Blurred Reflections on Hollywood

...it appears to rebut the spirit of his own argument against Hollywood...

...It also seems to contradict the charge of refusing to confront reality that Baldwin has consistently brought against white Americans...

...Moreover, besides them Hollywood has not sent much Baldwin's way worth being thankful for...

...A black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, swore that Fonda had colored blood...

...In both, he explains, "a current flowed back between the audience and the actor: flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood—as we say, testifying...

...She was "the only American film actress who reminded me of a colored girl, or woman—which is to say that she was the only American film actress who reminded me of reality...

...That is an astonishing conclusion from a man who has just spent the greater part of his book leading us to believe he was quite hip to everything taking place in the American looking glass...

...Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney [Poitier], at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to...

...What was good enough for Hollywood, in this instance, was certainly good enough for him, and he made peace with his eyes: "I had discovered that my infirmity might not be my doom...

...One of the things he says about In the Heat of the Night could be said of The Devil Finds Work—that there is in it "something strangling, alive, struggling to get out...

...Surely the first blacks he saw on screen?Man-ton Moreland, Willie Best, Stepin Fetchit—were no cause for celebration: "It seemed to me they lied about the world I knew, and debased it, and certainly I did not know anybody like them...

...Parts of this essay are labored, as if it were an uphill task he had grittily committed himself to complete—or, thinking now of his tide, a little work he had found for his idle hands...

...You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don't walk like that...

...Does his mild dissent from Eliot suggest that he has had a measure of success...

...Whether or not the film industry and its millions of uncritical subscribers will be impressed is open to argument, but Baldwin's formulation will find support among more thoughtful moviegoers and certainly among those, like blacks, who hunger in vain for valid celluloid representations of their lives...

...One of them had to do with an aspect of his reality that caused him no little pain and bafflement, his looks...

...And why, as soon as he realized what would inevitably happen, did he not turn right around and go back home...

...abandon his white buddy...

...Other baffling moments of inconsistency also fray the thread of Baldwin's argument...

...Compared to the exchanges and validation of truth and experience occasions of that kind allow, the cinema is inherently false: "The camera sees what you want it to see...

...And Henry Fonda, the single actor of the era with whom he identified...

...There was Bette Davis, a white movie star, with her pop eyes...

...Nevertheless, some time ago Baldwin allowed himself to be talked into going to Hollywood to write a screenplay based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. What, beyond the stipends, could he have dreamed would satisfy him...

...And Lady Sings the Blues, he tells us, "is related to the black American experience in about the same way, and to the same extent that Princess Grace Kelly is related to the Irish potato famine: by courtesy...

...After allowing himself to fall into the further trap of accepting a "technical" assistant, who set about translating virtually every scene Baldwin wrote to fit the perceptions of the studio, he finally realized that the film was being produced "in the interest of entertainment values...

...Throughout his career as a moral essayist and social critic—one of the more distinguished such careers in our language—a principal point has been that most whites shun things as they are, especially relating to blacks, by taking refuge behind safe and comfortable illusions and by falsifying whatever they are not quite able to sidestep...

...He has tried to pursue these Americans, to corner them with what he holds to be the truths of their country and their inner lives...

...While one doubts it, one gets no answer...

...For the heart of his case against Hollywood is a critique of the invalid terms in which movies re-create the world, and of the "inadmissible fantasies" in which they too often deal...

...In the Heat of the Night he describes as "a preposterous adventure" at "an appalling distance from reality...

...I was not alone...

...The language of the camera is the language of dreams...

...But Bette Davis, Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda did not seem in essence to be products of Hollywood...

...Baldwin walked out at that point, "but the adventure remained very painfully in my mind, and indeed, was to shed a certain light for me on the adventure occurring through the American looking glass...

...About The Defiant Ones he says: "It is impossible to accept the premise of the story, a premise based on the profound American misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white...

...Because of his enormous "frog eyes" his father, who hated them and therefore hated him, said "that I was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, and I had no reason to doubt him...

...As it turns out, his early cinematic experiences were not unreservedly bleak...

...They were more like real and valid life forces the movies were powerless to transform or falsify...

...And it is only one reason why, despite Baldwin's largely effective case against Hollywood, I found myself curiously dissatisfied and disappointed with The Devil Finds Work...

...One is surprised by the digression...

...Still, he would further justify that patience by bringing us fresh news—about himself and ourselves—and not going over familiar territory...

...A final disappointment is perhaps not Baldwin's fault: He has succeeded in raising expectations so high that scrutiny of his work and demands on his excellence grow more rigorous and merciless with each new book he writes...

...The script is as empty as a banana peel, and as treacherous...

...Relatively recent films involving blacks fare no better with Baldwin...

...Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait' Roughly halfway through his latest book—a long essay that indicts American films for distorting or evading reality—James Baldwin writes: "I think it was T. S. Eliot who observed that the people cannot bear very much reality...

...Then there was Sylvia Sidney, as the young Baldwin saw her in such films as Street Scene, You and Me, Fury, and Mary Brown, Fugitive...

...At least not until, at age 10 or so, he went to see 20,000 Years in Sing Sing...

...The book lacks, too, the natural and sustained fluency that marks his better efforts and enables us to recognize the urgency and validity of his passions...

...This may be true enough, as far as it goes, so much depending on what the word 'people' brings to mind: I think that we bear a little more reality than we might wish...

...In addition, his constant digressions from the main theme, to report on everything that floats into his mind, repeat far too much of what he has said a number of times before...

...In The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin takes a sometimes tortured retrospective look at a number of the films he has seen since his boyhood in the 1930s...

...This is a welcome recovery of sorts, setting his argument back on the track just when one had begun to fear he had derailed it...

...here and there he found some surprising satisfactions...

...Baldwin misses in movies what he found initially in the church and later in the legitimate theater...

...Instead, Baldwin goes on: "In any case, in order for a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life...

...The Harlem audience was outraged, and yelled: Get back on the train, you fool...

...Our expectations, though, may be as unrealistic as they are unfair, and cer-tatinly on the basis of his past work Baldwin has earned from us a number of things, not the least of which is our patience...