Thirteen Two Screenplays: Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) and Man in a Basket (2003)

a complete filmmaker, burnett has not only directed but also written, produced, photographed, and edited many of his films (he took a brief turn as an actor in the fourteen-minute Olivia’s Story [1999]), and in his role as director he often contributes to screenplays written by others. Most of his TV films, for example, have involved adjustments to the scripts he was given. “The TV movies that I did were Movies of the Week,” he has explained. “I had more control as opposed to an episodic series, where the writer is at the top of the food chain. … I would go over the script with the [director of photography] and all the key department heads to exchange ideas, to find a better way of doing it. At this time, I would also talk about the mood with a composer” (Miguez and Paz 2016, 77). Like many filmmakers, Burnett has also experienced the frustration of writing scripts and script outlines that were never produced, either because he couldn’t find sufficient funding or because producers wanted him to make changes he couldn’t accept. Among the unfilmed projects are an epic film about Frederick Douglass; feature-length biographies of Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois; 145th Street, based on a collection of young adult short stories by the prolific black author Walter Dean Meyers; and The William and Ellen Craft Story, about two slaves who escaped from Georgia in 1848, the wife disguised as a white man and the husband as a servant (see Kapsis 2011, xxv–xxvi). In 2015 he was in Algeria, where he hoped to make a film about Emir Abd-el-Kader, the nineteenth-century Arab scholar and military leader who repelled a French colonial invasion and saved Christians in Damascus from being slaughtered by Arab tribesmen; unfortunately, financing for that film never materialized.

I have not seen screenplays for these films, but two others can serve to illustrate the range and excellence of Burnett’s writing, which should get more attention, and which I want to emphasize here. First is an outstanding film he wrote but didn’t direct, although it’s very much in the style of his early pictures about Watts. Second is an adaptation of a novel by Chester Himes, which has yet to make it to the screen. Together, they exemplify not only his affection and concern for black lives, but also the range and inventiveness of his work at its most basic level of inspiration.

In 1978–1979, during the period between Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, Burnett encouraged the Texas-born Billy Woodberry, whom he had come to know at UCLA, to direct a feature film. As incentive, he presented Woodberry with a seventy-page screenplay. The resulting film, Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), was also photographed by Burnett in 16mm black and white and used actors and family members who had previously worked with him. Like Killer of Sheep, it deals with a family in Watts who suffer from economic and emotional pressures, and it is one of the key examples of the distinctive style of black neorealism for which Burnett was largely responsible. (In my view, this style owes less to the Italians than to the Brazilian “cinema of poverty” and the films of Ousmane Sembene, which Burnett had seen as a student.) Rarely shown, it was restored by Milestone Films in 2017 and will at last be widely available on DVD, alongside Killer of Sheep. Bless Their Little Hearts, which in 2013 was selected for the National Film Registry, is in every way worthy to stand alongside the earlier picture.

Credit for the completed film goes primarily to Woodberry, who directed, edited, and slightly expanded the screenplay, putting greater emphasis on family relationships. But Woodberry retained most of the structure and dialogue Burnett had established. Both this film and Killer of Sheep are centered on poor black fatherhood, serving to refute the idea that inner-city families are typically matriarchal, lacking dedicated fathers. (As we have seen, however, Burnett’s own father was absent for most of his childhood; he was raised by his mother and grandmother.) Also like Killer of Sheep, Bless Their Little Hearts is episodic, without the tight cause-effect plotting of Hollywood pictures and many social problem films. Most of the sequences are relatively self-contained vignettes illustrating a round of quotidian life that gradually drifts toward open conflict and near despair, and the ending is ambiguous, lacking full closure. The dialogue is typical of Burnett in its touches of humor and deft characterization; the strength of the screenplay, however, comes not only from language (some of which is improvised) but also from the eloquence and affective power of the activities and incidental details he chose to make up the story.

Killer of Sheep involved a laboring man who, however soul-destroying his work, was able to take a certain pride in supporting his family. In Bless Their Little Hearts, the situation is different; Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) is equally committed to his family but has been without permanent work for almost a decade and can only scratch out temporary menial labor. His wife, Andias (Kaycee Moore, even more impressive here than in Killer of Sheep), works as a domestic (as Burnett’s mother once did) and has become the breadwinner. The couple has three kids, aged twelve, ten, and six (Angela, Ronald, and Kimberly Burnett), the oldest of whom looks out for the others when the parents are away. We never see Andias at work, but she’s shown in somber close-ups as she takes long bus rides to and from her place of employment, sometimes nodding off to sleep, sometimes gripping the bar atop the seat in front of her in a restless gesture, sometimes pensively and sadly holding her chin in her hand as the city passes outside her window.

