'BRIGHT ROAD'
Dworkin, Martin S.
State of the Cinema Bright Road' By Martin S. Dworkin BRIGHT ROAD" is a maverick among Hollywood films, unusual in production, compass, and intention. In fact, the way it is being presented to...
...The classroom scenes portray a modern, even progressive school...
...In the one scene with the white doctor, for example, the colored teacher is unobtrusively helped on with her coat...
...Made from the Christopher Award story...
...The biggest switch-on-the-unusu-al, however, is psychological...
...If this were not enough to confound the publicity men, Bright Road casts beautiful night club torch singer Dorothy Dandridge as the demure new teacher, and folk singer Harry Belafonte as principal of the school...
...But the actors need not be Negroes at all...
...This may be sound cinema economics, and may make possible the production of films which would otherwise not be made...
...Bright Road may be a significant step towards more realistic treatment in films of our colored minority...
...In fact, the way it is being presented to the public indicates that the film industry doesn't know quite what to make of it, or what to do with it...
...But in our system of motion picture distribution and exhibition, getting the film to where it may be able "to attract a segment of the white audience," may be quite a problem...
...Although not sustained throughout, and occasionally weakened by sentimentalism, this effect causes the audience, through many sequences, to look at Negroes on the screen as if they are ordinary people...
...The dramatic requirement for psychological projection, or at least association, with the protagonists can lead to an understanding of the imaginative wrench that must be made by the colored youngster attending a "Western at a Saturday matinee, or his parents watching screen romances in the evening...
...But this plot is not the basic theme...
...In the Christmas dinner scene at the little boy's home, his parents show their affection for each other and for their children in an easy, unostentatious manner...
...In New York, it opened at a small "art" theater generally used as a showcase for foreign films appealing to limited audiences...
...The chances are, however, that places with small colored populations will be denied the opportunity to see the film...
...Although the film does not overstep the lines of Hollywood custom by showing Negroes courting in the fashion of white actors, there is a suggestion of romance in the conversations of the new teacher and the young principal...
...Its simplicity may be misleading, and its apparent naivete occasionally embarrassing...
...They are a poor family—this is an important point in the plot—but' they are "clean poor," not "Nigger poor...
...But in a limited compass, the film offers its message in deliberately simplified terms, free of complications which might adulterate its intended universality...
...Bright Road may have deep interest for an audience larger than that of Negro movie-goers...
...Although overtly treating race relations in only one or two brief remarks, the film says much more on this matter indirectly...
...These instances, and the universality of the basic theme, create an unusual effect for a Hollywood product...
...For a few moments, at any rate, white audiences can get an idea of what colored people, in the United States especially, feel while watching films...
...Exhibitors have been less than overwhelmed, and the film, which is worth seeing, stands a fair chance of getting lost by being exploited for special groups...
...See How They Run, the first published effort of colored schoolteacher Mary Elizabeth Vroman, Bright Road is fundamentally concerned with basic religious principles...
...The simple story tells of the regeneration of a "backward" boy, through the love and patience of a new teacher...
...we may surmise that it is part of a segregated . system somewhere only from the fact that all the pupils and teachers are colored...
...The film has an all-Negro cast— except for one white actor who plays a doctor in a short sequence...
...The producer has remarked that the film can break even on showings to Negro audiences, and can make a profit, "if it has enough quality to attract a segment of the white audience...
...Director Gerald Mayer and Producer Sol Baer Fielding were limited to a C-movie budget, and the film was made almost entirely on the M-G-M lot, on the simplest sets, with little technical elaboration...
...The little boy is played by Broadway professional Philip Hepburn, and there is some good acting in the smaller roles, such as that of the boy's ill-fated playmate, performed by Barbara Ann Sanders...
...Bright Road is hardly a "Negro" picture, dealing with the problem of caste only slightly, and this principally by implication...
...In the usual film, the hero has to be a hero, and the heroine a heroine, to the vicarious heroes and heroines in the theater-rows...
...These handicaps have been turned to advantage, in producing what is essentially a parable, dealing with the relation of faith and works, with natural reverence for all living things, and with the eternal mystery of dying and rebirth...
Vol. 17 • July 1953 • No. 7
