It’s fair to say James Baldwin wasn’t a fan of The Exorcist. “It has absolutely nothing going for it,” he wrote in his 1976 memoir-meets-criticism collection The Devil Finds Work. “Except Satan, who is certainly the star.” William Friedkin’s 1973 horror hit about a possessed schoolgirl might have caused havoc in theatres, but for the African American literary giant it was a garish dud that missed the real target. “For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me,” he went on. “He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.”
Baldwin wasn’t an opportunist critic bashing a big commercial hit – he was an ardent cinephile whose obsession with film began as a young child in Harlem when a teacher called Orilla “Bill” Miller took him to see movies. Those early trips began a lifelong love affair. He went to the cinema whenever he could, to see everything from The Maltese Falcon to the 1959 lynching drama I Spit on Your Grave. Baldwin scholar Caryl Phillips said that while literature was his biggest love, “Baldwin discovered the cinema before he discovered books, and he never forgot the impact that these early movies had upon him.”
A new season at the Barbican in London hopes to put The Devil Finds Work into the conversation with the author’s better known nonfiction, such as the essay collections No Name in the Street and Nobody Knows My Name, by showing a series of films that are connected – thematically or more directly – with Baldwin’s work. Barry Jenkins, who directed 2017’s If Beale Street Could Talk, is taking part; while Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum and Steve McQueen’s Hunger are also screening, alongside a talk by young Black British film-makers Ayo Akingbade and Rhea Storr, who have both taken inspiration from Baldwin.
In The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin mentions about 60 films that he neatly weaves through vignettes from his life and observations about his main preoccupations: race and America. He recalls his father’s interest being piqued by Bette Davis, a white movie star who wasn’t his mother (“I had caught my father, not in a lie, but in an infirmity”) and offers his own slant on Margaret Farrand Thorp’s “escape personality” theory, which said golden age audiences saw themselves in the stars on screen. “No one makes his escape personality black.”
His most cutting critique is reserved for the interracial romance Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier’s doctor character tells his disapproving father: “You think of yourself as a coloured man. I think of myself as a man.” “Which means that a man exists only in the brutally limited lexicon of those who think of themselves as white,” Baldwin says.
Phillips says The Devil Finds Work is Baldwin’s most “underrated work of nonfiction”, while in 2014, the Atlantic called it “the most powerful piece of film criticism ever written”. Yet, even for many Baldwin fans, it sits outside the established canon. This year is Baldwin’s centenary , but while some of his books are being reissued by Penguin Classics, The Devil Finds Work isn’t among them.
The Barbican season’s curator Clive Chijioke Nwonka hopes that audiences will see a new side to Baldwin. “The documentaries we have like I Am Not Your Negro and Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, show him as a polemicist, but there are so many layers to him: he was an exceptional film critic and someone who truly understood the form.”
Only one of Baldwin’s novels was adapted for the screen in his lifetime. In 1985 – two years before his death from stomach cancer – there was a well-received TV adaptation of the writer’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. But it wasn’t until 1998, when French director Robert Guédiguian released À la Place du Coeur (Where the Heart Is) – inspired by If Beale Street Could Talk – that the writer’s work ended up on his beloved big screen. It took until 2018 for Baldwin’s work to be adapted in English, when Barry Jenkins made If Beale Street Could Talk, his follow-up to Moonlight.
Phillips doesn’t think it surprising that there’s such a dearth of adaptations; the literary worlds that Baldwin creates are often so expansive. “Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and Just Above My Head are sprawling novels that move over vast periods of time. They’re not easy to fit into 90 minutes of screen time. With the exception of Giovanni’s Room, all his books that were ripe for adaptation have been made.”
Nwonka has a different view. “Maybe they’re not right for film adaptation but all the novels are televisual,” he says. “We live in an age where projects can be spread over six or 12 episodes – with that kind of room, a showrunner could explore some of Baldwin’s worlds. I wasn’t sure The Underground Railroad was filmable, but look at what Barry Jenkins did with that.”
Baldwin “positively yearned” for the kind of exposure and fame only Hollywood could bring, according to Phillips, who said that if pushed Baldwin would have admitted he “craved an Oscar almost as much as he did a Pulitzer”. He certainly wasn’t shy about pitching his ideas to directors.
When on assignment to interview Ingmar Bergman for Esquire in 1960, he outlined a movie idea as the pair talked in the director’s office in Stockholm: “My film would begin with slaves boarding a good ship Jesus: a white ship on a dark sea, with masters as white as the sails of their ships and slaves as black as the ocean,” he wrote.
It was a story about an enslaved man who died on the middle passage protecting a woman who would have his child. The child would then grow up to lead a slave revolt only to be hanged but then reappear in every generation as a Reconstruction-era politician “murdered upon leaving Congress”; a first world war soldier who is “buried alive”; a jazz musician who goes mad; and finally a present-day incarnation who ended up as a “junkie”.
Like nearly all of Baldwin’s cinematic aspirations, the project was destined to be unfulfilled. This wasn’t for want of effort on the writer’s part. When Jenkins was working on Beale Street, Baldwin’s sister gave him a brown leatherbound notebook with a list of directors, including Gordon Parks and François Truffaut, whom he would have liked to direct the story, and notes on how he thought it should be made.
There were concrete offers too. Rainer Werner Fassbinder approached him about adapting Giovanni’s Room, as did the Black British film-maker Horace Ové, who shot a documentary of Baldwin’s time in London during the 1960s. Both men believed they’d secured the rights, but the author’s dislike of legal agreements and contracts meant that neither of them did and the film was never made. “Jimmy wasn’t a dotting the Is and crossing the Ts kind of guy,” says Phillips.
The trappings of Hollywood did appeal to Baldwin, though. At the peak of his fame in the 1960s, he became close friends with Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Richard Burton and Yves Montand. Baldwin hung out with Ava Gardner who once, he claimed, tried to convince him that she’d be the perfect person to play Billie Holiday – despite being white. When Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, Baldwin reportedly heard the news while poolside at Billy Dee Williams’s place in LA. He was in town working on a screenplay of Alex Haley’s Malcolm X autobiography, which was scuppered because of FBI interference (they insisted on reading every page Baldwin wrote) and because the studio was reportedly considering casting Charlton Heston as the Black revolutionary.
Perhaps the most tragic of his failed film projects was his final attempt to get Giovanni’s Room made. The British director Michael Raeburn and Baldwin worked on a script in the late 1970s. After a meeting in Paris involving decoy limousines, Marlon Brando was pencilled in to play Guillaume, the bisexual main character, while Robert De Niro was also reportedly interested. But as with earlier efforts, interest fizzled out and the 211-page script sat in Raeburn’s London flat for 40 years. “There’s no way that would have been made,” says Phillips. “Even if it was eminently filmable, because of how homophobic the industry was.”
Despite that disappointment, there is a Baldwin biopic in the works starring Billy Porter, although the actor’s recent interview with the Guardian showed a level of political awareness some distance behind the great writer’s. Even if that project is destined to be hit by the Baldwin curse, the Barbican’s new programme will give a deeper dive into a thinker whose first love was always film.
The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin Through Film is at the Barbican, London, 2-22 May