Early in the film we see Charlie in a series of telephoto shots as he visits an employment office; a burly fellow and a heavy smoker, he slowly and carefully fills out forms with a lead pencil, studies a sign on the wall labeled “Casual Labor,” and wanders around the office until closing time, his actions backed by a saxophone and piano jazz version of “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.” (The nondiegetic music functions much as it did in Killer; a compilation score made up chiefly of jazz and blues, it comments on the action and isn’t mixed with ambient sound.) Then he exits, walking through the decayed Watts rail yard with the closed and shuttered factory buildings of Goodyear and Firestone Tire and Rubber visible in the background. In the evening he arrives home to find his kids in the kitchen, the oldest cooking sweet potatoes while the others play cards. In the bedroom, his exhausted wife is in bed. When he asks if she’s asleep, she says, “I wisht I was.”

Stan in Killer of Sheep suffered from depression induced by his job, but Charlie in Bless Their Little Hearts suffers from depression, shame, and repressed anger over his joblessness. His sense of masculinity and self-worth are under threat. His wife is too tired to offer him emotional or sexual comfort (he lies beside her in bed at night, staring at the ceiling), and as a result he becomes alienated. He hangs out with a group of men who sit around drinking Colt 45 and cheap bourbon, listlessly debating such topics as who has the lightest skin and commiserating over their joblessness. At one point a member of the group suggests that they could maybe take up robbery like the kids are doing. “We’re smarter than they are,” he says. Charlie declares that he would never do anything to lose his family and tries to view his situation as a spiritual crisis to be overcome. One of the drunken men thinks of using guns to hunt for food, but another remarks, “You know how far you have to drive to kill a rabbit?”

In the evening Charlie gets into bed with the half asleep Andias, who mumbles “you eat sumthin’?” He tries to kiss her on the shoulder, but she doesn’t respond. Later we see Andias and the children cleaning the kitchen while Charlie, who never seems to help with domestic labor, is smoking and lying atop the hood of a car outside the Compton All Star Fish Market; a pal brings him a piece of fried fish, and nondiegetic blues can be heard on the sound track. When he’s at home Charlie reads want ads in the newspaper. One of the most impressively written and acted scenes involves his attempt to assert male authority by disciplining his small son, who hasn’t cut his fingernails. Charlie and Andias are having coffee at the kitchen table, and he talks about how low he is because of being out of work. She tries to give him encouragement, and he suddenly calls for his son to bring him cigarettes and an ashtray. Covering his vulnerability, he lectures the child. “Boy, didn’t I tell you to keep your fingernails cut?” he says. “Girls and sissies have long nails. Are you a sissy?” As he cuts the boy’s nails, the boy quietly cries. Charlie repeatedly jerks the boy’s arm hard, ordering him to stand straight and stop crying, and the boy does his best to comply.

An equally painful but more poignant scene shows Andias preparing the kids for Sunday school. She tells them to wait for their father, who will give them money for a tithe. Then she goes out to the hallway, where Charlie is waiting in obvious discomfort. She opens her purse and gives him money, silently admonishing him to act the patriarch. Trying to conceal his humiliation, he goes to the kitchen and gives each of the children a coin.

Another of the memorable domestic scenes has only a single line of dialogue. Charlie is in the bathroom shaving, and director Woodberry makes brilliant use of a wide shot to show the entire process. Charlie hums to himself as he carefully, methodically shaves his thick beard. His oldest daughter enters, wanting to use the bathroom. He gently tells her to wait. She exits. He rinses his face, and a tight close-up shows him grimly looking at himself in the mirror. He slowly turns off the tap water with a force that, as Alessandra Raengo has observed, makes his hands seem to indicate “the struggle they are both expressing and holding back” (2015, 302). He exits. After a moment the daughter enters and tries to turn on the tap. She can’t. She exits again. A moment later she comes back with a monkey wrench almost as big as she is and turns on the water.

