The Green Pastures (1935)

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 in the Old Testament as they might be imagined by black school children living in rural Louisiana. God, for example, is referred to as "de Lawd," and takes the form of an elderly black preacher (Rex Ingram).

Perhaps the best story in this episodic fable concerns Noah and the flood. Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, certainly one of the finest comedic performers of his day, plays the good man who builds the Ark.

The Hall Johnson Choir supplies lovely Gospel music throughout the picture, which is, at the end of the day, a fine piece of theatre that should be viewed as a film of its time.

DVD extras include audio commentary by actor LeVar Burton and some Africa-American cultural scholars, plus two musical shorts, one featuring Ethel Waters and 7-year-old Sammy Davis Jr., and the other with The Nicholas Brothers.

© Michael B. Druxman, author of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (available December 2008) October 24, 2008

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 April 28, 2008

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 for different reasons. The objective was to cast the Blacks into the mold of the unexplainable will of God and the necessity to suffer in this world to be saved in the next one. The interest of this film cannot be found in the ethics of the story. Maybe only - at this level - in the exploration of the arcane sophistication of the alienation, imposed onto the Blacks. But the real interest is the large presence of Negro spirituals in the film, one of the very first films entirely centered on Black music, though in 1936 we must not forget we are after - and within - the triumph of the radio that enabled Black music and jazz to find a wide audience, to embed its existence and force into the widest Black and white audience it had ever had, just as it enabled F. D. Roosevelt to dominate the political arena for twelve years or so. Yet the film is tremendously deficient. The desire to have only Black actors in the film locks up the Blacks in a color ghetto. It appears as pure segregation against the whites. It does not help us much understand the great musical revolution the Blacks brought to the American continent. They live their music, their religion and their everyday life in the total absence of whites except in one scene where the whites are Ku Klux Klan members lynching a whole bunch of Blacks for no other apparent reason than the excitement of the hunt. At times the biblical stories told to us are so naive and simple-minded that we can wonder whether we are talking to people provided with a brain. The music itself is very average. Luckily this exclusively Black cinema has not been furthered beyond the few films the late 1920s and the 1930s produced. They were leading to a complete dead end as for understanding or simply reflecting the real situation in which the Blacks are living and which they may want to change. What's more the reduction of the whites to KKK members is definitely a racist caricature.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
October 30, 2007

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! October 23, 2007

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 and the next government, and whose home had been raided twice, understood both the humor and the tenderness. When Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land, he pointed out the gentle, understanding touch of Aaron on Moses' shoulder. He sighed, "Wasn't that beautiful?" Seeing this movie through the eyes of a black person who had endured so much was humbling.

This film is more than humor or a view on a past era. It still speaks about the gentle hand of God to those who are oppressed. October 15, 2007

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