LITMIR.BIZ

      When Wendell and Sonia visit the Mundy home to discuss arrangements for the wedding, the class differences are glaringly obvious, and the actors project their dialogue with comic theatricality. The very black-skinned Pierce is in the kitchen, wearing a T-shirt and pouring hot water into a washtub so his father can soak his feet, when Sonia, a beautiful, light-skinned female in an expensive dress, sashays through the door to get a drinking glass. “How are you doing, Mr. Mundy?” she asks. Mrs. Mundy enters behind her and beams with pleasure. “You know,” she says, “I always wanted girls, but the Lord gave me boys. Have to be satisfied with what you got.” She pats Pierce on the arm and he scowls. This leads to a face-off, initiated by Pierce, who confronts Sonia like a prizefighter at a weigh-in. “I bet you had a lot to be thankful for,” he says. Sonia gives him an arch look and a condescending, exaggeratedly sing-song reply: “I had to worry about grades, whether people liked me, and oh yes, I had two older brothers I had to compete with.” Acting the heroic proletarian, Pierce goes for a direct insult: “They teach you how to pick cotton in Charm School?” She smirks and imitates a southern belle: “Why no, Pierce, Charm School taught ladies how to be ladies and how to be charming in the presence of gentlemen. A man’s work was once measured by how much cotton he chopped in a day. And how much cotton have you chopped, Pierce?”

      When the characters move to the living room, we see Wendell for the first time. More light-skinned than his brother, he wears a business suit and is writing notes with a gold pen. He has only a few lines of dialogue and is a less-developed character than other members of his family; in this scene, he’s little more than a social placeholder, providing just the right indications of a recently achieved educational and social status. He tells Mrs. Mundy that his secretary is going to type up a list of wedding guests. Mrs. Mundy turns to Pierce and asks, “When are you going to have a secretary?” Sonia airily remarks, “I’m sure that when Pierce makes up his mind what he wants to be, he’s going to be quite successful.” Mrs. Mundy takes the remark as a compliment and beams again, her voice rising as if she were at a revival meeting: “I got them into church! If they get married and have a family I’ll be ready to be called to glory!”

      Sonia is so flamboyantly bourgeois that many viewers will completely dislike her and probably also dislike Wendell; nevertheless, the film doesn’t take sides in the usual fashion of didactic drama. It has sympathy with Pierce’s class position, but it gives Sonia and Wendell chances to defend themselves. As they exit the Mundy house, Sonia turns to her future husband and asks, “Is Pierce retarded?” “No,” Wendell says, “just ghettoized.” And in fact, Pierce is too self-righteous about his working-class experience and too ready to force arguments with Sonia. He has no political consciousness other than populist hostility toward big shots. His parents, on the other hand, look up to the Dubois family and are deeply conservative, influenced by a mix of fundamentalist Christian charity and worship of individual initiative. Their values are articulated when at one point Mrs. Mundy wants to give a bit of money to a relative who has “the neuralgia.” She feels it would be the “Christian” thing to do, but Mr. Mundy objects, launching into a half-senile monologue about self-sufficiency: “If they made cotton like they did when I was growing up, there’d be jobs for everybody.” He wishes his relatives were “in a Mississippi field in the hot sun picking five hundred pounds of cotton a day. Old folks used to tell us, ‘Boy, you better mind how you walk. There’s trouble ahead and your days are numbered.’”

      When the Mundy family is invited to dinner with the Dubois family, the stage is set for a parody of social pretentions, ending in slapstick, and employing what Amy Corbin describes as a “Brechtian style” (2014, 40). The comparison is appropriate because Brecht’s “alienation effect” has something in common with satire and broad or crazy comedy. The Brechtian actor and the comic actor are equally antirealistic, concerned less with subtle emotions than with slightly exaggerated representations of social behavior, and the dinner scene fits this model nicely. Corbin notes that the dialogue, excellent for its purposes, has a stilted, unnatural quality (partly, I think, due to the acting style), and all the characters are depicted as social types. The setting, too, is somewhat antirealistic, designed to create an over-obvious air of stiffness, discomfort, and philistine excess. Seven characters are crowded around a relatively small but expensively appointed table in a dining room covered with elaborate blue and white wallpaper, which dominates the image. Burnett photographs the establishing shot with a long lens that flattens perspective and induces a slight claustrophobia. Mr. Dubois (Sy Richardson) sits at the head of the table, presiding over the occasion. A Latina servant wearing a vintage French maid’s uniform and cap stands at attention behind him. He begins the meal with a prayer, thanking “our Father” for “these new relationships” in a tone that suggests concealed distaste. Pierce is the only person at the table who doesn’t reverently bow his head and close his eyes.