Eventually Charlie finds temporary piecework with a local contractor. One of the outstanding qualities of the film is its tendency to document the process of both domestic and outdoor labor. We see Andias and the children preparing food and washing the walls and surfaces of the kitchen, and Charlie proves to be something of a jack-of-all-trades. In a montage that conveys the repetitiveness and sheer discomfort of hard physical work, he and another man swing scythes to clear brush on a vacant lot. Burnett shoots the action with a telephoto lens, and the camera seems to be positioned deep down in the thick brush, which almost swallows the two men. At the end of the long, hot, hazy day, Charlie, who has no proper work clothes, piles the chopped brush in the center of the field. He sits on a hillside and waits for his employer, who drives up in a battered truck. Charlie explains that his coworker gave up in the heat and went home, and the employer promises to pay him. As they drive back toward Watts, Charlie sits in the passenger seat, quietly smoking. To the sound of blues, we see the cityscape passing outside his window and we eventually travel through the old industrial area of Watts, with its shuttered buildings and skeletal factory remains. Thom Andersen’s celebrated essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, pays tribute to Billy Woodberry by closing with these scenes. Andersen observes that when Watts had industrial jobs, visitors and the people of the city could tour the nearby Goodyear plant to learn how tires are made; now, they go on tours of movie lots. As David E. James puts it, “the manufacture of images has replaced the manufacture of material goods,” and the social costs of this transformation have been represented not in “Hollywood’s false, manufactured spatialities,” but in “modes of film production opposed to the industry that grow out of the working class itself” (2005, 422).

At home after clearing the field, Charlie reclines in a full bathtub and snores—this to the discomfort of his son, who knocks on the bathroom door and can’t get a response. Somewhat later Charlie gets a job painting over the graffiti on a storage building (“Fuck all Bruins” and “East Side Crips”) and does good professional work, carefully cleaning off the gutters, trimming certain areas with a small brush, and putting away his ladders and tools with efficiency and pride. That evening he brings home ice cream for his kids, smiling and teasing them with his power to bestow a special treat. But things take a troubling turn when, still happy with himself, he meets an old girlfriend, Rose, a single mother who has a couple of kids, one of them almost grown. With her, Charlie can drink beer, have sex, and feel important, and he spends his money to show off. He brings the rest of the money home to help Andias pay bills, and when she notices some of it is gone he makes a lame excuse. She immediately senses his infidelity and talks with a neighborhood woman about philandering husbands who have had their “little egos” hurt. One evening after work she returns home to find the place empty and the kitchen dirty. “Lord have mercy!” she cries. “I would think somebody in this house would have hands besides me!” Her kids come in bearing groceries, and her mounting fatigue, pain, and anger cause her to snap. Ranting at everybody for sitting on their “well-rested behinds,” she begins unwrapping a whole chicken from the groceries. “We could be dead as far as he’s concerned!” she shouts, then throws the chicken hard against the wall.

Charlie, meanwhile, is having a conversation with Rose, who sits on his lap and tells him she needs a man to take care of her boys, especially the teenager, who is too big to whip. Her interest in Charlie is obviously motivated by something other than his sex appeal. He explains that he has kids of his own to raise and just wants a bit of comfort. “I thought I could have peace,” he whines. “I’m tired, baby!”

Charlie’s complaint comes back at him with a vengeance in the film’s most powerful sequence: a ten-minute, handheld, long take in which Kaycee Moore and Nate Hardman provide a virtual master class in improvisational acting. Improvisation in film is of course somewhat different than on stage, because scenes can always be reshot if the results are unsatisfactory; nevertheless, this sequence has a vérité quality that can be obtained only when actors approach a scene existentially, relying on their immediate instincts to escape what Ed Guerrero has called “the illusionist narcosis so prevalent in Hollywood films” (1991, 320). Woodberry has said that Nate Hardman was reluctant to perform it and quit the production for almost two months because he believed—wrongly—that Moore had revealed secrets of his private life to Burnett, who used them to create the situation (see Sheppard 2015, 235–36). In the event, both actors seem to be drawing on reserves of personal feeling that give their behavior unusual authenticity.

Charlie comes home in the evening wearing a crisp white shirt and gets a cold reception. “What’s wrong with everybody?” he asks. “It ain’t everybody, it’s me!” Andias cries, finally releasing all her pent-up anger and grief. An especially effective aspect of the scene is the ebb and flow of emotional energy between the two actors. At first Andias is disgusted and furious. Confronting Charlie with his infidelity, she gets in his face, tells him he’s smelling of “ten-cent perfume,” and shoves him away whenever he tries to touch her. He softly pleads, trying to sweet talk, telling her she’s “crazy … just cause things ain’t going right.” Then, as a result of her unyielding scorn, he gives in, swearing in typical wayward-husband fashion that the woman “meant nothing.” “I’m tired, Charlie, tired, tired, tired, tired!” Andias keeps shouting the words like a whiplash or a broken record. Charlie says that he’s trying all the time to find permanent work. “Don’t try,” she says, “do it!” Guilty, backed into an emotional corner, humiliated and angry at his many job frustrations, he roars back at her, and at one point it looks as if the shouting match is going to turn into a knock-down, drag-out fight between the big man and his slender wife. Andias is tearful and unforgiving. Charlie relents, and the scene ends when he quietly asks to sleep apart for the night, giving them both time to calm down.

