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

Symmons, Tom

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-52930-5_3

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

Tom Symmons²

Chapter
First Online: 14 June 2016

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Abstract

Following the decline of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of Black Power in the late 1960s, race and its representation were the subject of impassioned debate. A key feature of this debate was Sounder (Ritt, 1972), a rare example of a black historical that has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Unique and contradictory, this Depression-set drama both marked a break from the post-Second World War social problem film and its images of black suffering, and was the antithesis of the violent and controversial blaxploitation boom of the period that channelled black rage and defiance. Emphasising universal themes over those of race, namely family love and dignity in the face of adversity, Ritt’s film was widely acclaimed in the national press, but also served to highlight the profound opposition between the ideologies of racial integration and racial separation within the African American community and American society at large.

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Notes

1.
This analysis first appeared in The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, published online on 12 August 2014.
2.
Sounder was funded by the Mattel Toy Company and returned the thirteenth-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, pp. 76–106. The film went on to receive four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actor, Actress and Screenplay based on material from another medium.
3.
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 (New York: Continuum, 2001).
4.
As the criteria of inclusion differ among critics, so 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: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 69; and Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 98.
5.
Charles Michener, ‘Black Movies’, Newsweek, 23 October, 1972, p. 74; and Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 70. Blaxploitation also attracted black suburban middle class cinemagoers and some white cinemagoers. See Guerrero, Framing Blackness, pp. 83–4.
6.
Paul Monaco, The Sixties, 1960–69 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 168–97.
7.
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.
8.
Guerrero, Framing Blackness, pp. 103–4. 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.
9.
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.
10.
‘Master Review File’, Robert Radnitz Collection, The Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
11.
‘PUSH, ALA Laud 20th’s “Sounder”’, Variety, 29 September, 1972, Sounder microfiche/AMPAS.
12.
See, respectively: Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (London: Garland, 2000); Barbara Tepa Lupack, Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: From Oscar Michieux to Toni Morrison (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 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: University of Illinois Press, 1991). For a persuasive textual analysis of Sounder, see also: Gabriel Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
13.
Carlton Jackson, Picking Up the Tab: The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994).
14.
William H. Armstrong, Sounder (New York: Perennial, 2001), p. x.
15.
Lupack, Literary Adaptations, p. 329.
16.
Lupack, Literary Adaptations, pp. 331–2.
17.
Gabriel Miller (ed.), Martin Ritt: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002), p. x.
18.
Gabriel Miller (ed.), Martin Ritt: Interviews, p. x.
19.
Gabriel Miller (ed.), Martin Ritt: Interviews, p. xiii.
20.
Martin Ritt, interview by Bruce Cook, ‘Norma Rae’s Big Daddy’, in Miller, Martin Ritt: Interviews, p. 57.
21.
Martin Ritt to Klaus Freund (letter), 4 January, 1973, 30.f-317, Martin Ritt papers/AMPAS.
22.
Ritt to Freund.
23.
Jackson, Picking Up the Tab, p. 118.
24.
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.
25.
Harmetz, ‘Robert Radnitz’.
26.
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.
27.
Harmetz, ‘Robert Radnitz’.
28.
Harmetz, ‘Robert Radnitz’.
29.
Sounder Twentieth Century Fox Press Release, Sounder microfiche, British Film Institute Library, London.
30.
Sounder Press Release.
31.
Paul Warshow, ‘Sounder’, Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2 (1973), p. 61.
32.
Robert Radnitz, letter to the editor, Newsweek, 17 October, 1972, ‘Sounder - Press thank you notes New York’, Radnitz/USC.
33.
‘Lonne Elder III’, interview by Rochelle Reed, American Film Institute: Dialogue on Film, vol. 2, no. 7 (1973), p. 2.
34.
‘Lonne Elder III’, Reed, p. 2.
35.
Lonne Elder III, Sounder Screen Treatment, 11 February, 1971, ‘190, folder - Sounder Screenplay’, Radnitz/USC.
36.
‘Lonne Elder III’, Reed, p. 4.
37.
‘Lonne Elder III’, Reed, pp. 8 + 10.
38.
‘Lonne Elder III’, Reed, p. 10.
39.
‘Lonne Elder III’, Reed, pp. 8–9.
40.
‘Lonne Elder III’, Reed, p. 9.
41.
Robert J. Landry, ‘Crime Reaction Like Italians’, Variety, 23 August, 1972, p. 5.
42.
Martin Ritt, interview by Phyllis R. Klotman, ‘I Don’t Ask Questions, If It Works, It Works!’, in Miller, Martin Ritt: Interviews, p. 80; and ‘Fox Awaits Holiday Fulfillment’.
43.
Harmetz, ‘Robert Radnitz’.
44.
Harmetz, ‘Robert Radnitz’.
45.
Guerrero, Framing Blackness, pp. 81–6.
46.
Shaft and Sweetback returned, respectively, the fifteenth- and twenty-fifth-highest rental incomes in 1971.
47.
