Black Power Movement and Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s

Introduction: Art as a Product of Its Time

As many scholars agree, all art is a product of its time. The social tensions, trends, patterns of thought, and political issues of an era cannot help but influence the art that is created and consumed. This is particularly true of cinema and all forms of media arts. This paper examines how the Black Power movement influenced cinema — and at times was influenced by cinema — through three distinct films of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Defiant Ones: Misrepresentation and Its Consequences

The Defiant Ones (1958), directed by Stanley Kramer, was a film that both succeeded and failed in making meaningful commentary on race and race relations. It was perhaps its failures that helped provoke the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s most acutely. The movie is a "buddy film," a genre of cinema that centers a story on an immediate or eventual friendship. In the film, lead actors Sidney Poitier (Noah Cullen) and Tony Curtis (John "Joker" Jackson) play prisoners who escape their work truck when it overturns. Chained wrist to wrist, they must stay ahead of the police and search hounds as they hide in the swamps and forests of the surrounding area. The two are eventually caught and face death, though they receive a last-minute reprieve. "Their bound-together plight — blacklisted radical writer Nedrick Young won an Academy Award he could not collect, having co-written under a pseudonym — eventually produced solidarity and something like love" (Roediger, 2018). The film was also celebrated at the time as a strong box-office draw capable of attracting both Black and white ticket holders.

The film is polarizing, though it need not be. It should be celebrated for its successes while still being examined for its significant failures. Both contributed to helping spark the Black Power movement that followed. It is important to situate the film in its historical moment: made in 1958, just a few years after the Montgomery bus boycotts and in the prime of the Civil Rights movement, many film critics argue that it helped pave the way for more three-dimensional examinations of ethnic relations in the American experience. Nominated for nine Oscars, the film received a largely warm reception and was widely praised as avant-garde and well executed.

However, as James Baldwin notably illuminates in his essay "The Devil Finds Work," the film's problems are invasive and originate at its core. As a buddy film, it is unable to accurately capture the real relationship between the two races, because it represents a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between Black and white (Baldwin, 524). Baldwin acknowledges that hatred between Black and white is portrayed in the film, but it is misrepresented through a lack of understanding. Regarding this resentment between the races, he writes: "…the hatred is not equal on both sides for it does not have the same roots. This is perhaps a very subtle argument, but black men do not have the same reason to hate white men as white men have to hate blacks. The root of the white man's hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on the black, surfacing, and concentrating on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. But the root of the black man's hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply want them out of his way, and more than that, out of his children's way" (Baldwin, 525). Baldwin is able to pinpoint the film's core problem: it was written by a white screenwriter who held a generally myopic view of race relations. Nedrick Young clearly did not possess enough self-awareness about the white man's fear of Black men, nor about what the average white man symbolizes to the average Black man — an obstacle, a force that needs to be removed from the path as it blocks the way forward.

Another significant issue is that Poitier and Curtis are not equal matches. Poitier brings a grace and class to the screen that Curtis does not come close to matching, creating a fundamental lack of believability that the two would ever become friends. This undermines the integrity of the entire film. One wonders whether this disparity served to infuriate the Black community and motivate the Black Power movement. The inaccurate portrayal of the gulf between the two men alienates Black audiences, making them feel misunderstood and misrepresented. As Baldwin writes, "No black man, in such a situation, and especially knowing what Poitier conveys so vividly Noah Cullen knows, would rise to the bait proffered by this dimwitted poor white child, whose only real complaint is that he is a bona-fide mediocrity who failed to make it in the American rat-race. But many, no better than he, and many much worse, make it every day, all the way to Washington: sometimes, indeed, via Hollywood. It is a species of cowardice, grave indeed, to pretend that black men do not know this" (525). Curtis's character's failings were intended to make him relatable — an everyman figure — but to Black audiences he simply appeared as someone unable to make use of the advantages given to every white man at birth. The enormous obstacles constantly confronting Poitier's character receive comparatively little portrayal. Curtis's malaise with life and the "rat race" makes him seem spoiled and far beneath Cullen.