All the conflict of the film has been unleashed, and while one’s sympathy is mostly with Andias, it’s typical of Burnett that Charlie, flawed but equally miserable, is also worthy of respect. He spends a night on the couch, contemplating the state of his marriage. Soon afterward, the contractor he’s been working for explains that at present there aren’t any piecework jobs. For once, Charlie doesn’t aimlessly drift. We see him digging madly through the family’s crowded storage closet, looking for his fishing rod and tackle. Andias comes to his aid, and for the first time she smiles. (The moment is almost equivalent to the scene when Stan smiles near the end of Killer of Sheep.) Charlie takes his tackle box into the kitchen. In a series of close-ups Woodberry again shows him at work, his big hands untangling fishing line and using pliers to repair hooks and small lead weights. He has the delicacy and skill of a craftsman and experienced fisherman. The next day he joins other black fishermen near the seacoast, where a yacht sails past in the distance.

Charlie’s nadir comes in the next scene. For unexplained reasons, his oldest daughter has broken her arm and is wearing a cast. The family sits around the table in the kitchen, and Charlie dissolves into tears because of his inability to give his family a better life in a better place. Hardman touchingly conveys a big man’s helpless anguish. Andias stands behind Charlie, puts her hand on his shoulder, and offers comfort.

Next Charlie visits a roadside market where black fish sellers are waving at passing cars and offering fresh, river-caught catfish. He can’t compete. The film ends as he walks away from the camera toward the rail yards in Watts. Grim as his situation is, it’s far from unique. Everywhere in the United States, working-class blacks have always been the last hired and the first fired, and their pay has always been lower than whites’. There was a time when Watts had industrial jobs; in those days Charlie operated forklifts and drove trucks. Now the factories are shells, and he returns home to the same conditions and threats to the survival of his family that he has suffered before. Bless Their Little Hearts brings us much closer to complete despair than Killer of Sheep, but at least its protagonist is going back to his family.

The screenplay for Man in a Basket, unlike the one for Bless Their Little Hearts, must be discussed to some degree conditionally. Written in 2003, it’s a straightforward adaptation of a 1959 detective novel by Chester Himes (published in the United States in 1973 under the title The Crazy Kill) and seems especially well-suited to Burnett’s talents as a director of darkly humorous ensemble pictures about communities of the black underclass. It could, and probably would, make an outstanding film noir, but has yet to receive financing. In 2016 Burnett told Spanish interviewers that he was interested in the novel because it’s “the Himes story that comes close to a love story.” He had hoped to get support from Harvey Weinstein on the coattails of the Denzel Washington picture The Great Debaters (2007), which Weinstein had distributed, but when The Great Debaters did poorly at the box office Weinstein lost interest (Miguez and Paz 2016, 89.) Since then Burnett has twice come close with other production companies, and as of this writing he is still trying.

Burnett’s title is derived from the original French version of the novel, Couché dans le pain (roughly, “Laid Out on Bread”; the first English title was A Jealous Man Can’t Win). Like all of Himes’s crime fiction involving Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, it was initially published by Gallimard in its Sérié noire paperback editions. Although now considered a major African American novelist, Himes didn’t achieve widespread literary success until he moved to Paris during the period when Richard Wright and James Baldwin were there. He was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1909, the son of middle-class academics who were in deep conflict with one another. His youth was rebellious and violent, and when he briefly attended college at Ohio State University he became an outlaw; he led black fraternity boys to a party at a local brothel, dropped out of college, passed bad checks, stole guns from a National Guard Armory, and was eventually convicted of the armed robbery of an elderly couple in the relatively affluent Cleveland neighborhood of Cleveland Heights. At age nineteen he was sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years of hard labor at an Ohio prison. While there, he began writing short stories, one of which was published by Esquire using his prison number—59623—as a nom de plume. In the late 1930s he was paroled and moved to California, where he worked in wartime industries in Los Angeles. On the basis of that experience, he wrote his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), which Mike Davis has aptly described as a “brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine” (1990, 43).

