2018 has become a banner year for the lesbian African-American playwright-activist Lorraine Hansberry, despite the fact that she died in 1965 at age 34, seemingly lost and invisible. In March, a splendid documentary on her life, "Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart," was shown on PBS as part of their "American Master" series. And now, just released on Blu-ray by Criterion for the first time, is her masterpiece play, "A Raisin in the Sun," filmed in 1961. The movie has now achieved classic status, though it was considered something of a flop when first released. It was selected in 2005 by the National Film Registry under the Library of Congress as culturally significant. Sadly, its underlying themes of structural inequality and racism are as relevant today as they were in the early 1960s.
The story concerns the Younger family, Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier), his wife Ruth (Ruby Dee), his son Travis, and his sister Beneatha (Diana Sands), who all live in their mother Lena's (Claudia McNeil) apartment in Chicago's South Side. They are waiting to receive a $10,000 life insurance check left to Lena by her late husband. Tired of his chauffeur job, Walter Lee wants to use the money to invest in a liquor store, while Beneatha would pay her medical school tuition with the inheritance. Matriarch Lena, however, prefers to buy a house that would give more space for Travis, and Ruth agrees with this proposal. There is much fighting about what will be done with the money. Ruth discovers she is pregnant, and, in desperation about finances, contemplates getting an abortion. Beneatha is juggling two suitors: George Murchison (Lou Gossett), upwardly mobile and elitist, versus Joseph Asagai (Ivan Dixon), a Nigerian classmate who wants to marry her and bring her to Africa. But she can't decide what to do.
Lena makes a down payment on a two-story house in the white Clybourne Park neighborhood, but gives the remaining money to Walter, only asking he put $3,500 in the bank for Beneatha's education. Meanwhile, the family receives a visit from Mark Lindner (John Fiedler), the head of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, who is willing to repay their down payment plus give them additional money not to move into their neighborhood. The family rejects the offer, but after Walter's business scheme fails, he is reconsidering accepting Lindner's money, though the rest of the family objects. This final battle will lead to one of the greatest climaxes in American drama.
"A Raisin in the Sun" was the first serious play written by a black woman to appear on Broadway, winning Hansberry the NY Drama Critics Circle award. She based it on her real estate father's successful attempt to oppose Chicago's racially restrictive housing covenants in the 1940s in a legal case that went to the Supreme Court. Hansberry wrote the screenplay. Inspired by Italian neo-realist films, she wanted the film to broaden the Younger world outside their apartment to show their real lives, but Columbia Studio nixed that idea, as well as clamping down on black vernacular and getting rid of "excess race material," fearing it would drive away white audiences. The film was promoted as a family drama not a social one, almost concealing that it dealt with black people. Consequently, critics derided the movie as a filmed play, yet the almost claustrophobic interior works as an advantage, in that the legal apartheid threatening to engulf the Younger family in different forms cannot be avoided. The audience is forced to confront the indignities and dehumanization of racial discrimination facing the Youngers.
The acting is sublime, starting with Poitier, who throughout his films of the 1950s was accused of being assimilationist. "Raisin" was a turning point, in that he was able finally to convey black anger and desperation. Walter, with his focus on money, is largely unlikeable until the end of the movie, when he redeems himself. Poitier had a huge fight with Claudia McNeil, who felt the focus of the play should be Lena representing traditional family values, while he saw Walter's transformation as pivotal. McNeil moved beyond the stereotypical Mammy character, reminding audiences of the huge costs and sacrifices it took to get that $10,000 check. Ruby Dee's Ruth is the transitional figure — she wants change but is hesitant to challenge the status quo. The real revelation is Diana Sands' Beneatha (a stand-in for Hansberry), an early prototype of the black feminist, a professional woman, self-aware and self-determined, experimenting with different forms of self-expression. Her career-defining performance reminds us of what we lost when she died so young.
In the Patricia Marx audio interview with Hansberry, one of the outstanding DVD extras, the playwright argues that art is a way to transport us out of our narrow confines, creating meaning and purpose. Each of the characters in "Raisin" struggles to attain racial justice on a personal level. In the age of revitalized white nationalism and a racist President, Hansberry's concerns seem as fresh as ever, epitomized in Lindner's declaration, "You can't force people to change their hearts," a conundrum we continue to struggle with, thus making "A Raisin in the Sun" very timely.