Word: soldier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with more than its share of gags, chills and good feelings. The other is an electrifying whodunit from a veteran director whose films have received 31 Oscar nominations. In a simpler world these two movies-John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet and Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story-would pass through the theaters with the usual benediction or indifference from critics and the public. But because the films have casts composed almost entirely of blacks, because Sayles' comedy is set primarily in Harlem and A Soldier's Story in a Negro barracks...
Jewison is white, but he has trudged this weary road before: in 1967 he directed In the Heat of the Night, a crackling confrontation between black man and redneck that won an Oscar for Best Picture. A Soldier's Story is his tautest, funniest, bitterest work since then, with a sparkling cast. For this, credit is due largely to Playwright Charles Fuller, whose A Soldier's Play earned the Pulitzer Prize and just about every other drama award of 1982, and to the Negro Ensemble Company, where the play was first staged. Every actor, from Adolph Caesar...
There is a suggestion of man meeting role here. A Soldier's Story looks like an act of love for everyone involved-including Jewison, who peddled the project to three studios before Columbia Pictures bought it on the condition that the director work for free instead of receiving his usual $1.5 million salary-but for Rollins it is a late second chance. Like LeVar Burton after Roots and Louis Gossett Jr. after An Officer and a Gentleman, Rollins found himself a celebrity but not a hot commodity after his Oscar-nominated role in Ragtime (1981). He did not make...
Some Hollywood executives believe that the same thing would happen if theater doors opened on a flurry of black movies. So it is seen as encouraging that in its first week A Soldier's Story broke house records in three of the five theaters showing it. "If the film is a success," says Charles Fuller, "there just might be room for other stories acknowledging that America is a multiracial society. Because we are part of the life of this country. We breathe. We buy Cottonelle. We go to the movies...
...stickwomen have dropped three consecutive shutouts, most recently a 2-0 drubbing at the hands of Boston University yesterday at Soldier's Field...