From "the best essayist in this country” ( The New York Times Book Review ) comes an incisive book-length essay about racism in American movies that challenges the underlying assumptions in many of the films that have shaped our consciousness.  Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also an appraisal of American racial politics. Offering a look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin considers such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained and shaped us. And here too is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change. "If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one." —Michael Ondaatje "The best essayist in this country—a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country." —The New York Times Book Review "It will be hard for the reader to see these films in quite the same way again." —The Christian Science Monitor "He has taken the old subject of race and made it even more personal probing perhaps more deeply than ever before into American racial practices." —The Nation "A provocative discussion." —Saturday Review James Baldwin  (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel,  Go Tell It on the Mountain,  appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections  Notes of a Native Son  and  The Fire Next Time  were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. ONE Congo Square Joan Crawford's straight, narrow, and lonely back. We are following her through the corridors of a moving train. She is looking for someone, or is she is trying to escape from someone. She is eventually intercepted by, I think, Clark Gable. I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like the heaving and swelling of the sea (though I have not yet been to the sea): and which is also something like the light which moves on, and especially beneath, the water. I am about seven. I am with my mother, or my aunt. The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance . I don't remember the film. A child is far too self-centered to relate to any dilemma which does not, somehow, relate to him— to his own evolving dilemma. The child escapes into what he would like his situation to be, and I certainly do not wish to be a fleeing fugitive on a moving train; and, also, with quite another part of my mind, I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady. Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford, was buying something. She was so incredibly beautiful—she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her. The storekeeper, who knew me, nd others in the store who knew my mother's little boy (and who also knew my Miss Crawford!) laughed and called me back. Miss Crawford also laughed and looked down at me with so beautiful a smile that I was not even embarrassed. Which was rare for me. Tom Mix , on his white horse. Actually, it was Tom Mix's hat, a shadow in the shadow of the hat, a kind of rock background (which, again, was always moving) and the white horse. Tom Mix was a serial. Every Saturday, then, if memory serves, we left Tom Mix and some bleakly interchangeable girl in the most dreadful danger—or, rather, we left the hat and the shadow of the hat and the white horse: for the horse was not interchangeable and the serial could not have existed without it. The Last of the Mohicans: Randolph Scott (a kind of fifteenth-rate Gary Cooper) and Binnie Barnes (a kind of funky Geraldine Fitzgerald), Heather Angel (a somewhat more bewildered Olivia de Havilland) and Philip Reed (a precursor of Anthony Quinn). Phillip Reed was the Indian, Uncas, whose savage, not to say slavish adoration of Miss Angel's fine blonde frame drives her over a cliff, headlong, to her death. She has chosen death before dishonor, which made perfect sense. The erring Uncas eventually pays for his misguided lust with his life, and a tremulous, met-eyed brave couple, Randolph Scott and Binnie Barnes, eventually, hand in hand, manage to make it out of the wilderness. Into America, or back t