Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hansberry, Lorraine - John Cutts

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JOHN CUTTS

In its transference from stage to screen, Lorraine Hansberry's deeply moving play about an impoverished but indestructable Negro family, has, alas, lost more than it has gained. On stage, the play literally whipped its way across the footlights to lash the audience with its verve and vigour. On film, its effect is at once less urgent and personal, and one seriously feels the lack of breathing space needed between us, the spectators of the action, and the action itself. We tend, as it were, to be too near the drama to ever feel it properly….

This is not to say, of course, that the film is un-entertaining…. [The] vivid flounce of Miss Hansberry's exciting dialogue [makes] it thoroughly worthwhile on any level of viewing. But one just wished that the producers might have had a little more courage and made their adaptation a more expansive one: one with a shade more filmic fluency to it. If they had, I feel that they may well have had a little...

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1. Introduction
2. Brooks Atkinson
3. Tom F. Driver
4. Gerald Weales
5. Harold R. Isaacs
6. Stanley Kauffmann
7. John Cutts
8. Walter Kerr
9. Ossie Davis
10. Arthur France
11. C.W.E. Bigsby
12. Gerald Weales
13. Jordan Y. Miller
14. Martin Gottfried
15. Brendan Gill
16. Walter Kerr
17. Harold Clurman
18. George R. Adams
19. David E. Ness
20. Clive Barnes
21. W. Edward Farrison
22. Julius Lester
23. Bertie J. Powell
24. Copyright

1. Lorraine Hansberry