Filmed stage plays had reached their height by the end of the 1950s, but there was still one more statement to be made in 1961.
The days of glorious Tennessee Williams adaptations were long over by then. Yet, Hollywood still mined Broadway for ideas, even if playwrights back East were allowed far more freedom than filmmakers in Tinseltown. In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun debuted and while it was a critical success after its official opening – and even starred Sidney Poitier, who was already a bankable mainstream star – the film adaptation was not made at any of the biggest studios.
Instead, Columbia Pictures picked it up. The majority of the Broadway cast – including Poitier – reprised their roles and Hansberry was even allowed to write the screenplay. However, it wound up being directed by Daniel Petrie, whose name doesn't exactly sell tickets. Perhaps hiring Petrie was a good move, since he had no defining style to impose on Hansberry's incredible story.
For those who have never experienced A Raisin In The Sun and need some kind of explanation of why it remains a powerful piece of American theater, the movie will do it justice. Petrie does not try to “open up” the play, as filmmakers often do, keeping the movie constrained within the Youngers' dingy, two-bedroom Chicago apartment. In fact, there are just two major sequences outside of the apartment, but even these feel claustrophobic – one is in a tiny bar, the other in the tiny backyard of the home they hope to own.
A Raisin, which takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem, centers on the Younger family, which is made up of five people, crammed into one apartment in a Black neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee (Poitier) hopes to be seen as the man of the family, dreaming the “American Dream.” His wife, Ruth (Ruby Dee) seems to be the only one in the family resigned to their position, but when she learns she's about to have a baby, she does consider an abortion. They have a young son, Travis (Stephen Perry), who Walter hopes will have a better life than his own.
Travis has to sleep on the couch though, because Walter's younger sister Beneatha (Diana Sands) and his mother Lena (Claudia McNeil) share the second bedroom. Of course, as anyone who has watched enough dramas knows, the more people you stuff in one room, the more explosive it becomes and the more dangerous the words are. By the third act, each word comes like daggers as dreams are crushed.
Or are they? Is life really about accomplishing your dreams or is it really about letting go of the past and allowing there to be a new head of the family? Put aside the racial issues Hansberry puts forth – which admittedly is hard to do – and A Raisin is more about a failed American Dream and the impatience Walter has to see it come true. So, his mother's insurance money from his father's death didn't make his dream come true, but he must learn to accept that this doesn't set his son's future in stone or his family's.
For her part, Lena must also learn something too – Walter must be his own man. She tries to keep her husband – also named Walter, so that doesn't help the situation – alive, almost in a Rebecca-esque way. For much of the film, Walter Senior feels as much alive as the other characters, but he isn't still alive to pass judgment on his son and daughter. They have to be allowed to live their own lives and once Lena learns this, A Raisin can reach its finale.
Then, there is the racial aspect of the play that really is impossible to ignore. At first, the Younger family seems at ease with living in their own community. Even Walter's dream isn't to break out of a black Chicago neighborhood, but just to be a successful businessman. He just wants to break out of poverty and not have to work as a chauffeur for a rich white man. Beneatha is the one who cares most about her identity. She is dating two men – one who is the son of money and can go to college and the other is Joseph, a classmate from Nigeria. She is more happy with Joseph, who opens her eyes to Africa and even offers to take her there.
Ironically, it is Lena who pushes the family out of the black neighborhood by putting a down payment on the house in a white neighborhood. That in itself forces her to come to grips with the future and how different life is outside their crammed apartment. It appears that getting used to change at large is easy for Lena, but change within the family is too difficult.
A Raisin is also a master class of acting and should be held as one of the best-acted films of the era. Sadly it's not, probably because no one was nominated for an Oscar. But this is the kind of powerful performance from Poitier that should have earned him an Oscar nod. The same goes for Ruby Dee, who was clearly robbed of a Best Supporting Actress nomination. But you can file that on the long list of “why awards in art really don't matter.”
Acting is what makes this film work so well, along with the strong material. The audience can clearly see that Petrie understood one thing: just let the camera roll. When you've got actors who already crafted their characters on the stage, working from a script by the playwright, anything you add just isn't going to work. With that in mind, we can fully grip the importance of A Raisin In The Sun and Hansberry's examination of the true costs of the American Dream.
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