All God's Children (1980 TV Movie) User Reviews

The risk of white flight.

[mark.waltz · 10/10 · 6 January 2022]

"When a white boy and a black boy get to be friends, there's going to be trouble." So says Ruby Dee, the mother of a black teenager who may be dead after a bus accident where her son and a white team, in protest over school busing controversies, stole a bus and accidentally drove off a bridge. That's the opening scene, and the rest of this TV movie combines flashbacks with the parents of the teens waiting at a coroner's office to find out which one of their sons is dead. The two teens have been friends forever, and now that they are in young adulthood, that friendship is compromised because of the politics of the adults around them.

Dee is joined here by real life husband Ossie Davis as her onscreen husband, and of course, these two stage trained actors are outstanding. In a scene with Ned Beatty who plays the father of the white boy, Davis explains how circumstances beyond their control have led the races to this point, and no matter how good they try to be to each other, there's always going to be an unspoken issue. He later has a scene with Richard Widmark who plays a judge in the case of the busing issue where they discuss in order to further issues, and it's incredible how wise this script is and how easy it is once the conversation is started, but it takes a lot to get to that conversation.

Fredric Lehne and George Spell are outstanding as the two teenagers torn apart by this issue, and who are apart of the generation whose futures are going to be the ones mainly affected by this bussing issue. There are many wise well-thought-out discussions over racial issues, some based on assumptions, others based on philosophy and some based on statistics. The two boys who are really young men are the ones who have the answers because their friendship is real and they don't have the jaded prejudices of the older generation, just things in common that has made them brothers.

The performances are uniformly excellent, with even the most unlikable of the adults understandable because they have been manipulated in society to think the way that they do, and they are not exactly the types of racists who are a danger to society outside of their own ignorance. Beatty, in particular, is outstanding especially in a drunken rant where he tells off Widmark and his secretary, and the presence of an old man in court giving Widmark the raspberry is not only a moment made for comical relief but to strike a cord in the staid judge to really make him think. You may not be able to leave the world to fully change, but you may be able to make it think. Why this movie is not considered one of the all-time TV classics is beyond me.

The problem of American racism in a nutshell that bursts open

[clanciai · 9/10 · 21 January 2024]

At first sight this seems like a triviality, two boys hijacking a school bus at night for some kind of a practical joke, quite innocent, but the brakes of the bus don't work, and there is a terrible accident. You would think that both boys would have perished, but they only find one body, and the other boy must have escaped and left it all behind, too scared to be able to return to school. That's the framework. Gradually the story behind this practical joke emerges by flashbacks, the two boys were really friends as good a brothers, but one was white and the other black. Gradually the whole complex of the racism problem emerges to take charge of the film.

Why did they decide on this practical joke? They just wanted to drive the bus out of range and paint it pink for a demonstration, against the fact that the society had decided to separate them by sending one of them to another school by a long bus line. The boys didn't go for it but decided to make a mark.

Richard Widmark is the local judge in one of his later profoundly interesting roles, who has to face the general discontent of the locals about forcing white and coloured boys to share the same education. He is jeered at, but his character and conclusions outlast the film, which is not complete when he leaves the office, leaving the parents and the audience wondering. We hear a crying mother, and that is all - although one boy survived, the fact is that both boys were lost, for their friendship's sake, which their society denied them.