This imbalance undermines the entire "friendship" the film presents. Poitier delivers a performance of unshakeable excellence and extreme truthfulness, but as Baldwin points out, the friendship itself seems like a lie (525). That Poitier would play along with this unequal partnership and forge a bond with someone so beneath him perhaps helped to ignite the fury and impatience that lay at the heart of the Black Power movement. Many Black audiences saw The Defiant Ones as yet another film that failed to understand the Black experience and that clumsily represented it in whatever way suited the filmmakers — regardless of how untruthful. "Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney, at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to abandon his white buddy. The Harlem audience was outraged, and yelled, 'Get back on the train, you fool!'" (525). This reaction exposes the highly contrived ending that so many audiences found objectionable. It demonstrates that the film was at heart nothing more than a series of well-meaning politics that did not portray the realities of the era with any accuracy. Cullen is so forgiving that he offers an absolution that Curtis's character has neither deserved nor earned. The ending provides a clear springboard for the Black Power movement, as the Black male lead is expected to forgo his own interests for the sake of his friendship with the white man — an unrealistic and insensitive idea to put before audiences of any race. There is almost a suggestion of inherent service, as if the Black man feels obligated to help the white man at the expense of his own needs and goals. These characters ultimately seem less like complex people and more like caricatures designed to whitewash race relations in America.

It is little wonder, then, that a film that received such acclaim could also do its part in helping to spark the Black Power movement. The film's inaccuracies in portraying the Black experience, and its refusal to acknowledge white fear of Black people, produced something that was frustrating and ultimately insincere. That frustration contributed to cultivating a segment of American society that was deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.

Conclusion

All things considered, one can conclude that the Black Power movement had an influence on all facets of society during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the art world, and cinema most of all. Just as the cinema that preceded the 1960s influenced how Black Americans wanted to be treated and wanted to see themselves in the world, the Black Power movement was so overt that it forced storytellers to address it. Filmmakers either rejected its pressure and robustness of tone — as we saw in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — or did the opposite. The Blaxploitation films of this era may not have been perfect vehicles for the Black community to gain exposure, but they still shed light on social and political issues that mattered. More than anything, they reflected the values of the Black Power movement.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.

The Defiant Ones. Directed by Stanley Kramer, performances by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, 1958.

Dunne, Sarah. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Hollywood's Misrepresentation of the Politics of Interracial Relationships in 1960s America." The Midlands Historical Review, 2018, www.midlandshistoricalreview.com. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Fleishman, Jeffrey. "'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' is 50 and Racial Tension Still a Problem in America." Los Angeles Times, 2 Feb. 2017.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Directed by Stanley Kramer, performances by Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Sidney Poitier, 1967.

Harris, Glen A., and Robert B. Toplin. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?: A Clash of Interpretations Regarding Stanley Kramer's Film on the Subject of Interracial Marriage." The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 40, no. 4, 2007, pp. 700–713.

Mellen, Joan. Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film. Elm Tree Books, 1978.

Roediger, David. "The Defiant Ones, 1958." For All the World to See — UMBC, 2018, fatwts.umbc.edu. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Stevens, Brad. "Why Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a Radical Blaxploitation Classic." British Film Institute, 18 Oct. 2016.

TheGrio. "'Sweet Sweetback' at 40: The Birth of Modern Black Film Revisited." TheGrio, 26 Apr. 2011.

ushistory.org. "Black Power." US History, www.ushistory.org/us/54i.asp. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Wiggins. "'You Talkin' Revolution, Sweetback': On Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Revolutionary Filmmaking." Black Camera, vol. 4, no. 1, 2012, p. 28.

Williams, Brennan. "Sidney Poitier's Daughter on the Groundbreaking Life Lessons of 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.'" HuffPost, 22 Feb. 2017.