A Raisin in the Sun (Paman-Doris Productions, Columbia, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 31) my husband Charles and I watched the 1961 film of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Daniel Petrie and written by Lorraine Hansberry based on her New York Drama Critics’ Circle award-winning 1959 play. The movie was co-produced by David Susskind, who then hosted a show called Open End, later The David Susskind Show, on what was then “National Educational Television” and later became PBS, and became so famous for interrupting his guests that Allan Sherman recorded a satire of him that began, “Mr. David Susskind, shut up.” Susskind also hosted the film’s trailer, which began with the title “A Message to Moviegoers from David Susskind.” That will give you a good idea of how this film was marketed in the racial and political ferment of its time: not as light entertainment but as cinematic medicine that you should see for your own good. I had an odd relationship to the film of A Raisin in the Sun because its producing studios, Paman-Doris Productions and Columbia Pictures, cut it up into 10- to 20-minute segments and offered those to high schools as educational films about the lives of Black people – and during my days in high school (1966-1970) these were regularly trotted out and shown during periods of heavy racial unrest, which in the late 1960’s was virtually all the time. So I had the weird experience of having seen this film in bits and pieces well before I had the chance to see it start-to-finish. A Raisin in the Sun was originally written by Lorraine Hansberry based on an incident she experienced in her childhood: her parents had made an offer on a modestly priced house in a suburb of Chicago and ran afoul of the so-called “restrictive covenants” through which neighborhoods tried to keep themselves all-white by requiring new home buyers to sign agreements promising that they would never sell their home to Blacks. The Hansberrys were offered a sum of money greater than what they’d put up as a down payment for the house to sell it back to a so-called “Neighborhood Improvement Association” so they could make sure it stayed in white hands. They were supported by the white family which had sold them the house in the first place, and one writer about the incident, which took place in 1934, suggested that the reason the white owners were willing to sell to a Black family was that because of the Depression they just didn’t get a high enough offer from white buyers.

Lorraine Hansberry remembered this injustice from her childhood and, as a grown woman, decided to write a play about it after she moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1950’s. Though she married a white man, Robert Nemiroff (who became her literary executor after her death from cancer in 1965), Hansberry was also a closeted Lesbian who contributed two articles (signed only with initials) to The Ladder, the pioneering publication of the Lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis. The story takes place in a low-budget but decent and clean apartment on the south side of Chicago (the city’s historically Black neighborhood) and centers around the Younger family. The Youngers are headed by matriarchal grandmother Lena Younger (Claudia McNeil), who lives in the apartment with her two adult children, son Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier) and daughter Beneatha (Diana Sands); Walter’s wife Ruth (Ruby Dee); and their son Travis (Stephen Perry). Walter Lee is a scapegrace who likes to hang out at the local Black bar, the Kitty Kat Club (a name which seems almost risible now since the bar in the musical Cabaret was called the Kit Kat Club), with his two disreputable friends, Bobo (Joel Fluellen) and Willie Harris (Roy Glenn). The conflicts within the Younger family boil over when Lena’s husband dies and the remaining Youngers anxiously await the $10,000 check from his life insurance policy. Lena wants to use the money to buy the family a house of their own, and she does so in a previously all-white neighborhood only because the houses in Black or integrated neighborhoods are priced too high for their budget. Walter Lee wants to use some of the money to open up a liquor store with Bobo and Willie as partners, which evokes understandable moral revulsion from Lena, who is a God-fearing woman who doesn’t want any of her or her late husband’s money to be used for a business that disreputable. Walter’s sister Beneatha wants to use some of the money to finance going to medical school so she can become a doctor. Beneatha, who I suspect is the character Hansberry modeled after herself, also wants the family to be more aware of the African-American civil rights struggle and she wants to reconnect with her African roots. Accordingly, there’s a scene in which Beneatha turns off the family phonograph when it’s playing an instrumental rock ‘n’ roll record and says, “Enough of this assimilationist junk!” Then she replaces it with a record of African drums, and Walter gets into the spirit and starts drumming on various tables and countertops while imitating the African cries Beneatha starts making along with the record.

Eventually the check arrives and Lena cashes it and uses $3,500 for the down payment on the house, and she gives the rest to Walter with instructions to open two bank accounts with it, $3,000 in Beneatha’s name for her college fund and the rest for himself to live on and deposit his earnings as chauffeur for a white man we never see. Of course we can guess what Walter does with the money; instead of opening the accounts he gives all of it, including the $3,000 that was supposed to fund Beneatha’s education, to Willie Harris to invest in the liquor store. Willie insisted that he needed the money in cash to go to Springfield, the state capital, to bribe the state inspectors to come through with the needed licenses. To no one’s surprise except Walter’s and Bobo’s, Willie turns out to be a scam artist who absconds with the money. Other plot threads include Beneatha’s growing disinsterest in her African-American boyfriend George Murchison (a very young Louis Gossett, Jr. in his first feature film) and her growing interest in African exchange student Joseph Asagai (Ivan Dixon), who wants Beneatha to marry him and move together to his native Nigeria. Just as the Youngers are preparing to move to previously all-white Clyburn Park, an unassuming white guy named Mark Lindner (played by John Fielder, whose whole stock in trade was naïve niceness) shows up from the “Clyburn Park Improvement Association” and offers them a good amount more than they paid for the house in if they’ll sell their house to the Improvement Association so they in turn can sell it to a white buyer. Hansberry’s writing and Fielder’s playing of this character are spot-on, especially when he denies being a racist even while he’s pushing a racist agenda and we, the Youngers and he himself all know that’s exactly what he’s doing. (In 1948, 11 years before A Raisin in the Sun debuted on stage and 13 years before the film was made, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case called Shelley v. Kraemer, had ruled in a roundabout way that restrictive racial covenants of the kinds that had screwed over Hansberry’s parents were unconstitutional; the court didn’t outright say that such covenants were illegal, but it ruled they could no longer be enforced in the courts.) The first time Lindner shows up with his offer, the Youngers righteously turn him down and throw him out. Later, after Walter loses what’s left of the insurance money, he calls Lindner and tells him they’ll take his offer – only, in the film’s famous finale, the Youngers once again refuse him and insist they’re moving into the house even though, without the remaining insurance money, Lena and her sister-in-law Ruth will have to do that much more housecleaning and washing for white families to make the house payments.

One of the things I like best about A Raisin in the Sun is that there are no cardboard characters; the people in the story emerge as real flesh-and-blood humans, and even the ones we like act in ways that make us think they could be “real handfuls” in actual life. Another thing I’ve long enjoyed about this film is it gave Sidney Poitier a chance to play an unsympathetic role; here he’s not the Black man you would want your white daughter or sister to marry, but a deeply flawed individual with the proverbial feet of clay. It’s one of my two favorite Sidney Poitier films. (The other is To Sir, With Love, because in that one – which cast Poitier as a teacher who tames a rebellious high-school class – there’s nothing in the plot that requires Poitier’s character to be Black: he’s Black only because the actor playing him is. It makes me miss all the more a film Poitier never made: a 1960’s remake of Fritz Lang’s Fury. In the 1936 original Spencer Tracy played a white man who barely survives a lynching and returns as an embittered revenge figure. For years Lang told interviewers he had asked the studio, MGM, to allow him to make that character Black; while biographers like Patrick McGilligan pointed out how impossible that would have been in 1930’s Hollywood, that begs the question of why Lang didn’t seek to remake it in the 1960’s, when he could have used a Black protagonist and Poitier would have been perfect for the role.) A Raisin in the Sun has its flaws; the piece betrays its stage origins in almost never leaving that damned apartment set (when Walter sneaks out to the Kitty Kat Club, we know it’s to indulge the bad side of his character but we’re also relieved that he’s taking us someplace else!), and Daniel Petrie is a functional director rather than a great one. When Claudia McNeil as Lena has to react to the news that Walter has lost all her late husband’s insurance money, she overplays the scene so relentlessly I was tempted to joke, “I’m going to prove that Black people have as much of a right to overact as whites!” For the most part, however, it’s a finely honed piece of drama that holds up amazingly well – even though Charles was surprised that, though the film critiques racism, it says virtually nothing about sexism even though its author was a Black woman, and a woman-loving Black woman at that!