Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored

"Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored" is a nice movie. It's tame, calm, and largely uneventful which makes it nothing more than nice. It's about a Black boy's growing up in the South during the Jim Crow era. It's devoid of any real drama considering we're talking about Black folks trying to survive in the South. The movie has some fine actors in it and I believe they did the best they could with the script. Unfortunately, it was a weak script. I think this movie would've done well as a book, but not all books need to be made into movies.

This was a very nice, scaled down version of how it really was in the Deep South. The movie did not even begin to depict the real horror Blacks faced each day. There was just a hint of the KKK, Jim Crow and the plantation mentality Blacks had to endure. I kept waiting for those historical, explosive events, we all knew to be the law of the land, to explode onto the screen, but it never happened.

Life was unbearable; Blacks were looked upon as animals and treated as such. I walked away from this movie feeling like life was almost a bowl of cherries.

I find it so odd that people are tired of hearing about the Black experience but never get tired of all the holocaust movies. 6 million Jews were slaughtered over a 6 year period (approx) -- hundreds of thousand Blacks were hung, beaten, raped, shot, humiliated and abused to death over a period of 150+ years, not to mention the suicides that took place on the slave ships in route to America. Admittedly, the holocaust was an atrocity, hopefully never to be repeated, while discrimination of Blacks is still a reality. Too bad there are no great movies that tell the Black Plight the way it should be told.

I kept waiting for the bad moments to happen, as so often they do in these reminiscent movies of growing up in the south, yet no real drama occurred. These were moments pieced together, and if that was the intent--it worked. True, a child's reflection of childhood would be pieces of memory chained loosely together, impressions of events, people, and times. However, when the movie ended I thought, "That's it?" There were fine performances; however, the plot seemed to soft-step around the real issues, such as the Jim Crow laws, segregated schooling, subservient wages, and escaping to the north to avoid the subjugation. We got breadth, when depth might have made a much more interesting plot line.

It just touchdown little things that happened in the era didn't really stick to any things. And when it came to the very ending they could have delved into that a little more but they didn't. One thing that irritates me the most is that the lead character has a pretty terrible mother and it wasn't acknowledged in any way if this is a true story I wonder how he feels about the end result which sadly he probably like because it was an All-Star cast

The author's stated intention was to show the family that nourished him and protected him from the world of hatred and segregation. The film showed just enough of the segregated life to let the viewer know that Cliff needed to be protected from that world and nurtured to overcome the scars that outside world could inflict. I think Taulbert and the movie did a good job of showing how the love of his immediate and extended family could compensate in some way for the hatred and oppression of the outside world. I hate to see the movie berated for not being a documentary of all the hateful excesses of the segregated South when that was not the movie's intent. We have films that are considered classics that are about different parts of World War II, and they don't document all the atrocities of the Holocaust. Not focusing on parts of an era that are not the main point of the film is not "sugarcoating." It's an excellent film about growing up in a loving family and overcoming challenges through the love and support of others. It's fine the way it is.