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To Sleep With Anger
on DVD (1990)
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Brief synopsis of To Sleep With Anger
Charles Burnett's beautiful, poetic masterpiece is novelistic in its narrative density and richness of characterisation. Harry Mention (Danny Glover), an enigmatic drifter from the South, comes to visit an old acquaintance named Gideon (Paul Butler), who now lives in South-Central Los Angeles. Harry's charming, down-home manner hides a malicious penchant for stirring up trouble, and he exerts a strange and powerful effect on Gideon and his thoroughly assimilated black, middle-class family, including wife Suzie (Mary Alice) and sons Junior (Carl Lumbly) and Babe (Richard Brooks). The household was already rife with conflict when the devilish guest arrived, and Harry's grab bag of folktales, lucky charms, and foul magic only deepens the family rift. Sickness and insanity gradually descend upon Gideon's home, and it soon becomes evident that something will have to give.
Burnett, who gained prominence with his groundbreaking 1977 film KILLER OF SHEEP, proves with this powerful drama that his earlier effort was no fluke. He paces his film extremely slowly, to the point where subtle throwaway gestures contribute to the film's thickening tension. Glover, known more for his sympathetic performances, is a perfect Harry, an individual so contradictory that he becomes even more of a hidden devil.
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Critics Reviews
Radio Times
As a downside to the middle-class amiability of The Cosby Show, Charles Burnett's story of a black family settled in Los Angeles from the South, is an engrossing study of conflicts in black America. Danny Glover has never been better, playing a seductive charmer from the past whose storytelling moves from the comic to the sinister, a domestic demagogue who stirs up nightmare tensions the family never knew existed.
Time Out
Burnett's ambitious blend of folklore and family feuding opens startlingly: Gideon, an elderly black paterfamilias,...
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Time Out
"...A slow-burning, soul-insinuating, 12-bar blues of a movie..." (Tom Charity)
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