The Color Purple (1985 film)

Celie is an African-American teenager in early 20th-century rural Georgia who twice has borne children by her abusive father, which were taken from her. He gives her away as a wife to Mister, who also abuses her, and his children mistreat her. Celie's loving younger sister, Nettie, runs away from their abusive father and seeks shelter with Celie. The sisters promise to write if they are separated. Mister attempts to rape Nettie, and he kicks her out after she fights him off. Years later, Celie is meek from abuse. Mister's son Harpo marries Sofia, and Celie is shocked to find theirs to be a matriarchal household. Harpo attempts to overpower and strike Sofia, but he fails. Celie advises Harpo to beat Sofia, who retaliates and later confronts Celie, revealing her long history of abuse. She threatens to kill Harpo if he beats her again and tells Celie to do likewise to Mister. Harpo does not change, so Sofia leaves, taking their children with her. Mister and Harpo bring home the ailing Shug Avery, a showgirl and Mister's long-time mistress. Celie, who has slowly developed a fondness for her through a photograph sent to Mister, is in awe of Shug's strong will. Celie nurses Shug back to health; Shug in turn takes a liking to her, writing and performing a song about her at Harpo's newly opened juke joint. Shug tells Celie she is moving to Memphis, and Celie confides to Shug that Mister beats her. Shug tells Celie she is beautiful and that she loves her, and they kiss. Celie packs her things to follow Shug to Memphis but gets caught by Mister. Meanwhile, Sofia has been imprisoned for striking the town's mayor after he slaps her for speaking back to his wife Ms. Millie. Years pass, and she, now a shell of her former self, is released from prisononly to be immediately ordered by the judge to become a maid to Ms. Millie. Having not seen her children in eight years, Sofia is allotted Christmas to be with her family. When Ms. Millie tries to drive her, she panics and turns around after encountering a group of Sofia's family and friends, who were only trying to help her. Shug returns to Celie and Mister's home with her new husband Grady, expecting to receive a recording contract. She gives Celie a letter from Nettie, who tells her that she is working for the couple who adopted Celie's children. Celie and Shug realize that Mister has been hiding Nettie's letters from Celie so, while he and Grady are out drinking, they search the house. They find a hidden compartment under the floorboards filled with dozens and dozens of Nettie's letters. Engrossed in reading, Celie does not hear Mister's calls to shave him, so he beats her. She attempts to kill Mister with his straight razor, but Shug stops her. At a family gathering, Celie finally speaks up against Mister, putting a "curse" on him much to the delight of Shug and Sofia. This fighting spirit prompts Harpo's new wife Mary Agnes to stand up for herself as well. Shug and Grady drive away, taking Celie and Mary Agnes with them. Years later, Mister is an old drunk and suffering alone while Harpo has made amends with Sofia; they now run the juke joint together, and Shug still performs there as a featured act. Upon Celie's father's death, she finally learns from Nettie's letters he was not their biological father. When their mother died, "his" property was legally inherited by Celie and Nettie. So, she receives the home and shop that had belonged to her father. Celie begins to operate a tailor shop. When Mister receives a letter from Nettie addressed to Celie, he takes money from his secret stash, and arranges for Nettie, her husband, and Celie's children to return to the U.S. from Africa, where they had been living. While Mister watches from a distance, Celie, Nettie, and Celie's children reunite, and the two sisters bond over a hand-clapping game from their childhood. ==Cast==

