The Story of a Three Day Pass: Ordinary Love

If I’m going to make it in cinema, I’ll make it on my own terms.
 I didn’t come this far to fink out, to get in The Man’s bag,  
to talk his dialect and mouth his terms.
Melvin Van Peebles, 1967

For someone who insisted, throughout his career, on “the right to be ordinary,” Melvin Van Peebles is, quite ironically, exceptional. A much-mythologized figure, in no small part by himself, Van Peebles nonetheless earned his reputation for tenacity and audacity. He is a true Renaissance man: novelist, playwright, actor, composer, painter, options trader, and, most notoriously, screenwriter, director, and producer. Through all these facets of his incredible creativity, what consistently marks his extraordinary life is an uncanny ability to navigate customary constraints, to refuse their terms, and to forge his own way—starting with the improbable success he had with his first feature film, The Story of a Three Day Pass, made in France in 1967 and launching him on a trajectory that would change the course of American cinema.

The American film industry was not a welcoming place for an African American aspiring director, so at the age of twenty‑seven, with two short films under his belt and a set of original scenarios, Van Peebles and his family left the United States for Europe. Ultimately, working in France gave him the opportunity to direct a feature and to control all aspects of its production—an unfathomable degree of access and autonomy compared with what Hollywood could offer. He took every advantage of this relative freedom to make a remarkable, daring, and formally innovative feature debut. In it, he established a distinctive filmic style that would carry through his career, one that blends formal experimentation and genre play in service of equally daring, often radical, narratives.

The film tells the story of Turner, an African American soldier stationed in France, who receives three days of leave in advance of a promised promotion (albeit to only the position of assistant orderly), along with a stern warning from his captain—euphemistically cloaked in a discussion of “trust”—against fraternizing with white Frenchwomen. Turner—a character Van Peebles described as “a black cat who is a human being”—arrives in Paris as a lonely sightseer, searching for connection and wandering somewhat aimlessly until evening. At a nightclub, he meets Miriam, a white Frenchwoman, who agrees to go with him to the Normandy seaside for the rest of his leave. They communicate through shreds of each other’s language and find affinity despite awkwardness and misunderstandings. Once they are at the beach, they encounter three white soldiers from Turner’s base, and his worry that they will inform the captain that he was with a white woman clouds the couple’s remaining time together but also brings them closer. What began as a weekend fling turns into deeper sentiment—they fall in love. Though his apprehension turns out to have been justified.

This was a key moment for the representation of interracial relationships; Loving v. Virginia—the landmark Supreme Court ruling that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional—was decided in June 1967, a few months after the film was shot, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released in December 1967 in the U.S. and in March 1968 in France. A far cry from the timidity of Stanley Kramer’s tepid romance between the too-perfect Sidney Poitier and the too-silly Katharine Houghton, The Story of a Three Day Pass rejects ideals and allows its characters to be flawed beings, no less worthy of love. Rather than elide the question of miscegenation, Van Peebles confronts racial stereotypes and racist formulations related to interracial intimacies through the use of fantasy sequences. Neither character is blameless in this regard; Turner and Miriam each initially approach sex with the other as accompanied by the projections of racially inflected fantasies. Turner imagines himself as an eighteenth-century European aristocrat in a château with fine wine, a grand fireplace, and a waiting woman. In Miriam’s mind, she is hotly pursued by jungle tribesmen, who capture her and place her on a sacrificial altar for their king—a ridiculously costumed Turner with a bone threaded through a woolly wig. Their laughter diffuses these fantasies, and they come together first because of and then eventually despite them.

The point isn’t that I’m black or white but that I’m a genius.
MVP, 1968

It might seem improbable that an African American writer with minimal filmmaking experience could successfully make a feature film in France, leading to a multipicture deal with a major studio. But Van Peebles has lived an improbable life. Born in 1932 in Chicago, he grew up in the village of Phoenix, a suburb, and graduated from Thornton Township High School in neighboring Harvey in 1949. Harvey would undergo a major demographic shift in the coming decade, but at the time Van Peebles was one of the few African American students at the predominantly white school. He went on to Ohio Wesleyan University, where he studied English literature, then joined the air force and served as a navigator and a bombardier. Despite his qualifications, he couldn’t get a job with a commercial airline due to racist hiring practices. Eventually, he found work as a cable-car gripman in San Francisco. It was while working on the cable cars that he wrote his first book, The Big Heart (1957), a photo-essay homage to cable cars, published under the name Melvin Van, with photographs by Ruth Bernhard. His ambition then turned to filmmaking. Under the tutelage of Allen Willis—“Allen taught me everything,” Van Peebles later recollected—an African American photographer, documentary filmmaker, and TV cameraman in the Bay Area, he completed two short films, also under the name Melvin Van.

