To Sleep with Anger

Harry being charming

Between Lethal Weapon 2 and Predator 2 Danny Glover starred in To Sleep with Anger, a genre film of an entirely different stripe, masquerading as a domestic drama about an extended family of black folk. Glover plays Harry, an old-school charmer with Southern manners, who after many years of absence arrives back in the lives of old friend Gideon and his wife Suzie. Gideon invites his old childhood friend to stay and Harry soon has his feet well under the table. Writer/director Charles Burnett spends time detailing the extended family Harry finds himself among. It’s a slightly soapy portrait of a large group of people who get along just fine though not entirely … Read more

Killer of Sheep

Henry Sanders as Stan

Charles Burnett’s movie Killer of Sheep was shot in 1972 and 1973, mostly at weekends, didn’t get shown until 1978 and then vanished for about three decades even though it had had rave reviews from the few people who’d seen it and had been selected for preservation in 1990 by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. The reason for its disappearance? Burnett had made it on a budget, guerrilla style, not bothering with shooting permits or anything official. Nor did he bother sorting out the music rights, and its eclectic mix of music (Dinah Washington and Scott Joplin to Earth, Wind and Fire and Rachmaninoff) is the backbone … Read more