The Exhausted Radiance of Claudine

In an episode of Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcom Good Times, the mother (Esther Rolle) and father (John Amos) raising their kids in the Chicago projects look for a movie to see on their date night, and the only thing showing that isn’t a blaxploitation outing is the 1974 romance Claudine. Twentieth Century Fox used that difference in order to sell the movie. In contrast to the badass poses struck in the ads for Shaft and Super Fly and Foxy Brown and Slaughter and Hell Up in Harlem and all the rest, the poster for Claudine showed a beaming extended family striding toward the camera above the tagline, “A heart and soul comedy. Can you dig it?” But far from the family-friendly sap that poster promised, Claudine, which has been released on DVD and Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection, reaches right back to the tough-nosed and wisedup attitudes that characterized American comedies and melodramas in the 1930s. Like those movies, it cuts right through Hollywood sentimentality, showing life as it’s lived by what the Golden Age British mystery novelist Henry Wade called “hardworked people.”