Himes’s early novels were influenced by Richard Wright and can be categorized as social protest fiction involving criminal themes, although they have a distinctively mad, nightmarish quality. Underappreciated in America, Himes migrated to Paris in the early 1950s (leaving a wife behind) and made contact with Marcel Duhamel, the celebrated editor of the Série noire, who was also the French translator of If He Hollers Let Him Go. Duhamel commissioned him to write a crime novel in the hard-boiled manner of Hammett and Chandler, advising him to create vivid scenes and concentrate on action rather than psychology. Himes never acquired French (certainly not enough to write in the language), but Duhamel provided him with translators. Himes quickly wrote La reine des pommes (1958; later published in English as A Rage in Harlem), and as a result became the first non-French author to be awarded the Grand Prix de la littérature policière. This book inaugurated the series of Gravedigger/Coffin Ed detective novels, which, as Robert Polito (2001) has written, constitute “his most incisive, radical, and enduring fiction.”

Himes never lived in Harlem for any length of time. The Harlem setting for his crime novels is largely imaginary and hallucinogenic, though he gives us accurate street names and convincingly realistic details. (For an informative essay about the place by one of its natives, written not long before Himes arrived in Paris, see Baldwin 1955.) “The Harlem of my books was never intended to be real,” he recalls in My Life of Absurdity, his 1976 autobiography. But the question of realism is complex. At first, Himes says, “I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.” Ideas about the “Absurd” were of course au courant in Paris at the time Himes lived there and had influenced the work of Sartre, Camus, and Beckett. But the absurdity in Himes’s novels isn’t philosophical or abstract in the manner of the French; the surreal or blackly comic quality of his work originates in all-too-real social and political conditions that he and other black Americans experienced. His Harlem novels are steamy caldrons of prostitutes, junkies, thieves, alleyway killers, fake preachers, brutal cops, stool pigeons, chorus girls, ex-cons, hucksters, and characters with names like Deep South, Pigmeat, Baby Sis, Doll Baby, Acey, Deucy, and Chink Charlie. (“I would swear this is a list of circus acts,” a cop says in Burnett’s screenplay.) The atmosphere is carnivalesque and the plots zany, but the novels succeed as metaphors for the violence of American life. Whatever he intended, Himes was writing social realism by another means.

Some of the Harlem detective novels were adapted by black directors in Hollywood before Burnett wrote his script, but none of the adaptations fully conveys the tough, edgy, dark-side-of-town quality that makes Himes a noir master; on the contrary, they have more in common with the blaxploitation cycle that Burnett and his UCLA cohort rebelled against. The best is Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), which was shot on location and has documentary value because of its colorful, detailed picture of the Harlem streets of that period. Unfortunately, it portrays Coffin Ed and Gravedigger (Raymond St. Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge) as extremely well-dressed types who look as if they’ve just stepped out of a Bond movie, and it contains too many 1970s-style car chases and flashy action. Its sequel, Mark Warren’s Come Back, Charleston Blue (aka The Heat’s On, 1972), is more of the same. Bill Duke’s A Rage in Harlem (1991), starring Danny Glover, Gregory Hines, Forest Whittaker, and Robin Givens, might have been an important exception, but it was shot in Cleveland and suffered from tension between Duke and his producers.

We can only imagine what kind of film Burnett would be likely to achieve, but his screenplay gives every indication that he wants to capture the original period flavor (one of the characters watches Queen for a Day on TV) and the gritty, almost claustrophobic feel of Himes’s novel, which for all its absurdity has certain things in common with the ghetto James Baldwin had described in his well-known essay on Harlem: “The buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block. … All of Harlem is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut” (1955, 57). Burnett is also much better than previous adapters at retaining and often enhancing the particular kind of wit and dark humor in Himes’s work.

Burnett’s screenplay is a straight rendition of the plot of Couché dans le pain/The Crazy Kill, preserving some of Himes’s dialogue, adding or substituting equally good lines, and in places condensing the action. It is, however, more pointedly concerned with racism. One striking difference is that the best-known characters, precinct detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger, are named “Ice Water” and “Sharecropper.” When Burnett sought rights to the novel, they were owned by the Goldwyn Company, which at one point had wanted to produce a picture based on The Crazy Kill. Goldwyn was no longer interested in the film and told Burnett that he could get the rights from Himes’s literary agent, Roslyn Tag; the only catch was that Goldwyn wanted to retain the rights to the names Coffin Ed and Gravedigger for possible future use. Burnett had to invent new names, but this is no great loss, because his conception of the characters is much truer to Himes than previous movies have been. Far from the natty dressers depicted in Cotton Comes to Harlem and Come Back, Charleston Blue, the Himes duo are “tall, lanky colored men dressed in black mohair suits that looked as though they’d been slept in” (Himes 1973, 29). Almost half of Coffin Ed’s (Sharecropper’s in Burnett) face has been horribly scarred by an acid thrower, and his temper is so violent that his partner repeatedly needs to calm him down. This is not a good cop/bad cop act. Both men are as jaded and tough as they look, and they have no problem with using “extra-legal” measures, such as a punch to the mouth or solar plexus, to get information. In Himes and in Burnett’s screenplay, the two detectives put handcuffs on a suspect’s hands and ankles, suspend him upside down from the top edge of an open door, and apply pressure with their feet to his armpits until he talks. All the while, other cops are calmly at work beyond the open door.

