‘The Birth of Black Consciousness on the Screen’?: The African American Historical Experience, Blaxploitation, and the Production and Reception of Sounder (1972)

Abstract

The black historical film Sounder (1972) was a key feature of the heated debate over race representation in Hollywood cinema in the early 1970s. Indeed, while marking a break from the post-Second World War social problem film, this Depression-set family drama also ran counter to the controversial blaxploitation boom of the period, by emphasising universal themes over those of race. Widely acclaimed in the national press, these qualities also focalised the ongoing conflict over values pertaining to the splintering of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of Black Power in the second half of the 1960s. Making use of a range of primary source materials, including letters sent to the film’s producer and director, this analysis examines Sounder’s turbulent social, cultural and ideological contexts. It considers the aims and influence of key personnel, the wider discussion of black filmic representation, and the film’s complex and contradictory contemporary reception.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) [2008/142249].

Notes

1. Sounder was funded by the Mattel Toy Company and returned the 13th highest rental income of 1972. The rental income is the portion of the film’s box office receipts paid by exhibitors to distributors. All figures in this article are the rentals generated in the USA and Canada and are taken from: Lawrence Cohn, All-Time Film Rental Champs, Variety, 10 May 1993, section C, 76–106, 108. The film went on to receive four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actor, Actress and Screenplay based on material from another medium.

2. Critics condemned black action films for updating old stereotypes, such as the sexually available black female and the ‘buck’ as male hero. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: an interpretive history of Blacks in American films, 4th ed. (New York, 2001).

3. As the criteria of inclusion differs among critics, so too does the number of films categorised as blaxploitation, which ranges from around 60 to over 200. See Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: the African American image in film, culture and the moving image (Philadelphia, 1993), 69; and Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh, 2009), 98.

4. Charles Michener, Black Movies, Newsweek, 23 October 1972, 74; and Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 70. Blaxploitation also attracted black suburban middle class cinema-goers and some white cinema-goers. See Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 83–84.

5. Paul Monaco, Landmark movies of the 1960s and the cinema of sensation, in: The History of the American Cinema: the Sixties, 1960–69 (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 168–197.

6. That none of the trailblazing cinemas used in Fox’s slow build strategy were venues that showed blaxploitation, indicates Sounder was not primarily aimed at a young, black working class audience; see Fox Awaits Holiday Fulfillment of ‘Sounder,’ Big Black Sleeper Pic, Variety, 27 December 1972 (Sounder clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California). Similarly, the audience turn out in blue collar areas of Pennsylvania and New Jersey was also low; see ‘Sounder’ In 255 Dates, Near $8,000,000; ‘Wholesome Black’ Soft At Drive-Ins, Variety, 14 March 1973 (Sounder clippings/AMPAS).

7. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 103–104. Guerrero notes that between 1964 and 1975 the only films to both resist Hollywood’s exploitative and stereotypical formulas, and achieve commercial success, were The Learning Tree (1969), Black Girl and Sounder.

8. Fox sold 650,000 reduced price group sales tickets by utilising various social, religious and educational sources. See Sounder Racks up 650g Group Sales, Variety, 29 June 1973 (Sounder clippings/AMPAS).

9. Master Review File (Robert Radnitz Collection, The Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles).

10. PUSH, ALA Laud 20th’s ‘Sounder’, Variety, 29 September 1972 (Sounder microfiche, AMPAS).

11. See, respectively: Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Children’s Films: history, ideology, pedagogy, theory (London, 2000); Barbara Tepa Lupack, Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: from Oscar Michieux to Toni Morrison (Rochester, NY, 2002) and Paul S. Cowen, A social cognitive approach to ethnicity in films, in: Lester D. Friedman (ed.), Unspeakable Images: ethnicity and the American cinema (Urbana, IL, 1991). For a persuasive textual analysis of Sounder, see also: Gabriel Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt: fanfare for the common man (Jackson, MI, 2000).

12. Carlton Jackson, Picking Up the Tab: the life and movies of Martin Ritt (Bowling Green, OH, 1994).

13. William H. Armstrong, Sounder (New York, 2001), x.

14. Lupack, Literary Adaptations, 329.

15. Ibid., 331–332.

16. Gabriel Miller (ed.), Martin Ritt: interviews (Jackson, MI, 2002), x.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., xiii.

