If quality of film is to be measured by the size of the budget than Bright Road is pretty inconsequential. But a big budget production would have overwhelmed the beauty of this story about a dedicated black school teacher in rural Alabama of the Fifties. Dorothy Dandridge is nothing short of brilliant in the part of the teacher.
As much as the story is crucial to the film, so is the location. Remember this is Alabama right before the Civil Rights era and Bright Road gives you a really good look at what the kids there have to endure to get any kind of education. It paints a very good picture about just what the related integration cases that were compacted into Brown vs. the Board of Education were all about, that separate is inherently unequal. Still principal Harry Belafonte makes do with what he has and staff like Dandridge don't come better.
The juvenile leads of Philip Hepburn and Barbara Ann Sanders are real kids and not Hollywood kids. Hepburn is the slow kid in the class, but Dandridge sees something in him. She works to get him out of his shell, but then the death of young Ms. Sanders who he was close to, threatens to blow up all the progress she's made.
For Dandridge's character the writers and director borrowed the not often used technique from Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude with her thoughts being voiced over the dialog, especially when it concerns young Mr. Hepburn. It was effectively utilized in this film.
Children do have dreams and they pretty much run the same regardless of race. The wonder of Sleeping Beauty especially with music by Tschaikovsky knows no boundaries. Young Ms. Sanders dreams of being a princess and so she is in a class production of Sleeping Beauty. One of the most effective displays of the unequalness and yet the beauty of the film situation is the badly tuned rickety school piano being utilized for the Sleeping Beauty production. This rural black school probably hasn't had a new piano in decades or can afford a piano tuner for the one they have.
When young Ms. Sanders is discovered to have viral pneumonia, she's lucky to find a doctor, any doctor to treat her. Robert Horton is brought in, probably too late and more than likely because there is a scarcity of black physicians and finding a white doctor to treat a black child in 1953 Alabama was rare indeed. Yet there is beauty because the young girl really does die the princess she dreams of being. I defy anyone to stop the tears watching this film.
Bright Road is a beautiful and sadly accurate picture of a troubled place and time in America. But like Tschaikovsky's music it is a timeless work.
As much as the story is crucial to the film, so is the location. Remember this is Alabama right before the Civil Rights era and Bright Road gives you a really good look at what the kids there have to endure to get any kind of education. It paints a very good picture about just what the related integration cases that were compacted into Brown vs. the Board of Education were all about, that separate is inherently unequal. Still principal Harry Belafonte makes do with what he has and staff like Dandridge don't come better.
The juvenile leads of Philip Hepburn and Barbara Ann Sanders are real kids and not Hollywood kids. Hepburn is the slow kid in the class, but Dandridge sees something in him. She works to get him out of his shell, but then the death of young Ms. Sanders who he was close to, threatens to blow up all the progress she's made.
For Dandridge's character the writers and director borrowed the not often used technique from Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude with her thoughts being voiced over the dialog, especially when it concerns young Mr. Hepburn. It was effectively utilized in this film.
Children do have dreams and they pretty much run the same regardless of race. The wonder of Sleeping Beauty especially with music by Tschaikovsky knows no boundaries. Young Ms. Sanders dreams of being a princess and so she is in a class production of Sleeping Beauty. One of the most effective displays of the unequalness and yet the beauty of the film situation is the badly tuned rickety school piano being utilized for the Sleeping Beauty production. This rural black school probably hasn't had a new piano in decades or can afford a piano tuner for the one they have.
When young Ms. Sanders is discovered to have viral pneumonia, she's lucky to find a doctor, any doctor to treat her. Robert Horton is brought in, probably too late and more than likely because there is a scarcity of black physicians and finding a white doctor to treat a black child in 1953 Alabama was rare indeed. Yet there is beauty because the young girl really does die the princess she dreams of being. I defy anyone to stop the tears watching this film.
Bright Road is a beautiful and sadly accurate picture of a troubled place and time in America. But like Tschaikovsky's music it is a timeless work.