Where Black Is Too Beautiful

Where Black Is Too Beauiful

"I want a continuity of beautiful pictures and beautiful movement," insisted Photographer Gordon Parks about his first feature film, The Learning Tree. "I try to start each scene with a beautiful still photo and end each scene with a beautiful still photo." Indeed, there are many images of startling beauty in Parks' film, like the dappled summer light shining through the trees on a country lane. The Learning Tree's major problem is not with pictures but with people.

Adapting his own 1963 autobiographical novel about growing up as a black boy in the Kansas of the 1920s, Parks recollects the characters of his childhood as the sort of stereotypes that usually appear in elementary-school brotherhood pageants. Dad (Felix P. Nelson) is slow-witted, humble and loving and Mom (Estelle Evans) is a gentle, worldly-wise philosopher who works as a domestic. Newt (Kyle Johnson) is about as likely an adolescent hero as Andy Hardy, waking Mom up in the middle of the night and listening wide-eyed as she dispenses such homespun homilies as "This town ain't all a good place and it ain't all a bad place. It's like the fruit on a tree --some's good, some's bad."

The original novel was a reminiscence, not a protest, a souvenir of a simpler time when a quiet bitterness was as good as a riot and the most drastic sort of racial demonstration was trying to buy a Coke at the drugstore soda fountain. Parks is not yet sufficiently sophisticated as a dramatist to make such an unquestioning life completely credible to a contemporary audience. To be sure, there is one angry, rebellious black youth who stalks the community giving the sweaty white lawmen a mean time, but he is portrayed as a vicious psychotic who can easily be vanquished by Newt's storybook morality and radiant goodness.

Parks' meticulous photographic direction (executed by an excellent cameraman, Burnett Guffey, who shot Bonnie and Clyde) only seems to underscore all these melodramatics, lending every character and scene an extra edge of unreality. His shimmering imagery creates a world of benign memory but imperfect drama, in which black is just too beautiful.

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