[With The Devil Finds Work] James Baldwin has written a commentary on the movies as visionary, and unusual, as D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classical American Literature.

The nature of his theme is hinted at in a recalling of a moment (the moment) of apostasy—when Baldwin decided to go to a proscribed theatre matinée, and in so doing, put in peril his religious calling…. He sees The Exorcist as an example of the power to possess that movies may have in an age almost without faith—and dismisses it for its 'hysterical banality'. In dismissing it, though, he enriches us by invoking once more his vision of life as an experience both terrible and terrifying (favoured adjectives in his apocalyptic). He believes that black people, and certain other threatened (and threatening) social outsiders, are the last custodians to this experience—which movies, in general, betray.

Apart from The Birth of a Nation (appalled, he acknowledges it to be a masterpiece: 'an elaborate justification of mass murder,' 'it has the Niagara force of an obsession') and You Only Live Once …, all the films he writes about veer somewhere between the fourth- and fifth-rate. But minute sins can be the pretext for great sermons, and James Baldwin rails at length, and sonorously, against the emollient distorting of terrifying lives that occurs in Lady Sings the Blues, or Lawrence of Arabia, or even more strangely, My Son John. In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, he picks on dishonesties subtly different from those that usually worry the Caucasian.

His enmity is not limited to muddled liberalism. He is sharp about the so-called radical black films of the Seventies, seeing them in some way as annulling the revelation that the blacks hold in divine fee. He is able to give detailed instances of how falsity may creep into a Hollywood treatment—through an unhappy account of working on a script about Malcolm X. Yet the main impression given by this brief book is far from negative. Again and again, he shows how even the most fake film can contain some truth.