Gravedigger and Coffin Ed (hereafter Ice Water and Sharecropper, and all quotes are from Burnett’s screenplay) are more prominent characters in some of the Harlem novels than in others. In this novel, as in Burnett’s screenplay, they have important roles but aren’t the center of interest; in fact, they’re a step behind in the discovery of a murderer. The more important character, and the reason for Burnett’s interest in the novel as a “love story,” is Johnny Perry, a veteran of a Georgia chain gang who, in his youth, killed his stepfather. Johnny has become a figure to be reckoned with in Harlem: a smooth, smart, laconic, bejeweled gambler who owns a small club named Tia Juana at the corner of 124th and Madison. He drives a cream-colored Cadillac convertible, and Harlem kids gather around in awe whenever he appears. He has an intelligent Harlem lawyer, and the police defer to him. Everybody else drinks booze, but he drinks lemonade. You wouldn’t want to play cards with him and wouldn’t want to make him angry; nevertheless, he doesn’t cheat at cards and has a sense of personal ethics. In some ways he resembles the shady heroes of Raymond Chandler’s early pulp fiction, who behave with sangfroid under pressure. His only problem, besides being a suspect in a murder he didn’t commit, is his wife Dulcy, a sexy, heavy-drinking young woman who dresses to please men; a former cabaret singer, Dulcy loves Johnny but makes him very jealous, and she, too, is a suspect. Ultimately, he needs to become a sort of detective to find out who committed a murder and just how innocent she might be.

Burnett’s screenplay, like Himes’s novel, begins at 4:00 A.M. in front of an A&P grocery in Harlem, where a robbery takes place. A truckload of groceries has just been delivered outside the store, including a big wicker basket full of bread, and a black cop is guarding the groceries. The cop sees the nearby robbers and gives chase. Johnny Perry’s Cadillac convertible pulls up to the curb (Burnett notes that a small shrunken head is hanging from the rearview mirror) and Val Valentine Haines, Dulcy’s so-called brother and a friend of Perry, gets out of the passenger side. Meanwhile, three stories above in Mamie Pullen’s crowded living room, a wake is being held for her husband, Big Joe. Describing the scene, Burnett writes, “It would look more like an after-hours party catering to gamblers, numbers men, and women who have been used up by life and men, if it were not for the open casket.” Ten people are present, including a musical trio playing a blues version of an old spiritual, “Steal Away.” (No doubt one reason Burnett is attracted to the project is the jazz, blues, and spiritual music that permeates the novel; he adds more of it.) A good deal of sexual tension circulates among the women in the room because a handsome fellow named Chink Charlie has been paying too much attention to Dulcy. As Chink Charlie exits to find a few sticks of marijuana, one of the “mourners,” a Holy Roller preacher named Reverend Short, who has been imbibing from a bottle of “nerve medicine,” stands at a bedroom window and observes the robbery taking place below. When the thieves take flight, he leans out too far and falls from the window, dropping three stories and landing in the basket of bread. After a few moments he revives, adjusting his glasses and making his way back up to the wake. When he explains what happened, the party guests are skeptical and go to the bedroom window to have a look. Down below, a dead body is lying atop the bread basket: it’s Val Haines, with a hand-tooled English dagger in his heart.

The party from the wake runs out to the street and cops arrive, followed by Ice Water and Sharecropper. Three characters see the two Harlem detectives coming toward them:

pigmeat:

Detectives Ice Water and Sharecropper.

chink:

Yeah, Buck and Bubbles.

deep south:

Man, you’re asking for an ass whuppen.

