Director: Daniel Petrie
Writer: Lorraine Hansberry, from her play
Stars: Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee
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Index: 2025 Centennials.
It’s Black History Month, whether Trump’s administration is willing to acknowledge it or not. It therefore seems appropriate to review this film now, even though I’m actually doing so for a white actor, in fact the one and only white actor in the entire movie. He’s literally the token white guy.
He’s John Fiedler, who would have been one hundred years old today. While he only has a supporting role, it’s a notable one. The entire closing monologue, a tearjerking showcase of a monologue, is delivered to him and he walks out utterly silenced. Well, for now, at least.
A Raisin in the Sun is a powerful film indeed and part of its success is that it was based on a powerful play, the first Broadway production by a black woman, Lorraine Hansberry, as well as the first by a black director, Lloyd Richards. It didn’t win a Tony from its four nominations but it was the New York Drama Critics’ Circle’s best play of 1959. It ran for 530 performances.
Crucially, almost the entire cast transferred over to this feature version, as did the writer, so they were all well and truly invested in the roles they played and the relationships their characters had with each other.
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The cast isn’t large but the core cast is even smaller, the Younger family. We might assume that the man of the house is Walter Lee, in the capable form of Sidney Poitier, after Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones, but before a pivotal string of successes in the sixties. However, the story is, at heart, him becoming that, now that his father is gone.
He’s thirty-five and he feels held back, by all his relatives: his wife Ruth, who he thinks nags at him and blocks his moneymaking schemes; his younger sister Beneatha, who plans to be a doctor but flits between interests as she finds her expression; and his mother Lena, who has a habit of interfering in family affairs. “I ain’t meddlin’!” she repeats like a mantra.
The first thing I realised here is that Sidney Poitier is in fine form. He was a massive talent anyway but he knew this part backwards and it’s a gift for an actor, allowing him to explore a whole slew of emotions and look both good and bad at various points in the story.
The second thing I realised here is that the three actors who play his female relatives are absolutely up to his standard. They allow him to dominate them in this scene but then they dominate him in return in the next one. Every permutation of interaction makes for a pair of talented actors bouncing off each other with power and impact. It’s textbook stuff.
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Ruth is played by Ruby Dee, who started her film career before Poitier and found successes, but also shone much later in life, in Spike Lee joints and the 2007 Ridley Scott film American Gangster. Beneatha is played by Diana Sands, who I didn’t think I’d seen before, except that apparently I watched her a few nights ago in a Jack Nicholson movie, Ensign Pulver.
Both are impeccable here, very different in character and outlook but equally good. That said, Claudia McNeil is even better as Lena. On Broadway, there were apparently discussions as to whether the play should focus on the son or the mother. From a dramatic standpoint, it went to the son so Poitier was the star, but in many ways Lena is still the glue that’s holding everything together. This story could happen without Walter Lee, though it would be rather different. It couldn’t happen without Lena.
Only part of that is because of an insurance cheque about to arrive. Her husband died at work, in some way that’s kept from us, and he has a $10,000 payout on its way to her. It’s her money, but naturally everyone else has a plan for it anyway. Much conflict ensues.
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To get to John Fiedler’s role, I have to point out that Lena decides that she’s going to spend much of it on a house for them all, somewhere in which her grandson Travis doesn’t have to sleep on the couch, somewhere with its own bathroom, somewhere with sunlight.
The house she buys is in Clybourne Park, an upscale neighbourhood where, shall I suggest, they might stand out a little. It’s rather telling that the first time we see white people in this film is one hour and twenty-two minutes in, as we get our first glimpse of Clybourne Park. It’s just a glimpse. None of them talk. They’re just background lack of colour, as it were.
And soon after that, Fiedler knocks on their door—their old door, I should add, given that they haven’t started packing yet—to introduce himself and explain a few things. Fiedler was in the original Broadway cast too, so knew the part of Karl Lindner well, but he’s gloriously awkward in delivery because his monologue is a notably awkward one. Somehow he gets that awkwardness over to us while being surprised by how awkwardly he’s received..
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He’s extra-polite, of course, as the chairman of the Welcoming Committee at the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, and he does all he can to make this interaction beneficial for everyone involved. I’m sure you can imagine how from how many times he uses the phrase “you people”. His attempt to spin where he’s going is as awful as it is valiant.
After he’s gone, they explain to Lena what’s been said and there are telling lines. “What do they think we’re going to do?” Beneatha asks. “Eat them?” Ruth replies, “No. Marry them.”
This is a tough part for Fiedler, as the only white actor in the cast and the one delivering racist insults to the black characters, however politely, especially given how powerfully all of these black actors perform here.
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Of course, he was a veteran stage actor who had debuted on film in a real gift for character actors, as Juror #2 in 12 Angry Men. It began a career in which he became mostly known for playing meek characters, whether live action or through voice, like his famous role as Piglet in a plethora of Disney films, but with notable exceptions, especially on TV, as he played a morgue attendant on Kolchak: The Night Stalker, an assassin on I-Spy and an admin possessed by Jack the Ripper on Star Trek.
His career lasted half a century on stage, on radio, in movies and on television. He died in 2005, shortly after recording a part in Kronk’s New Groove, and in between 12 Angry Men and that, he guested on what seems like every TV show in history. And you’ve seen him often.
He’s one of that class of great actors whose faces you know even if you can never seem to remember their names. Rather ironically, you probably know his voice even better still.
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