To Sleep with Anger

 When I first saw To Sleep with Anger (1990), I didn't understand the film.  Nothing much seemed to happen in the movie and I couldn't quite get a handle on the lead character, Harry (Danny Glover), an avuncular if sinister figure who invades the household of an African-American family, apparently living in a middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles.  Charles Burnett, the director of the groundbreaking Killer of Sheep, wrote and directed the picture and, somehow, it seemed a little blurred to me -- nonetheless, I recalled the movie as being very mysterious and gripping and, in particular, an image of a little neighbor boy practicing trumpet  from a room with an open window to the dismay of neighbors stayed with me.  I remembered that the metaphor of the child practicing was somehow integral to the film, but had forgotten how.  The film was rebroadcast recently, offered on Turner Classic Movies for Black History Month and so I had an opportunity to revisit the movie.  It's excellent and, in fact, very clear -- I wonder if my recollection that the movie was hard to understand reflects what I felt at the time or is just an artifact of old age and fading memory.  If anything, Burnett makes his meanings almost too explicit.

Gideon, a stern and righteous man, is the patriarch of an African-American family.  His wife, Susie, works as a midwife and teaches Lamaze method classes in her living room.  Gideon and Susie have two sons, the hardworking and virtuous, Junior, and the self-indulgent Ba-bro -- the name comes from "Baby Brother", the nickname for Samuel, the younger son.  Both sons are married and have children of their own.  Ba-Bro has never been good enough for his demanding father and, with his realtor wife, may be neglecting his own small son -- the young woman is an up-to-date Yuppie professional and she doesn't have much time for her little boy; the child is mostly tended by his father, Baby Brother, or by the grandparents.  It's not wholly clear when the film is taking place -- it has a sort of timeless ambience.  The characters behave as if they are living in the fifties -- the family gathers every Sunday after Church at Gideon and Susie's home; Ba-bro doesn't go to church, which he regards as tedious, and his wife, who is estranged from her in-laws, usually sits outside in their car during the family meals.  Gideon and Susie keep chickens in a coop in the backyard and have an elaborate vegetable garden; they emigrated to the big city from the Deep South and have retained country ways.  In fact, Gideon is superstitious -- when the film begins he has lost his "Toby"(that is, his good luck charm inherited from his grandmother,  Big Mama who was born in slavery.)  At the outset of the film, the scene is carefully set:  we see the boy next door practicing, the garden and chickens, the situation of the family, and shots of weirdly discomfited pigeons flying around the neighborhood.  Everything is completely quotidian but slightly ominous.  When Gideon recounts that he has misplaced his Toby, a broom shifts inexplicably and knocks over a jar full of marbles that roll all over the floor.  Then, there is a knock at the door and we meet Harry.

