A pungent and probing essay featuring primarily Baldwin's searing analysis of films: The Defiant Ones, Birth of a Nation, Lady Sings the Blues, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Godfather, and the Exorcist. Baldwin highlights the lack of truth and irrelevance of most American films, with white casts and white directors, to the Black audience. Thoughtful and convincing. ( )

2019
https://www.librarything.com/topic/312033#6993666 ( )

Baldwin sheds the sort of startling light on well-known films that gives the same jolt to us white folk that Russo's "The Celluloid Closet" would give to us straight folk a few decades later. To watch "The Defiant Ones" through Baldwin's eyes is truly to see the problem of race relations in the United States. ( )

Great interpretations of such movies as "In the Heat of the Night," "The Grapes of Wrath," and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". He skewers the latter hilariously. I disagree with only his interpretation of "The Best Years of Our Lives," which I think is more subversive than it may have appeared to Baldwin. ( )