Development Alice Walker was initially reluctant to sell the film rights to her novel The Color Purple, due to Hollywood's portrayal of female and African American characters. She only agreed to executive producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber's offer after consulting with friends, who agreed the only way to improve representation of minorities was to work within the system. Walker's contract stipulated that she would serve as project consultant and that 50% of the production team, aside from the cast, would be African American, female or "people of the Third World". Casting was known primarily as a stage performer when she was cast as Celie Harris.|thumb|right Rather than cast established stars, Walker sought out lesser-known actors to play the principal roles, since their rise from obscurity represented the experience of characters in her novels. Oprah later said she had chosen the film as it had special meaning in her life. After lobbying producers for the part, 29-year-old Goldberg was personally selected by Walker after she saw her stand-up. Other cast members, such as Danny Glover, Adolph Caesar, and Carl Anderson, were predominantly stage performers. Akosua Busia was a graduate of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and the daughter of Ghanaian prime minister Kofi Abrefa Busia. Goldberg's real-life daughter Alex Martin has a minor role as one of the children in the Easter sequence. Margaret Avery was a veteran actress who had previously won an NAACP Image Award for the made-for-television film Louis Armstrong – Chicago Style. Spielberg had pursued singers Chaka Khan and Tina Turner but both turned it down. Patti LaBelle and Sheryl Lee Ralph also auditioned, and Phyllis Hyman was considered. Though Avery had prior musical experience, her singing voice was dubbed by Táta Vega. Filming While the novel was based on Walker's childhood home of Eatonton, Georgia, the film was shot predominantly in James C. Bennett's house, located in Lilesville (Anson County), and Union County in North Carolina during the summer months. Sets were constructed at an Antebellum-era plantation outside Wadesboro, while the town of Marshville had its paved roads covered in mud and clay to match the early 20th-century setting. The church was a real 60-year-old Baptist chapel that was moved piece-by-piece from its original location. Due to the summer heat, the winter sequences were shot with fabricated snow. Additional scenes were filmed on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot, and a second unit led by Frank Marshall traveled to Kenya to shoot scenes in Nairobi and in the Maasai regions. Spielberg encouraged both Goldberg and Winfrey to ad lib during filming, including Sofia's speech at the dinner table. Quincy Jones' insistence on giving more dialogue to Winfrey sparked an apparent feud between her and Goldberg that lasted several years afterwards. ==Soundtrack==

The Color Purple's film score was written by Quincy Jones, the first feature film directed by Spielberg for which John Williams did not compose the music. The score combines elements of classical and period jazz, blues, and gospel, and features several popular songs of the era. The track Miss Celie's Blues (Sister), performed in the film by the character Shug (Avery; dubbed by Táta Vega), later gained popularity as a concert piece. Due to his dual responsibilities as both producer and composer, Jones delegated many of the tasks to a team of eleven other musicians and arrangers. This led to a dispute during the Academy Awards over the nominees for Best Original Score. While Jones is the sole credited composer of the film, the nomination lists all twelve musicians (Jones, Chris Boardman, Jorge Calandrelli, Andraé Crouch, Jack Hayes, Jerry Hey, Randy Kerber, Jeremy Lubbock, Joel Rosenbaum, Caiphus Semenya, Fred Steiner and Rod Temperton). ==Release==

The Color Purple premiered on December 18, 1985, in Los Angeles. However, the premiere was picketed by members of the NAACP for its depiction of rape. The film went into general release in the United States on February 7, 1986. ==Reception==

