FLAME IN THE STREETS (1961)

Like dairy products, progressive, socially conscious, issue-oriented films don’t have a long shelf life.  (Also like dairy, only slightly-longer when Ultra-Pasturized.)  So credit this British working class GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER precursor for largely holding up after sixty years.  Scripter Ted Willis over-stuffs with four or five stories running over the course of a single Guy Fawkes Day as Union Shop Steward John Mills fights any casual racist tendencies among his membership to win a confidence vote on the company’s first Black foreman.  But Mills has a comeuppance waiting at home where his schoolteacher daughter (Sylvia Sims) is getting (too) serious about Black fellow teacher Johnny Sekka.  Mills hides knee-jerk racism with excuses about how difficult her life would be, but wife Brenda de Banzie barely can hide her loathing, sickened by what the neighbors will think and at the thought of her daughter in bed with . . . you guessed it, we get the ‘N’ word.  Though the derogatory term of choice at the time appears to be ‘Spade,’ used openly by all.  Meanwhile, another mixed race couple, the husband is the union man Mills puts up for the foreman position, deal with their choices and what’s happening in the street as the neighborhood explodes with Guy Fawkes’ fireworks & bonfires just as a gang of ‘Teddy Boy’ hoodlums tries to instigate a race riot.  (Were these punks & thugs still called Teddy Boys in ‘61?)  So, plenty going on, and most of it pretty good, cleanly worked out & dramatically playable under director Roy Ward Baker’s inactive WideScreen style.  Would it have been better ‘hotted up’ or just felt overcooked?   Worth seeing as is.  Though one brief moment, where the pregnant White wife speaks on how she and her Black husband can’t even get a look at decent housing in better neighborhoods puts most of the film’s big dramatic gestures in the shade.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For another look at Big City all-white unions dealing with an influx of new Black workers (WWI era/Chicago meat-packers/Southern Newcomers) with a side of social mobility, see Bill Duke’s unjustly neglected THE KILLING FLOOR/’84.  Made for American Playhouse on PBS, it had been hard to track down but is now more readily available.  OR: Stick with de Banzie (in her signature role) and Mills as they chart their own upward social mobility in David Lean’s brilliantly observed comedy HOBSON’S CHOICE/’54.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/01/hobsons-choice-1954.html