Harry grew up with Gideon in the old South and he has come by bus from Detroit.  He is a courtly southern gentleman who, also, turns out to be the Devil or one the Devil's emissaries.  The pigeons flee from him and Junior's wife who is pregnant feels the baby giving her a strong kick when she first meets Harry.  At this point, the movie becomes an extremely easy-going, but effective supernatural thriller -- it's a cross between something like The Exorcist and Hitchcock's 1943 Shadow of a Doubt in which the kindly, soft-spoken Joseph Cotton plays a serial killer who has insinuated himself into a family in a small town.  As is typical of devilish agents, the adults, at first, are unable to detect the sinister aspect in their old friend -- immediately, however, a child touches Harry with a broom, apparently, a method for "sweeping away" evil.  The chickens and pigeons recognize the devilish interloper and are distressed and the produce in the garden wilts, sunflowers rotting atop their stems.  While the family is in Church, Harry rummages around among their bills, old letters, and medications.  He summons his cronies to the family house for an old-fashioned fish-fry and a crowd of disreputable-looking old men appear, "resurrected" one of the women says.  There's "corn likker" with "a fight in every bottle" and Harry tells the grandkids that he killed a man in as brawl in a blackened room -- all the while, he is fiddling with a big, sleek switchblade.  The film proceeds schematically, contrasting the folks at church with the gathering darkness at Gideon's home -- we see a child being baptized, for instance, while Harry is playing with his knife.  Something goes wrong with Gideon and he collapses.  Harry now seems to be in complete control of the situation.  With his elderly reprobates, he drinks corn likker in a room with a tapestry of dogs playing cards on the wall, the old gangsters messing around with guns and gambling.  Harry has seduced Ba-bro and wants him to leave his wife.  He says he can get Ba-bro another woman:  "You wouldn't drive without a spare tire.  With two mules, you can plow a lot more."  Back at the home, Gideon seems to be in coma.  There's a thunderstorm and rain is coming through the roof and puddling in his bed.  When Junior tries to get Ba-bro to help him move the bed, there's a fight and one of Harry's switchblades gets drawn.  Susie seizes the knife blade, gets cut badly, but stops the affray.  The next morning, Gideon seems better and, when Harry goes into the kitchen, the jar of marbles falls onto the floor again -- he trips and slumping to the floor and dies of a heart-attack.  The ambulance comes but can't take the body because Harry is already dead.  The corpse lies on the kitchen floor for a day, waiting for the coroner to take the body away.  People gather with the body lying only a few feet away and, even, eat fried chicken.  The preacher from the church falls asleep and snores loudly.  Gideon, now much better, tries to tell a joke about a "colored man" in heaven, but Susie won't allow it -- "I don't want to hear no jokes about colored people in Hell," she says.  "Well, it could be White folks," Gideon says.  Susie says she doesn't want to hear jokes about anyone in Hell.  The neighbor's sneer and ask:  "Do you still got a dead man lying in your kitchen?"  It's pretty clear that the corpse isn't going anywhere soon.  Everyone goes down the street for a picnic leaving the dead man alone under a table-cloth on the floor.  The animals have calmed down; the garden is flowering; the little boy practicing his trumpet still sounds terrible but when he hits a high note, the music becomes smooth, beautiful, suave -- this brings us to the closing credits.

I assume that the film is made for Black audiences who would understand the specific meaning of the various arcane references to the occult.  Harry says, for instance, that you "don't wanna be at a country intersection at night without your toby."  Harry seems to embody a sort of genteel countryfied charm -- but he's got a wide range of references:  at one point, he cites Pushkin,  The picture establishes clearly the distinction between the sanctified behavior of the church-going people and the wickedness of the Blues-singing, juke-joint habitues who gather around Harry.  Occupying the middle-ground is a flashy Black woman with platinum-blonde hair who was once a good-time girl but has now been saved.  At Harry's fish-fry, one old reprobate sings the old blues song "Se Se Rider"; the blonde woman responds by singing a hymn.  In some respects. the film's schematic structure and its obviously Manichean view of Good in mortal battle with Evil is similar to the morality expressed in old all-Black musicals such as Cabin in the Sky -- a good woman defends her erring man against the blandishments of Satan.  But the film is visually sophisticated and there are odd complications:  it is the Preacher who reads scripture telling his flock that Jesus has come to set fathers against sons and brothers against brothers -- in fact, exactly the project that Harry seems determined to accomplish.  A curious scene in which Harry leads Ba-Bro down a stony river bed has an odd lyrical and surreal quality:  at first, we see the two men gingerly stepping from stone to stone in the creek; but, in the next shot, they are wandering in a gorge full of boulders as big as tombstones.  It's as if Harry's malignancy has blighted the landscape around him -- this theme is further dramatized in the garden gone to weed, the frenzied pigeons, and the chickens running loose among the wilting vegetables  Evil is infectious:  when Suzie complains about Harry, one of the women tells her in a matter-of-fact way that she should poison him.  (We may recall that the great Blues man, Robert Johnson, died of poison in his moonshine.).  In one of his poems, Brecht comments on a Kabuki mask of a demon noting that the creature's taut features and frown show how hard it is to be evil.  Similarly, Harry's badness is a matter of practice -- he notes that he is working to perfect his wickedness.  The metaphor of the little boy playing the trumpet has the same meaning but applied to virtue:  goodness is a practice also -- you have to work at it.  The final scenes in the film, also  surrealist in force, with the folks eating fried chicken over Harry's corpse sprawled in the kitchen have an eerie charge.  The movie is every bit as good as I remembered it -- even, now, much clearer, more lucid, and more meaningful than I recalled.