19. Martin Ritt, interview by Bruce Cook, Norma Rae’s Big Daddy, in: Miller, Martin Ritt, 57.

20. Martin Ritt to Klaus Freund (letter), 4 January 1973, 30.f-317 (Martin Ritt papers, AMPAS).

21. Ibid.

22. Jackson, Picking Up the Tab, 118.

23. Aljean Harmetz, Robert Radnitz-Unlikely Avis to Disney’s Hertz, Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1973, Sounder—L.A. Times Calendar Article and Letters March 1973 (Radnitz/USC).

24. Ibid.

25. Among the awards Sounder received were Scholastic Magazine’s ‘Bell Ringer’ award, the ‘1973 Award of Merit’ from the Catholic Press Council, and the ‘1972 Interreligious Film Award’ from the National Council of Churches, the Synagogue Council of America and the US Catholic Conference.

26. Harmetz, Robert Radnitz.

27. Ibid.

28. Sounder Twentieth Century Fox Press Release (Sounder microfiche, British Film Institute Library, London).

29. Ibid.

30. Paul Warshow, Sounder, Film Quarterly 26(2) (1973), 61.

31. Robert Radnitz, letter to the editor, Newsweek, 17 October 1972, Sounder—Press thank you notes New York (Radnitz/USC).

32. Lonne Elder III, interview by Rochelle Reed, American Film Institute: Dialogue on Film 2(7) (1973), 2.

33. Ibid.

34. Lonne Elder III, Sounder Screen Treatment, 11 February 1971, 190, folder—Sounder Screenplay (Radnitz/USC).

35. Elder III, Reed, 4.

36. Ibid., 8+10.

37. Ibid., 10.

38. Ibid., 8–9.

39. Ibid., 9.

40. Robert J. Landry, Crime Reaction Like Italians, Variety, 23 August 1972, 5.

41. Martin Ritt, interview by Phyllis R. Klotman, ‘I Don't Ask Questions, If It Works, It Works!,’ in: Miller, Martin Ritt, 80; and Fox Awaits Holiday Fulfillment.

42. Harmetz, Robert Radnitz.

43. Ibid.

44. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 81–86.

45. Shaft and Sweetback returned, respectively, the 15th and 25th highest rental incomes in 1971.

46. Eric Pierson, Blaxploitation, Quick and Dirty, Screening Noir 1 (2005), 135. Super Fly ranked 21st in the annual rental incomes of 1972.

47. Blacks vs. Shaft, Newsweek, 28 August 1972, 88.

48. Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: blackness and genre (New York, 2008), 95.

49. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 100.

50. Malcom Boyd, Priest Attacks Movies that Exploit Blacks, Los Angeles Times, 8 October 1972 (Sounder clippings/AMPAS).

51. See Curtis J. Austin, Up against the Wall: violence in the making and unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville, AR, 2006); Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 87; and Michener, Black Movies, 77.

52. Black Movie Boom—Good or Bad?, The New York Times, 17 December 1972, 19.

53. Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens, GA, 2009), 92.

54. See Austin, Up against the Wall, 338; and Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, 92.

55. Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: the cultural politics of the Black Power movement and the search for a Black aesthetic (Charlottesville, VA, 2010), 19–20.

56. Ibid., 12.

57. B. J. Mason, The New Films: Culture or Con Game?, Ebony, December 1972, 66.

58. Ibid., 68.

59. Black Movie Boom, 19.

60. Ibid.

61. Michener, Black Movies, 77.

62. Blacks vs. Shaft, 88.

63. Ibid.

64. Michener, Black Movies, 77.

65. Growing up in the South, Ebony, October 1972, 82.

66. Quoted in Sounder, Filmfacts 15(13) (1972), 286.

67. Pauline Kael, Soul Food, New Yorker, 30 September 1972, 111.

68. Richard Schickel, A Family for all Families, Life, 20 October 1972 (Sounder microfiche/AMPAS).

69. Warshow, Sounder, 63.

70. See, for example: Glenn Lovell, ‘Sounder’ Is Sensitive Film, Hollywood Reporter, 15 August 1972 (Sounder microfiche/AMPAS).