A cop turns to the crowd gathered around the body: “Anybody see anything? [Before anyone can answer he quickly gives up in disgust.] Of course not.” Johnny Perry and everyone at the wake are taken in for questioning, and we meet the chief characters, who are called one by one into a small interrogation room, where an Irish detective named Brody is assisted by Ice Water and Sharecropper. Mamie Pullen, Big Joe’s wife, recognizes Ice Water as “little Timmy Waters,” a kid she knew long ago. Reverend Short claims he’s had a “vision” of the killer. Alamena, an attractive older woman who was Johnny Perry’s first wife, can’t help with anything. Chink Charlie tries to act like a smart aleck (“You’re going to find yourself tripping down some stairs,” Brody says). Chink’s girlfriend Doll Baby, a nightclub dancer who dresses provocatively, tries to give him an alibi. Dulcy, also a provocative dresser, is accompanied by Johnny Perry’s lawyer and defends Johnny. At one point Burnett cuts away to a holding tank for the suspects, where Johnny Perry glances at Chink Charlie across the room:

Johnny sits with his legs crossed, with his eyes half-closed, yet still very much awake. The band [from the wake] is staying in practice doing a little a cappella blues. Deep South and Susie Q. beat out a ham bone rhythm on their legs. The white cop is irritated by the noise.

cop:

You people just can’t sit still.

deep south (looking at the cop, decides to be nice):

That’s how I make a living, young man.

cop:

In some hole in the wall joint where people get their throats cut?

deep south:

Mister, ain’t no call for that.

Johnny, giving one leg a rest, crosses the other leg very neatly. He holds his hands out in front of him, looking at them for a moment, and puts one hand back in his coat pocket.

cop:

I grew up in the South.

pigmeat:

We knew that without you telling us.

Chink leans over, fingering his hat, stares at the pocket Johnny’s got his hand in.

Eventually Johnny is called into the interrogation room, accompanied by his lawyer. Brody asks questions, without much result:

Brody and Johnny exchange stares for a moment, both poker-faced and unmoving.

brody:

Okay, boy, you can go now.

johnny (getting to his feet):

Fine. Just don’t call me boy. I’m a man, and if anybody wants any peace they will remember it.

brody (face turning red):

Is that a threat?

johnny (Points to Ice Water and Sharecropper):

Ask these gentlemen

Given that Man in a Basket is a detective story, I won’t spoil things by saying much more about the plot. In any case that isn’t necessary, because Chester Himes is the kind of artist (as are Hammett, Chandler, and Burnett) for whom scene is as important as, if not more than, plot. One of the many excitements of Burnett’s screenplay is the opportunity it would give him to stage sinister and humorous scenes dealing with Harlem culture and the unforgettable minor characters that populate Himes. By way of illustration, I offer a description of a couple of scenes that not only contribute to plot development but also provide Harlem atmosphere and interaction among several characters. Notice the prevalence of music in both; it occasionally serves as indirect commentary on the characters’ feelings, in nearly the same way as classic Hollywood musicals.

Just before Big Joe’s funeral, Johnny, his lawyer, Dulcy, and Alamena go to lunch at Fats’ Down Home Restaurant, a small, narrow place with a neon sign depicting a man shaped like a hippopotamus. Inside are a bar, a dining room with eight tables, a juke box, and a sawdust-covered floor. The place is populated by what Burnett calls “people of the trade.” “What say, Pee Wee,” Johnny says to the extremely tall bartender. “Just standing here and moaning low, Pops,” the bartender replies as he flourishes a glass and offers Johnny a drink on the house. Johnny orders a pitcher of lemonade. Fats, the owner, a completely hairless man wearing a silk shirt with a diamond collar button and pants that aren’t big enough, greets Johnny with a wheezing whisper: “They tell me big Joe got a smile on his face.” Johnny answers, “I guess he likes it, wherever he is.” The cook sticks his head out of the kitchen and waves at Johnny: “Hiyuh, Pops.” When Johnny and his companions sit in the dining room, Dulcy wants a Singapore sling. Johnny glares at her and she settles for brandy and soda. The lawyer wants iced tea and an order of brains and eggs with biscuits. Johnny asks for “the same as always.” The waitress puts a nickel in the juke box (music unspecified), and everybody watches as a couple begins to dance.

Chink Charlie comes in with Doll Baby, who is wearing a dress exactly like Dulcy’s, and they sit at a table across the room. The entire joint becomes tense, but Johnny ignores the newcomers. Dulcy says she wants the waitress to play Jelly Roll Morton’s “I Want a Little Girl to Call My Own.” Doll Baby begins talking loudly to Chink: “After all, Val was my fiancé. … And if truth be known, he was just knifed to keep me from having him.” This drives Dulcy into a fury, and Johnny has to grab her and push her back down in her chair; looking at Chink, he shouts, “Keep her damn mouth shut!” Chink says, “Keep her quiet your damn self.” For a moment it seems like an incipient fight or shoot-out in a Western saloon; Johnny stands up, Doll Baby runs for the kitchen, and Pee Wee moves toward Johnny, saying “Easy, Pops.” Fats appears, waddles over to Chink, and orders him out: “And never come in here no more either.” He pushes Chink to the door: “You’re lucky, lucky, lucky. Get out of here before your luck runs out.”

