|
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
'Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!' Despite racial stereotypes and a naive, backward vision of 'Negro Heaven,' The Green Pastures remains an important, controversial, and still-entertaining milestone in African American popular culture. Because this 1936 spiritual musical embraces all of the black stereotypes that were prevalent in its time, Warner Home Video has appropriately included a disclaimer regarding the political incorrectness of the film's then-common racial prejudices, stressing the importance of acknowledging these stereotypes as opposed to pretending they never existed. With this understanding, The Green Pastures still endures as a classic American folk drama, based on Marc Connelly's Pulitzer Prize-wining Broadway production (suggested by Roark Bradford's southern sketches 'Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun'), in which several Old Testament stories are performed as they might be imagined by black Sunday-school child in the Depression-era South. It's an all-black vision of heaven as a perpetual fish-fry, full of black angels and cherubs eating catfish and smoking 10-cent 'see-gars,' where 'De Lawd' (Rex Ingram) presides over the tales of creation: Noah and the Flood; Joshua at Jericho; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Adam and Eve; Moses and Pharaoh; etc. With heavenly accompaniment by the Hall Johnson Choir, these Bible stories play like a lavish fantasy revival, and while the stereotypical images and all-black colloquialisms may seem absurdly regressive from the perspective of latter-day enlightenment, there's no denying that The Green Pastures is still a transcendently joyful celebration of faith. As a relic of its time, it's a vivid (and for some, still uncomfortable) reminder that racial stereotypes--even in a joyful gospel context--can teach us a lot about where we've been, and where we've yet to go. --Jeff Shannon
On the DVD
The Green Pastures is accompanied by an excellent DVD commentary in which actor/director LeVar Burton and African American cultural scholars Herb Boyd and Ed Guerrero (author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film) place the film in proper historical context. Burton candidly explains why he could never watch Green Pastures in its entirety until he gained the detached perspective of an actor/director, while Boyd and Guerrero relate many of the precedents and milestones that inform such '30s-era movies as The Green Pastures and Cabin in the Sky. Entertaining and informative, their commentary is essential listening for anyone seeking an enlightened perspective on racial stereotypes of the past. Also included, for similar historical appreciation, are two Vitaphone shorts from the early 1930s: 'Rufus Jones for President' is a lively 'two-reeler' (20 minutes) in which the 7-year-old future Rat Pack star Sammy Davis Jr. sings and dances (along with blues great Ethel Waters) as a young boy who fantasizes about becoming President of the United States. 'An All-Colored Vaudeville Show' delivers just what the title promises: a stage revue of black performers including Broadway star Adelaide Hall and the legendary tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers. Both shorts represent all that was good--and bad--about Depression-era show business as a vibrant showcase for African American performers and the social conditions through which they endured. --Jeff Shannon
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A Film of Its Time
Shadow Watcher
Nobody Drowns in Mineral Lake
This is not an easy movie to write about.
Marc Connelly's play debuted on Broadway in 1930, ran for eighteen months, enjoyed a five year national tour and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Unfortunately, today, it's political incorrectness and racial stereotypes makes one want to cringe.
Directed by Connelly and William Keighley, the 1936 film, which features an all African-American cast, looks at stories ... Read More
Rating:  - didn't receive the orderen DVD until now
Dear people of Amazon, every day I check the mail, but the package hasn't arrived yet. Please let me know what happened to it. Kind regards Hema
Rating: - The spirituals are fine but the film is a naive caricature
When we know the author of the original stories is white, the film shows perfectly well how the American society, after slavery and after - up to the 1850s - banning the Blacks from all training into reading and writing, from all speaking their original languages and even from all affiliation to any religion, rushes head first into over-Christianizing the Blacks with no cautious slowing down and with all calculated speeding up they could master after the Secession War, both south and north, though ... Read More
Rating:  - Green Pastures
Green Pastures is one of my all time favorite movies and I thought that with all the PC flooding our lives these days that it would have been banned long ago. But we are still able to enjoy the simple humor characteristic of those times. Bravo Amazon!
Rating: - An Absolute Joy
I have watched this movie several times and always find something new in it. For a black audience still without civil rights and whose elders remembered slavery, this movie shows a most merciful, grandfatherly God who cares deeply about his creation, and gives them a fine heaven behind those massive pearly gates.
A visiting Ugandan Anglican priest spent the night at our home in the 1980s, and we asked if he'd like to watch this movie. This black man who had struggled through Amin's regime ... Read More
|
