I hadn’t seen A Raisin in the Sun in decades, probably not since the 1970s or early ’80s, until we rewatched it in the film club.
A Raisin in the Sun started out as a stage play. All of the major cast members from the original Broadway production starred in the film adaptation, save for Stephen Perry who plays the young son, Travis.
Maybe adaptation isn’t the right word.
Watching the movie is like watching a stage play rather than a film. That extends to the acting and the makeup.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s great film; it just has some technical flaws.
A Raisin in the Sun, based on Lorraine Hansberry’s play, focuses on the Youngers, a multi-generational Black family, living in a south Chicago tenement, who are dealing with the death of a father and a $10,000 insurance payout.
Sidney Poitier, as the struggling son and husband Walter Lee, is charismatic. Claudia McNeil, as matriarch Lena, conveys such raw emotion that I wanted to see more of her. Diana Sands is fun and engaging as Walter Lee’s sister Beneatha, as she explores African heritage and what it means to be Black, while struggling with the goal of becoming a doctor.
But it’s Ruby Dee, as Walter Lee’s wife, who steals the show with her understated acting.
Understated is key here. It’s almost as if she was the only one who got the memo that this was a film. Dee plays her character with pent-up energy and agony. It’s not subdued; it’s boiling there under the surface. But it works perfectly for a film.
Poitier, McNeil, and most of the others act as if they were on the stage, with overly expansive motions and emotions that would be needed to carry from the stage to the audience. And the makeup, particularly McNeil’s, may have worked on a stage, but on film it makes it hard to believe she is Poitier’s mother. The obvious gray-tinted hair isn’t enough to visually expand the 10-year difference in their ages.
With the vast majority of the film confined to two or three rooms of the Younger’s apartment, the few on-location scenes are jarringly out of place. In some ways, they break the theatrical setting and your attention to the characters.
A Raisin in the Sun makes some serious comments regarding prejudice and discrimination that are still (sadly) relevant today. While I was taken by surprise by how chauvinistic Walter Lee’s initial scene was, I’m looking at it from a MeToo perspective, not from the late ’50s and early ’60s.