71. Bogle, Blacks in American Films, 249.

72. See, for example, Gone With the Wind (1939) or Raisin in the Sun (1961).

73. This analysis expands on Bogle’s observation that Sounder avoids ‘the old matriarchal set-up’ of films such as Raisin in the Sun. Blacks in American Films, 249.

74. Edward Mapp, Black women in films: a mixed bag of tricks, in: Lindsay Patterson (ed.), Black Films and Filmmakers: a comprehensive anthology from stereotype to superhero (New York, 1973), 203.

75. Toni Morrison, Film Find: A Really Good Movie About Blacks, Ms., December 1972 (Sounder microfiche/AMPAS).

76. Earl Ofari, Looking Inside ‘Sounder’, New Watts Awakening, November 1972, (Sounder clippings/AMPAS).

77. Cowen, Social Cognitive Approach, 366–367.

78. Sounder, Filmfacts, 15 (1972), 288.

79. ‘Like other prisons’, writes Peter N. Carroll, ‘Attica represented a microcosm of the larger society, pitting tough urban minorities against violent prison guards, most of them … rural, white, and often racist.’ It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: the tragedy and promise of America in the 1970s, 1st ed. (New York, 1982), 52–53.

80. Kael, Soul Food, 110.

81. Barbara Haskell, The American Century: art & culture, 1900–1950 (New York, 1999), 250+252.

82. Ibid., 245.

83. Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: a social history of American art (New York, 2002), 376.

84. Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1st ed. (London, 2001), 62.

85. Taken from quotation of Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times review in Master Review File (Radnitz/USC).

86. Pohl, Framing America, 377.

87. Sounder, Filmfacts, 288.

88. Jon Landau, Films, Rolling Stone, 18 January 1972, 58.

89. Vincent Canby, All But ‘Super Fly’ Fall Down, New York Times, 12 November 1972, clippings in Sounder—Vincent Canby N.Y. Times article (Radnitz/USC).

90. Art Murphy, ‘Sounder,’ Variety, 16 August 1972 (Sounder microfiche/AMPAS); Irwin Silber, Quarter Century Behind Times, Guardian, 11 October 1972 (Sounder clippings/AMPAS).

91. Roger Greenspun, Screen: ‘Sounder’ Opens: Story of a Negro Boy in Louisiana of 1930’s, New York Times, 25 December 1972 (Radnitz/USC); and Canby, All But ‘Super Fly’. For Lonne Elder III’s impassioned response to Canby, see As the Screenwriter of ‘Sounder,’ I Was Shocked, New York Times, 26 November 1972 (Sounder microfiche/BFI).

92. Margaret Tarratt, Sounder, Films and Filming, February 1973 (Sounder microfiche/AMPAS).

93. Jay Cocks, Sounder, Time, 9 October 1972 (Sounder microfiche/AMPAS).

94. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

95. Sharon Bell Mathis, Sounder is Baad [sic], Encore, December 1972 (Sounder clippings/AMPAS).

96. John Wayne to Martin Ritt (letter), February 1973, 30.f-317 (Ritt/AMPAS).

97. Joel Fluellen to Martin Ritt (letter), 2 October 1972, 30.f-316 (Ritt/AMPAS).

98. Elizabeth Connell to Robert Radnitz (letter), Sounder—Fan Comments/Letters (Radnitz/USC).

99. Morris Hill to Martin Ritt (letter), 1972, 30.f-317 (Ritt/AMPAS).

100. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London, 1852).

101. For a masterful analysis of the Southern film during this period, see chapters 1–4, in: Edward D. C. Campbell, The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern myth (Knoxville, TN, 1981).

102. Elma Jebhart to Robert Radnitz (letter), 2 September 1972, Sounder—Press Thank you Notes Ohio (Radnitz/USC).

103. See Stanley Kauffmann, The Mack, New Republic, 16 June 1973, 20.

104. Paul D. Zimmerman, Black Nightmare, Newsweek, 2 October 1972 (Sounder microfiche/AMPAS).

105. Michener, Black Movies, 81.

106. Ibid., 78.

107. Eithne Quinn, ‘Tryin’ to Get Over’: Super Fly, Black Politics, and Post-Civil Rights Film Enterprise, Cinema Journal 49(2) (2010).

108. Earning $9.7 million in rentals, Lady Sings the Blues returned the 11th highest rental income in the year of its release.

109. Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films, 94–97.