To Sleep with Anger

The trailblazing African American director Charles Burnett’s third feature, To Sleep with Anger (1990), was his biggest production to date, albeit still made on a modest budget of $1.4 million, a significant portion of which was raised through the attachment of its star and executive producer, Danny Glover. At that point, on the heels of the first two Lethal Weapon films, Glover was a genuine Hollywood attraction, but To Sleep with Anger stands in stark contrast to the explosive antics of Riggs and Murtaugh. It is a quiet, nuanced, and utterly beguiling drama of family and folklore, featuring Glover as Harry Mention, an enigmatic drifter who one day arrives at the home of a middle-class black family in South Central Los Angeles. To Sleep with Anger’s startling flirtation with magic realism in an identifiably middle-class setting signaled a fresh departure for a filmmaker hitherto associated with brusquely naturalistic—if also gorgeously poetic—portraits of working-class African American families. Burnett had first come to attention with his 1977 UCLA thesis film, Killer of Sheep, a stark, black-and-white drama set in LA’s impoverished Watts neighborhood, in which the eponymous character (played with agonizing vulnerability by Henry G. Sanders) is a soul-deadened abattoir employee, drained of his joie de vivreby his social and economic surroundings. These surroundings were intimately familiar to Burnett, who as a small child in 1947 moved north with his family from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Watts, where he grew up.

This perfection was noted by a number of critics at the time, including the Chicago Tribune’s Dave Kehr, who branded To Sleep with Anger “the first great film to come our way in quite a while.” And yet the film’s release was botched by [opening] it on a mere handful of screens and marketed it as an art-house curiosity rather than as a film that would have much wider appeal, particularly for black audiences. Consequently, it endured a fate similar to that of other unorthodox yet hardly impenetrable works by independent black filmmakers of the period, such as Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris Jr., 1989), and Sidewalk Stories (Charles Lane, 1989): high critical praise, box-office oblivion, and, for decades, a dismayingly low profile.