Box office The Color Purple was a success at the box office, staying in U.S. theaters for 21 weeks, In terms of box office income, it ranked as the number one rated PG-13 film released in 1985, and number four overall. Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 73% based on 125 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "It might have been better served by a filmmaker with a deeper connection to the source material, but The Color Purple remains a worthy, well-acted adaptation of Alice Walker's classic novel." On Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 78 out of 100 based on seven critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film four stars, calling it "the year's best film". He also praised Whoopi Goldberg, calling her role "one of the most amazing debut performances in movie history" and predicting she would win the Academy Award for Best Actress; she was nominated but lost to Geraldine Page, for her performance in The Trip to Bountiful. Ebert wrote of The Color Purple: Ebert's long-time television collaborator, Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, praised the film as "triumphantly emotional and brave", calling it Spielberg's "successful attempt to enlarge his reputation as a director of youthful entertainments." Siskel wrote that The Color Purple was "a plea for respect for black women." Although acknowledging that the film was a period drama, he praised its "...incredibly strong stand against the way black men treat black women. Cruel is too kind a word to describe their behavior. The principal black men in The Color Purple use their womenboth wives and daughtersas sexual chattel." The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin noted the film's divergence from Walker's book, but made the case that this shift works: James Greenberg for Variety found the film over-sentimental, writing, "there are some great scenes and great performances in The Color Purple, but it is not a great film. Steven Spielberg's turn at 'serious' film-making is marred in more than one place by overblown production that threatens to drown in its own emotions." Filmmaker Oliver Stone praised the film, saying it is "an excellent movie, and it was an attempt to deal with an issue that had been overlooked, and it wouldn't have been done if it hadn't been Spielberg. And it's not like everyone says, that he ruined the book. That's horseshit. Nobody was going to do the book. He made the book live again." In 2004, Ebert included The Color Purple in his book series The Great Movies. He stated that "I can see its flaws more easily than when I named it the best film of 1985, but I can also understand why it moved me so deeply, and why the greatness of some films depends not on their perfection or logic, but on their heart." In 2019, actress and singer Cynthia Erivo, who played Celie in the 2015 Broadway revival of the stage musical adaptation, named it as one of her five favorite films, saying that it "changed her life." Controversy In addition, some critics alleged that the film stereotyped black people in general and black men in particular, In response, Spielberg said, "Most of the criticism came from directors [who] felt that we had overlooked them, and that it should have been a black director telling a black story. That was the main criticism. The other criticism was that I had softened the book. I have always copped to that. I made the movie I wanted to make from Alice Walker's book. There were certain things in the [lesbian] relationship between Shug Avery and Celie that were finely detailed in Alice's book, that I didn't feel could get a [PG-13] rating. And I was shy about it. In that sense, perhaps I was the wrong director to acquit some of the more sexually honest encounters between Shug and Celie, because I did soften those. I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss. I got a lot of criticism for that." During the time and since then it has had an intense debate among civil rights activists, commentators, and film critics. The NAACP accused the film of "stereotypical portrayals of black males". Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune wrote, "It was a debate that divided much of the nation's black intelligentsia against itself. Author James Baldwin accused the movie and its director, Steven Spielberg, of mangling the poetic vision of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Black feminist Michele Wallace said the movie smothered Walker's feminist message in syrupy Disney-like sentimentality. Black author Ishmael Reed... called the book a near-criminal assault on black family life and heterosexual relationships." In 2022, writer Aisha Harris revisited the controversy on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour saying, "when it first came out, there was a lot of tension and debate about how it depicted Black men and Black women and the Black family". Harris later detailed, "nearly all of the Black men in the movie are depicted as cold-hearted, violent abusers. To some audiences, especially Black men, The Color Purple was the mainstream reinforcement of a deeply damaging and persistent perception". The film was fiercely defended by its stars including Oprah Winfrey who said, "It's one woman's story. It was not meant to be the history of every black man or woman in this country and I wish they'd just shut up about it". Whoopi Goldberg said "We got a lot of shit from a lot of people [and] the NAACP... I was really pissed off. [Spielberg] made a damn fine film". ==Accolades==

The Color Purple was nominated for 11 Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Best Actress for Goldberg and Best Supporting Actress for both Avery and Winfrey). It failed to win any of them, tying the record set by 1977's The Turning Point for the most Oscar nominations without a single win. Some organizations such as the NAACP protested against the decision of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to not award the film any categories. ==Musical film adaptation==

On November 2, 2018, it was announced that a film adaptation of the 2005 stage musical version was in development. Spielberg and Jones returned to co-produce, alongside the stage production's producers Winfrey and Scott Sanders. On August 25, 2020, it was announced that Marcus Gardley would pen the screenplay and Black is King's Blitz Bazawule would direct. On December 23, 2020, it was announced that Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Carla Gardini and Mara Jacobs would executive produce. H.E.R. and Corey Hawkins were cast in August 2021. The film was released on December 25, 2023. ==See also==