If Beale Street Could Talk

Beautifully shot, but emotionally languid

Studs Terkel: Did you feel a sense of shame about a heritage that is really so rich_, when you accepted the white man's stereotype of yourself?_

James Baldwin: I'm afraid that is one of the great dilemmas, one of the great psychological hazards, of being an American Negro. In fact, much more than that. I've seen a great many people go under because of this dilemma. Every Negro in America is in one way or another menaced by it. One is born in a white country, a white Protestant Puritan country, where one was once a slave, w__here all standards and all the images, when you open your eyes on the world, everything you see, none of it applies to you. You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the good guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realise all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.

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All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

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Terkel: Nobody Knows My Name. Why did you choose that title?

Baldwin: Well, at the risk of sounding pontifical, I suppose it is a fairly bitter title, it is meant as a kind of warning to my country. In the days when people called me "Boy", those days haven't passed except that I didn't answer then and I don't answer now. To be a Negro in this country is really - Ralph Ellison has said it very well - never to be looked at_. What white people see when the...

This is a beautifully filmed experience; thereafter a sort of emotional torpor sets in and it struggles to make headway in self-made heavy seas. The story, upon which it is based, offers us yards of controversial and harrowing material to work from, and ample scope to develop the characterisations, but somehow this just finds it's way into a cul-de-sac and never really discovers a way out. The cast, especially Regina King's emotionally fraught "Sharon" , and KiKi Layne's "Tish" really do impress at times, but that just isn't enough to compensate for the verbose, glacial pace of the film and I'm afraid it left me rather underwhelmed.