Life Meets Art in Uptight, Ruby Dee’s Groundbreaking Collaboration with Jules Dassin
Life Meets Art in Uptight, Ruby Dee’s Groundbreaking Collaboration with Jules Dassin
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In With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, an autobiography cowritten by legendary creative and life partners Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Dee tells the story of working as a screenwriter on 1968’s Uptight. It’s a brief account, about ten paragraphs, but it’s characterized by her trademark graciousness and humility, and emphasizes her collaborative spirit while underplaying her unique contributions as an actor, political activist, and burgeoning writer. An incendiary adaptation of John Ford’s Pabst-like expressionist film The Informer (1935), Uptight features an all-Black cast and transposes a tale of the Irish Troubles to the era of Black liberation. Dee recounts the ease with which she worked with the director, Jules Dassin, and the satisfaction she derived from the writing process. She describes feeling emboldened by her “own involvement as a black woman, and as a human being in the Struggle,” which gave her “a wealth of people and experiences to draw on.” The movie remains a singular entry in her filmography, and her humanity, convictions, and life experiences shine through in every aspect with which she was involved: the dialogue, the casting, and her own performance.
The politically trenchant Uptight was a natural extension of what Dee had been striving to do since the early days of her career: to combine art with activism. After growing up in Harlem, she began her career with the vibrant, independent American Negro Theatre, led by actor and playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O’Neal, who were intent on building a creative platform for African American self-representation. An orphaned film called A People’s Playhouse Presented by the American Negro Theatre shows glimpses of the company at its Harlem location. (Uncertified in origin, but likely produced by the U.S. government’s Works Progress Administration circa 1945, the film was found in the Anthology Film Archives collection and preserved in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017.) Toward the end of it, we see Dee, in her early twenties, stepping out from behind a curtain as her post-synced voice asks for “your dimes and dollars” and the narrator explains: “This is the place where the people’s talent will train for the task to interpret the people’s struggle.”
Following the end of World War II, Dee, recently divorced, met Ossie Davis while working on a play. They married in 1948 and soon became further involved in various progressive and Black arts movements. As Dee’s career advanced, she and Davis became followers of Paul Robeson, the iconic performer who at that time was the leader of the Pan-Africanist Council on African Affairs, an anticolonialist group fighting segregation. Dee was also galvanized by the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and participated in a 1953 rally at Carnegie Hall that demanded clemency for them. By then, her reputation as a communist sympathizer was sealed, leading to her being blacklisted and summoned, along with Davis, before HUAC in 1958. But her fight for social justice never stopped, and she developed close relationships with both Martin Luther King (whose nonviolent tactics initially inspired her skepticism) and Malcolm X. Her familiarity with these two leaders and her knowledge of their divergent methods would go on to animate Uptight.
During this period of political turmoil, Dee was also working on her creative chops behind the scenes. While on the set of Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957), she had expressed her filmmaking ambitions to costar John Cassavetes, who promptly gave her a Bolex 16 mm camera, lenses, and a light meter. Armed with this equipment, and with some pointers from Cassavetes, Dee eagerly took up amateur filmmaking and began to teach herself, shooting her family and around her neighborhood. She felt the camera “opened her up to herself” and began considering books she might adapt for the screen, eventually buying sound equipment, a tripod and lights, and a Bell & Howell projector. Dee’s interest in filmed storytelling was sustained by her television production work, which began in the 1960s, often in collaboration with Ossie Davis.
Dee was first introduced to Uptight as a proposal for her husband. Dassin had just returned to the U.S. from Paris, where he was living in exile after also being blacklisted, and wanted Davis to collaborate with him on it. Dee and Davis were particularly impressed by how Dassin noted the parallels between the struggle for Irish independence and the Black Power movement, and they also approved of his insistence on working with Black writers and other talent. When Davis (who was too busy because he was already scheduled to act in The Scalphunters) suggested Dee as a screenwriting partner, she embraced the opportunity and touted her ability to “see more than one side of a subject, to weigh matters and to make choices based on their value in relation to what’s at stake.”
The film is set in Cleveland, Ohio (where Dee was born), in the Flats, a declining Black neighborhood skirting the city’s steel mills and industrial infrastructure. Tank, a middle-aged, unemployed alcoholic (played by the coauthor of the script, Julian Mayfield), has recently served prison time for attacking an abusive white man at his mill. His childhood friend Johnny is now a militant revolutionary respected and protected by the community. Following King’s murder, Johnny and his gang ask Tank to join them in stealing weapons, but Tank is drunk and distraught watching scenes of the funeral casket, followed by thousands of marchers, on TV, and refuses to join them. Undermanned, Johnny kills a guard during the break-in and goes into hiding. Tank bemoans his choice and seeks comfort from his old flame Laurie (Dee), who lives on the edge of town. But despite his guilt, a series of events leads him to ultimately sell out his friend for a thousand-dollar reward.
