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The Devil Finds Work

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In this short work, Baldwin tries his hand at film criticism--and his unique and perceptive observations will change the way any filmgoer will watch movies. While Baldwin's focus is on racial representation (and misrepresentation) in the cinema, he expands his comments to various national obsessions that are reflected on the screen. As with most of Baldwin's work, there is power and precision in every sentence--and he nearly always quotable.

The essay is divided into three chapters. In the first, Baldwin discusses his adolescent love of movies and how it conflicted with his brief career as an adolescent minister in a church where the cinema (and the theater) were both regarded as "the devil's work" (thus, one of the implications of the title). The movies he dissects range from "A Tale of Two Cities" to Fritz Lang's "You Only Live Once," and he contrast the experience of film-watching with that of live theater, recalling Orson Welles's production of "Macbeth," which featured an all-black cast.

In the second chapter, Baldwin hits his stride, tearing into the patronizing portrayal of non-white roles in such films as "In the Heat of the Night," "In This, Our Life," "The Defiant Ones," and "Lawrence of Arabia." Baldwin observes about a type that reappears in many movies of the first seventy years of cinema: "It so happens that I saw 'The Birth of the Nation' and 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' on the same day . . . [Yet] in two films divided from each other by something like half a century, [there was] the same loyal [black] maid, playing the same role, and speaking the same lines." Noting how this stereotypical woman never seems to have her own family and how her only concerns are those of her white masters or employers, Baldwin exclaims: "How many times have we seen her! She is Dilsey, she is Mammy, in 'Gone with the Wind,' and in 'Imitation of Life,' and 'The Member of the Wedding.'"

Baldwin's final chapter finds him perplexed by the popular films of the 1970s. He is disappointed by the watering down of Billie Holiday's autobiography in "Lady Sings the Blues," although he admits that Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor "are, clearly, ready, willing, and able to stretch out and go a distance not permitted by the film." And he is disturbed by "The Exorcist" and what it seems to suggest about American dogma: "The mindless and hysterical banality of evil presented in 'Exorcist' is the most terrifying thing about the film."

Or, as Baldwin responds elsewhere to such otherworldly screen depictions of virtue and immorality: "I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me.... He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls, we do."

Baldwin's keen dissection of racial myth and other forms of dangerous fantasy pedaled by film in its century-plus existence is logical, concise and jaw-dropping. His eerie parallel of "The Birth of a Nation" with "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" and discussion of the "superhuman black man" is especially timely in the wake of the election of the first African-American president, a man sometimes compared to Portier. Truly we have a long way to go before divesting ourselves of such imagery, and this often overlooked book of essays is a fine start.