These early works, Sunlight (1957) and Three Pickup Men for Herrick (1957), already reveal his singular perspective. Sunlight is a short fable about a man, played by Van Peebles, who resorts to robbery in order to marry the woman he loves. Caught and sent to prison for decades, he returns to discover how the intervening years have affected them both. Three Pickup Men for Herrick is a subtler but no less devastating film, a vignette around day laborers arriving at a pickup spot and being selected—or not—for a job. While quite distinct from each other, these short films nonetheless both anticipate the director’s features in their formal sensibilities, in their centering of multifaceted Black subjectivities, and in Van Peebles’s emphasis on and control of the music. Sunlight’s chase sequence, for example, in which the protagonist attempts to evade the police, is striking for its resonance with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)—and both leads are played by Van Peebles. Three Pickup Men for Herrick’s close-ups and repeated use of direct address anticipate a key device in The Story of a Three Day Pass, while its use of long shots of figures traversing barren urbanscapes around San Francisco is echoed in Van Peebles’s filming of Los Angeles in Sweetback.

Like many aspiring filmmakers before him, Van Peebles took his short films to Hollywood as a calling card. Not surprisingly, he was rebuffed. As one agent told him, “If you can tap-dance, I might find you some work. But that’s about all.” He was met with a similar response from potential publishers for his first novel, which to white literary taste didn’t seem “Negro” enough. Fed up with these barriers and seeking new opportunities, he and his wife, actor and photographer Maria Marx, and their two small children, Mario and Megan, moved to Holland, where in 1959 he enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Amsterdam in astronomy—his air-force specialization.

Van Peebles didn’t entirely abandon his pursuit of filmmaking. When he was on his way from San Francisco to the Netherlands, he traveled through New York, where he sought out Amos Vogel, founder of the influential film society Cinema 16. Impressed with the young filmmaker, Vogel acquired Sunlight and Three Pickup Men for Herrick for distribution on the 16 mm educational film market. Vogel would also give him a theatrical platform, programming Three Pickup Men with Edward O. Bland’s The Cry of Jazz in February 1960. The screening was followed by a discussion with Bland, novelist Mark Kennedy, jazz critic Marshall Stearns, activist and journalist Nat Hentoff, and Ralph Ellison (as a replacement for the advertised James Baldwin). A didactic essay film, The Cry of Jazz argues for the political valence of jazz music as emblematic of Black life, asserting both intergenerational Black trauma and persistent and ongoing white culpability. At this screening, Bland’s film was met with fury, drawing police intervention and overshadowing the subtler Three Pickup Men. More significant for Van Peebles’s filmmaking career, Vogel included his short films in a set of 16 mm prints he took to the Cinémathèque française in Paris, where they were enthusiastically received by Henri Langlois, Mary Meerson, and Lotte Eisner. The French cinephiles tracked down Van Peebles at the University of Amsterdam and invited him to Paris in 1959, saying, as Van Peebles recalled, “What are you doing in astronomy? You’re made for cinema.”

Van Peebles seized this invitation as the encouragement that Hollywood had refused, but the accolades didn’t immediately translate into opportunities. They did, however, give him, in his words, “the most dangerous thing”—hope and confidence to pursue filmmaking. He performed odd jobs to survive in Paris: he sang in the street, worked as a journalist for France-Observateur, was hired by the satirical magazine Hara-kiri (the precursor to Charlie Hebdo) as a writer and comics editor, and was named editor of the French edition of Mad magazine. He also spent time writing novels, initially in English and then in French. During this time, he made another short film, under the name “Melvin”: Les cinq cent balles (Five Hundred Francs, 1961), about a kid who tries in vain to get a five-hundred-franc note out of a gutter. With this simple premise, the film served as an exercise in shooting in the streets and experimenting with the effect of natural light on faces, objects, and water—experimentation that would inform his subsequent features. He also learned, as he put it, “which way the wind was blowing” in the French film production system. Ingeniously, he took advantage of a rule of the French film director’s guild that granted membership to any writer who wanted to make a film adaptation of their own work. He had published several novels and a collection of essays in French between 1964 and 1967, and therefore was able to obtain a government subsidy of the equivalent of sixty thousand dollars to adapt his story La permission for the cinema. While the film would premiere in the U.S. as “based on his novel,” the actual chronology again demonstrates Van Peebles’s ingenuity in working the system to his advantage; the story was first written as a screen treatment (and given the subsidy on that basis), then novelized after the film was shot, though it appeared in print before the film premiered in France in April 1968.