Not long afterward all the suspects attend Big Joe’s crowded funeral at Reverend Short’s Holy Roller church. Reverend Short jumps up and down behind the pulpit, working up a sweat; the Grand Wizard of Joe’s lodge, dressed in gold braid, presides over a group of pallbearers; middle-aged church women in white uniforms pass out fans; and Ice Water and Sharecropper stand at the back of the church in dark glasses, “looking mean.” Reverend Short begins a eulogy with his regular churchgoers chanting choral support (“Lord have mercy, the trouble I’ve witnessed”), but the Reverend soon begins screaming in a frenzy, accusing Dulcy of being a murderess and a fornicating adulteress. Dulcy yells back at him, and Johnny restrains her, remarking, “Somebody needs to throw some cold water on these holy rollers.” The Reverend keeps pointing a finger at Dulcy as the organist begins playing “Nearer My God to Thee” and the congregation calms down. Mourners file by the casket, and the pallbearers, led by Johnny, carry it out to a hearse. The band plays “The Coming of John,” changing the beat to swing time and causing the departing congregation to step to the music. Ice Water and Sharecropper are left alone in the church. “These are your people,” Ice Water says, and Sharecropper replies, “No they ain’t.”

These tense confrontations cause trouble between Johnny and Dulcy; as the plot takes twists and turns, he not only becomes suspicious of her (in the past he had given her a fancy knife exactly like the one used to stab Val Haines) but also begins to feel that she or somebody else is trying to frame him for the murder. Dulcy’s drinking accelerates, followed by an almost violent fight—Johnny breaks his glass of lemonade, knocks over a table, and tries to kick Dulcy’s dog, Spookie—and later by a sex scene in which Dulcy creates a sultry mood by singing the blues. Frustrated by her behavior, Johnny suspects that she’s trying to get money from him and run away with Chink Charlie. He’s willing to let her leave, but she doesn’t try. All this causes him to investigate the crime while Ice Water and Sharecropper are conducting their own investigation. Ultimately, he locks the drunken, sleeping Dulcy in her room, gets in his Cadillac, and drives at high speed all the way to the south side of Chicago to find out something about Dulcy’s life as a singer before he met her.

Arriving in the morning, he visits The Dynamite Club, where blues singer Stavin Chain is onstage in his underwear, ironing his suit and singing to himself (“The Blues met me this morning, Lord, my baby told me she loves another man … cause my cream kaint lighten her coffee and my jelly roll ain’t sweet no more”). “You came all the way to Chicago about a woman,” Chain observes. “Man, you got it bad.” Next Johnny goes to the Club Alabam and talks with Big N Small, who is armed with an ice pick:

johnny:

You don’t need that ice pick.

big n small:

You don’t know this neighborhood.

johnny:

Why don’t you get a gun?

big n small:

In my years of experience, this will make a fool straighten up faster than a gun will.

Then Johnny goes to see a sixty-year old musician named Blind Billy, who shares his tiny apartment with a parrot in a towel-covered cage. To Johnny’s delight, Blind Billy happens to have lemonade. He advises Johnny to go on about his life. “If life wasn’t so damned crazy, I could,” Johnny says. Blind Billy replies, “Boy, life never made any sense.”

The information Johnny gets in Chicago clears up certain mysteries but not others. He finally discovers the chief culprit, arriving at the scene just before Ice Water and Sharecropper and barely preventing another murder. Like many noir narratives, this one ends in relatively spectacular fashion. I’ve left out a great deal of information and skipped over many excellent scenes, merely trying to indicate that the screenplay is exceptionally promising as an adventure, a muted social commentary, and a kind of love story. It may seem odd that a writer/director who began his career in rebellion against movies about blacks as gangsters, prostitutes, and drug dealers would later want to make a film centered on the black underworld. Burnett’s film, however, would be different. In his screenplay the sex is consensual; the violence, except for the violence of cops plus one scene involving a shotgun in which nobody gets hurt, is sparing; the vividly demotic and often humorous dialogue has almost no cursing or profanity; and the only evidence of drugs is a bit of marijuana and a police stoolie who is a heroin addict. All the emphasis is on environment, atmosphere, and character. One can only hope that this, the most brilliant adaptation of Himes, will someday be seen by audiences.