout...
...That pretty well reduces romance to a subsistence level in her life too...
...Richard Pryor's detective, Sharp-Eye Washington, provides the best few minutes in the film by being unobservant, rattled, dishonest and everything but a Sam Super-Spade...
...This man is ready to ring Claudine's chimes...
...A close-up isolates Steve from his hazardous circumstances, dissipating any tension that might inhere in the situation in order to give Poitier a chance to do a bit more mugging...
...Once a court of peers was assembled to hear my current delict, which involved, as I recall, a decision to travel to Hanoi with a symbolic gift of medical supplies, thus violating U.S...
...out of control...
...No, I say to you that the first among you is to be as the least . . . . " And again, "If I, your teacher and lord, have washed your feet, it is to give an example...
...They argue about their respective marital irresponsibilities...
...Like all vignette comedy, the roles in this film are stereotypes, a parade of stock characters for Poitier and Cosby to react to...
...Although the medium is black poverty, the message couldn't be more prescribed and middle-class...
...It's neither any worse, nor any better, than what one imagines My Three Sons or the Danny Thomas reruns to be...
...where we go when the road signs are down...
...why not consider such occasions as reinforcements, honors, decorations, instead of assaults...
...This time she has forgotten about their date and would rather cancel it...
...Damn it, no...
...She is the first to greet him this time, and the kids fall in contritely behind her...
...We hope you will continue to pitch your tent here at 98 Street, to share our work, our songs, our booze, our prayer, our precarious life together, whose image is that old scow launched by the Lord's word, in tricky seas, bound for all the world, uncomfortable, mutinous, crazily unsinkable...
...unlike official pronunciamentos, there was some taste and smell of the real world in it...
...Like this...
...they wouldn't condemn, they wouldn't stand by...
...Help us be brothers one of another, in the world, and to endure there...
...We consider you a Jesuit as long as you choose to be so considered...
...Shining through all the disadvantages and rancor is the need for traditional mother and father figures...
...Beyond the general worry of feeding her four kids, all Claudine's particular problems are of this kind...
...Gospel together, like it or not, bail, row, or sink...
...DANIEL COLOR TELEVISION OOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN The plot of the film Claudine is bracketed by a matched pair of episodes neatly placed, like bookends, so that they will contain everything in between them...
...I have never learned how to cope with this 'peccatum perenne,' to this day I am unable to do so...
...In the first one, garbageman Rupert Marshall (James Earl Jones) drives up for his first date with cleaning lady/welfare mother Claudine Price (Diahann Carroll...
...Be our brother, then...
...No better...
...While she's grappling with the pregnancy, the vasectomy and what not, he is providing the kids with spiritual benefits ranging from ice cream and companionship to a math lesson derived from a crap game...
...some of us, at least, do not consider the law, badly and even iniquitously applied, as the measure of our life together...
...As Commonweal: 65 Rupert sinks further and further into Claudine's living room chair, we get the feeling that what we are really watching is a man digging in to hold a beachhead...
...What it all amounts to in the end is situation comedy of the sort that, were the characters white, we might be more likely to see serialized on television...
...On the contrary, it's a series of character studies, cameos really, which are never anything more than vaguely connected either to the plot or each other...
...Later I took to fasting for the day of wrath, appearing before superiors light of head and gut, creating for myself a kind of inner Day of Atonement...
...It assumed that mature people would by and large be able to take care of their own lives, conflicts, activities, without outside interference...
...Her role is to cope with physical and physiological necessities: sex, sleep, food, elimination, that sort of thing...
...But Rupert at once enriches her life...
...Obviously a script that machine-guns new roles at us like this is going to end up riddled to pieces...
...Could it be that authority, so conducting itself, was really granting me a backhanded compliment, and every time I received an official put-down, I should wear it up and down Fordham Road like a shiny new Croix de Paix...
...I left as empty as I came...
...A few years ago when black films first began to be produced, it looked as if they would quickly choke on their own bile and die off as a genre...
...If Claudine is essentially a sit-corn, then Sidney Po]tier's new film, Uptown Saturday Night, is some lessstructured, coherent kind of TV fare--a variety show, perhaps, a black Ed Sullivan Show or Dean Martin Comedy Hour...
...And that the cooler types precisely owed itmto themselves, to their brothers, to the bleeding world--to support and help further the edgy, lonely, uncharted work of resistance against the warmaking state...
...I used to appear at the Fordham Fortress on command, explain as patiently as I knew how my latest trespassings and divagations, receive my birching and depart...
...Practically speaking, you must take our word for it...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 3