Van Peebles took near total control of the project, through postproduction. As he told the actors and crew, “Do it my way or we won’t do it.” Filmed in Paris and the Normandy towns of Honfleur and Étretat, The Story of a Three Day Pass was shot over six weeks for two hundred thousand dollars, financed by a new production company, OPERA. While largely a self-taught filmmaker, Van Peebles hired veteran cinematographer Michel Kelber, who had worked with major directors such as Claude Autant-Lara, Robert Siodmak, Jean Renoir, Nicholas Ray, and Sidney Lumet. Van Peebles controlled the music as well, as he had with his short films, collaborating on the film’s jazz soundtrack with his fellow African American expat Mickey Baker.

For the part of the American soldier, Van Peebles cast Harry Baird, a British Guyanese actor. For the role of Miriam, he cast Nicole Berger (born Nicole Gouspeyre), an actor with experience in the French New Wave (she had played Charles Aznavour’s wife in François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player) and the stepdaughter of film producer Pierre Braunberger. Berger described the role of the fragile but determined Miriam as one imbued with “tenderness and femininity.” As she noted of the connection between her character and Turner, “Laughter is very important. It constitutes the main form of communication between two beings who have difficulty speaking the same language.” This was to be her last role; she died from a car crash shortly after filming wrapped, giving more poignance to her character’s sense of melancholy.

What I want most in the world is to demonstrate that a Negro can stand on his own two feet and be his own master . . . I want to get The Man’s foot out of our backsides.
MVP, 1968

Van Peebles’s major break came by chance. At a party in Paris, he met San Francisco International Film Festival program director Albert Johnson. Johnson, also African American, was in Europe scouting for the festival. Johnson had served as assistant editor for Film Quarterly and was critical of the way American films treated Black subjects, lamenting, “Not one film or play written by a white author captures anything truthful about the Negro.” The two men hit it off, and Johnson invited Van Peebles to premiere The Story of a Three Day Pass (under its French title, La permission) as part of the New Directors program at the 1967 festival. As Van Peebles told readers of Ebony in 2005, “While Hollywood was dragging its feet about letting any power out of white hands—BLAM—I show up at the San Francisco Film Festival with my African American self, with my mahogany rear end, as a delegate from France.” His arrival at the festival under the auspices of the French delegation caused considerable embarrassment to the Americans. As Cineaste noted in 1969, “It is, of course, a sad comment on our society when a filmmaker must gain recognition in his own country as a ‘delegate’ from another.” However, it precipitated his move to Hollywood and his multifeature deal with Columbia Pictures, which would result in his only studio film, Watermelon Man (1970).

When The Story of a Three Day Pass premiered in New York, it was advertised as “the love story of an ordinary guy and an ordinary girl.” This tagline—accompanying images of Berger and Baird together—announces the film as a kind of refutation of the emphasis on Sidney Poitier’s exceptionality in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But like Van Peebles’s film itself, the tagline wasn’t merely a response to Hollywood’s misrepresentation of Blackness; it echoed Van Peebles’s ethos of “the right to be ordinary.” He published this proclamation in a manifesto titled “Le droit d’être ordinaire” that was printed horizontally and bound in between the novelized La permission and his novel La fête à Harlem (1967). In it, he recalls how his “entire childhood had been haunted” by his mother’s scolding of him as a young boy for acting, in her view, not sufficiently concerned with how he appeared to others. As an adult, Van Peebles came to understand that his mother was implying that “being black, I didn’t have the right to be ordinary, that I was obligated to be extra-special good”—a tendency he sees as a broader “tyranny” placed on some groups over others. In this short manifesto, he asks the reader not to see his characters as exemplifying Black identity, embodying racial stereotypes, representing social problems, or overcoming obstacles to equality—“Me and my characters, we will commandeer our right to live as we see fit.” With The Story of a Three Day Pass, he uses film style and a simple story as a way to refute a reductive reading of the character of Turner and to problematize the notion of a singular Black cinematic subjectivity. But it’s Miriam to whom he gives the line “Why can’t people just be human beings?” This may seem disingenuous coming from the filmmaker who has been credited as inspiring the blaxploitation boom of the seventies, but it also comes from a moment in Van Peebles’s career when he was negotiating the opportunities afforded him as a Black artist with those foreclosed for the same reason. In riding the waves available to him, he charted new waters, taking all possible advantages and, in the end, remaking the system.

The Story of a Three Day Pass: Ordinary Love

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