Eric Pierson, ‘Blaxploitation, Quick and Dirty’, Screening Noir 1 (2005), p. 135. Super Fly ranked twenty first in the annual rental incomes of 1972.
48.
‘Blacks vs. Shaft’, Newsweek, 28 August, 1972, p. 88.
49.
Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 95.
50.
Guerrero, Framing Blackness, p. 100.
51.
Malcom Boyd, ‘Priest Attacks Movies that Exploit Blacks’, Los Angeles Times, 8 October, 1972, Sounder clippings/AMPAS.
52.
See Curtis J. Austin, Up against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006); Guerrero, Framing Blackness, p. 87; and Michener, ‘Black Movies’, p. 77.
53.
‘Black Movie Boom - Good or Bad?’, The New York Times, 17 December, 1972, p. 19.
54.
Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 92.
55.
See Austin, Up against the Wall, p. 338; and Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, p. 92.
56.
Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 19–20.
57.
Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness, p. 12.
58.
B. J. Mason, ‘The New Films: Culture or Con Game?’, Ebony, December 1972, p. 66.
59.
Mason, ‘The New Films’, p. 68.
60.
‘Black Movie Boom’, p. 19.
61.
‘Black Movie Boom’, p. 19.
62.
Michener, ‘Black Movies’, p. 77.
63.
‘Blacks vs. Shaft’, p. 88.
64.
‘Blacks vs. Shaft’, p. 88.
65.
Michener, ‘Black Movies’, p. 77.
66.
‘Growing up in the South’, Ebony, October 1972, p. 82.
67.
Quoted in ‘Sounder’, Filmfacts, vol. 15, no. 13 (1972), p. 286.
68.
Pauline Kael, ‘Soul Food’, New Yorker, 30 September, 1972, p. 111.
69.
Richard Schickel, ‘A Family for all Families’, Life, 20 October, 1972, Sounder microfiche/AMPAS.
70.
Warshow, ‘Sounder’, p. 63.
71.
See, for example: Glenn Lovell, “‘Sounder’ Is Sensitive Film,” Hollywood Reporter, August 15, 1972 Sounder microfiche/AMPAS.
72.
Bogle, Blacks in American Films, p. 249.
73.
See, for example, Gone With the Wind (1939) or Raisin in the Sun (1961).
74.
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, p. 249.
75.
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: Dodd, Mead, 1973), p. 203.
76.
Toni Morrison, ‘Film Find: A Really Good Movie About Blacks’, Ms., December 1972, Sounder microfiche/AMPAS.
77.
Earl Ofari, ‘Looking Inside “Sounder”’, New Watts Awakening, November 1972, Sounder clippings/AMPAS.
78.
Cowen, ‘Social Cognitive Approach’, pp. 366–7.
79.
‘Sounder’, Filmfacts, p. 288.
80.
‘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: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), pp. 52–3.
81.
Kael, ‘Soul Food’, p. 110.
82.
Barbara Haskell, The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900–1950 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), pp. 250 + 252.
83.
Haskell, The American Century, p. 245.
84.
Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 376.
85.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Picador, 2001), p. 62.
86.
Taken from quotation of Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times review in ‘Master Review File’, Radnitz/USC.
87.
Pohl, Framing America, p. 377.
88.
‘Sounder’, Filmfacts, p. 288.
89.
Jon Landau, ‘Films’, Rolling Stone, 18 January, 1972, p. 58.
90.
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.
91.
Art Murphy, ‘Sounder’, Variety, 16 August, 1972, Sounder microfiche/AMPAS; Irwin Silber, ‘Quarter Century Behind Times’, Guardian, 11 October, 1972, Sounder clippings/AMPAS.
92.
Roger Greenspun, ‘Screen: “Sounder” Opens: Story of a Negro Boy in Louisiana of 1930s’, 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.
93.
Margaret Tarratt, ‘Sounder’, Films and Filming, February, 1973, Sounder microfiche/AMPAS.
94.
Jay Cocks, ‘Sounder’, Time, 9 October, 1972, Sounder microfiche/AMPAS.
95.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
96.
Sharon Bell Mathis, ‘Sounder is Baad’ [sic], Encore, December, 1972, Sounder clippings/AMPAS.
97.
John Wayne to Martin Ritt (letter), February 1973, 30.f-317, Ritt/AMPAS.
98.
Joel Fluellen to Martin Ritt (letter), 2 October, 1972, 30.f-316, Ritt/AMPAS.
99.
Elizabeth Connell to Robert Radnitz (letter), ‘Sounder – Fan Comments/Letters’, Radnitz/USC.
100.
Morris Hill to Martin Ritt (letter), 1972, 30.f-317, Ritt/AMPAS.
101.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London: John Cassell, 1852).
102.
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: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).
103.
Elma Jebhart to Robert Radnitz (letter), 2 September, 1972, ‘Sounder - Press Thank you Notes Ohio’, Radnitz/USC.
104.
See Stanley Kauffmann, ‘The Mack’, New Republic, 16 June, 1973, p. 20.
105.
Paul D. Zimmerman, ‘Black Nightmare’, Newsweek, 2 October, 1972, Sounder microfiche/AMPAS.
106.
Michener, ‘Black Movies’, p. 81.
107.
Michener, ‘Black Movies’, p. 78.
108.
Eithne Quinn, ‘“Tryin” to Get Over’: Super Fly, Black Politics, and Post-Civil Rights Film Enterprise, Cinema Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 (2010).
109.
Earning $9.7 million in rentals, Lady Sings the Blues returned the 11th highest rental income in the year of its release.
110.
Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films, pp. 94–7.

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Symmons, T. (2016). ‘The Birth of Black Consciousness on the Screen’?: The African American Historical Experience, Blaxploitation and the Production and Reception of Sounder (1972). In: The New Hollywood Historical Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52930-5_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52930-5_3
Published: 14 June 2016
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52930-5
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