A Raisin in the Sun. Terrific, even if in the moment(s) I wasn't sure about the denouement. But I don't know that that was due to any flaw in its conception or execution. It occurred to me that the family could have accepted the money and then found another house nicer and larger than their South Side apartment. But to accept the money would be to accept discrimination. And a pragmatic but politically dubious decision might work, sort of, in life but not in drama. The ending Lorraine Hansberry wrote is in line with her central idea, which she talks about in one of the DVD extras, a 1961 interview: To accept the idea that money by itself is the key to freeing oneself, one's family, one's people, from limited circumstances and servile status is to accept the values and ideology of the forces that put you in those circumstances in the first place. (Although I don't imagine that the left-socialist Hansberry would have opposed, say, striking for higher wages.) Okay. What's an alternative? I mean, short of violent revolution? That's the big question, isn't it? I don't know the answer, and I don't know that Hansberry gives one. But the play was written, and the film was made, around the cusp of the sixties, a time, especially early on, when there was something in the zeitgeist that might have told you that such answers could be found, or made. Anyway...Poitier, Ruby Dee, and the other performers are terrific, especially Diana Sands, who plays Beneatha. Hansberry says something to the effect that she herself, in 1961, “still has some Beneatha in [her].” An appealing character is Beneatha, an appealing person was Hansberry, and I'd like to have been Howard Nemiroff. Fucked up that Hansberry died at thirty-four.
Regarding tactics, Hansberry said blacks "must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent... They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps—and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities."