OMISSION IMPOSSIBLE. That was the front-page headline in the New York Post a quarter-century ago when Steven Spielberg was snubbed for a Best Director nomination for what is still his most controversial film. “The Color Purple” collected 11 nods, including those for the extraordinary big-screen acting debuts of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. But not for Spielberg.
Warner Bros., which is debuting “The Color Purple” on Blu-ray simultaneously with tomorrow’s Oscar nominations, issued an unprecedented statement back in 1986 expressing “sincere appreciation” for the 11 nods, adding that “at the same time, the company is shocked and dismayed that the movie’s primary creative force — Steven Spielberg — was not recognized.”
In this pre Time-Warner era, Warner Communciations founder and honcho Steve Ross was trying hard to get Spielberg to move into Frank Sinatra’s old digs on was then known as the Burbank Studios lot (shared with a pre-Sony Columbia), but even after bankrolling another ambitious Spielberg film at Warner (“Empire of the Sun”), the filmmaker stayed put at Universal, where his offices are still located even though Spielberg has his own studio, DreamWorks.
As frequently happened in the decades when there were five nominees for both Best Picture and Best Picture, there was a four-for-five match, with Spielberg passed over in favor of Akira Kurosawa for “Ran.” (Spielberg did win the Director’s Guild of America award, normally considered the single most predicive precusor of the Oscars).
Thanks to the Blu-ray, I’ve watched “The Color Purple” in its entirety for the first time since a press screening in December 1985. I wasn’t a big fan at the time — I was not alone in comparing Spielberg and cinematographer Allen Daviau’s picture-postcard vistas of North Carolina (including the town where my daughter Xan lived for several years, Marshville) with “The Song of the South” — except for Winfrey’s incredibly moving performance, but at a distance of 25 years it’s easier to see there is much else to savor in what Spielberg considered his first adult film.
As Spielberg says in Laurent Bouzereau’s excellent making-of documentary ported over from WHV’s 2003 DVD special edition, “The Color Purple” received mostly mixed to negative reviews. Some of the positive ones were so over the top (“it should be against the law not to see “The Color Purple,’ proclaimed Gene Shalit) they were hard to take seriously. The film sold an impressive $98 million worth of tickets in North America on a reported budget of $15 million.
The major rap against “The Color Purple” is that it’s bright and upbeat (especially the ending) where Alice Walker’s novel is dark and gritty — that Spielberg, up until then a pureyor of hugely popular entertainments like “E.T.” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” sugar-coats the themes of domestic abuse and incest in Alice Walker’s novel and Spielberg manipulates the viewer (greatly abetted by co-producer Quincy Jones’ score) in scene after scene.
I can’t really argue with that, but that isn’t to say there isn’t lots of honest emotion in the story of Celie, who we first meet as a 14-year-old in 1909, pregnant for a second time with a child by a man she believes is her father (shades of “Precious”). She’s shortly separated (for three decades) from her children and the main bright spot in Celie’s life, her sister Nettie.
Goldberg begins playing Celie sometime in the 1920s, after the character has been married against her will to the abusive Albert (top-billed Danny Glover in his first lead role), a widower who uses her for sex and to take care of his children (who do not seem to age as the same rate as the leads). His many acts of cruelty include hiding all of the letters she receives from Nettie over the years.
Albert has long been in love with Shug (the remarkable Margaret Avery), a jazz singer (Avery, Spielberg’s second choice after Tina Turner passed, had her singing dubbed) who moves in with Albert and Celie to recover from an illness. The book goes into great detail about the bisexual relationship that develops between Celie and Shug, something the PG-rated movie barely hints at. Shug helps Celie find the hidden letters and find the strength to finally stand up to Albert.
Winfrey is showcased in the movie’s major subplot, playing Sofia, the pregnant bride of Albert’s comical son Harpo from his earlier marriage. Then an anchor on “AM Chicago,” Winfrey nails the role of the proudly independent and two-fisted Sofia, whose unwisely pugnacious encounter with a white mayor and his wife triggers decades of poignant tragedy. Even Spielberg’s ill-advised insertion of slapstick comedy can’t ruin Winfrey’s big scene in the movie, when she is forced to abruptly leave a joyous Christmas Eve reunion with a family she hasn’t seen in years. A few months after the film’s release, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” debuted in national syndication; the rest is history.
Goldberg, who won a Golden Globe, received her well-deserved Best Actress Oscar nomination for her subtle and nuanced interpretation of Celie, losing to Geraldine Page (“The Trip to Bountiful”), finally winning in her eighth and final try. Winfrey and Avery were both nominated for Best Supporting Actress, where the prize went to the heavily-favored Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”
The Best Picture and Best Director Oscars went to the deeply mediocre “Out of Africa,” a movie that holds up much less well after a quarter-century than “The Color Purple,” which went 0-for-11 on Oscar night. As the digibook accompany the Blu-ray notes, it’s record “The Color Point” still shares with “The Turning Point” (1977) — though the book fails to note that director Herbert Ross was nominated for that one.
“The Color Purple” marked a turning point in Spielberg’s career. Though he had already optioned “Schindler’s List” it would be another nine years before he put the lessons he learned on “The Color Purple” to use on his Oscar-winning masterpiece about the Holocaust.
