Review: 'Once Upon a Time in Harlem' goes to a cocktail party and captures the voices of the Harlem Renaissance, still vibrant decades after their heyday
Have you ever been to a party where everyone there was more interesting than you, and were telling stories you wanted to hear all night long? You will if you see “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a documentary that took three generations half a century to make.
It starts with filmmaker William Greaves sending an invitation for a cocktail party in August 1972. The location is the Harlem apartment of the legendary composer Duke Ellington. The guest list includes as many of the surviving figures of the Harlem Renaissance — writers, artists, activists, agitators, and so on.
I am forced to admit that my knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance is limited. Blame a public school education in a predominantly white region of the country. I know a bit of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and I’ve heard of the Black nationalist movement started by Marcus Garvey more than a century ago. After spending 100 minutes with the folks at this party, I want to take a deep dive and learn more.
As the movie unfolds, I learned I did know a bit more than I thought. I recognized the historian John Henrik Clarke and the composer Eubie Blake, who was 85 at the time of filming. (Blake most famously wrote the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” a tune so engrained in the American songbook that it’s difficult today to think that it didn’t just exist for all time.)
But I found myself being drawn to the figures I didn’t know as well. For example, the poet and novelist Arna Bontemps, who died a year after this party took place. Or the actor Leigh Whipper, the first Black man in Actors Equity, and someone who performed through minstrels to vaudeville to legit theater. Or the society editor Gerri Major, who chronicled all the doings of the era and remembers all the names. Or my favorite, Ida Mae Cullen, who makes sure everyone remembers the contributions of her late husband, the poet Countee Cullen.
Duke Ellington never shows up to this party, even though it’s in his apartment. But with such fascinating people engaged in such rich conversations, you barely notice.
Greaves had a long career, mostly making documentaries — most famously, the meta-doc “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” in 1969 (and a sequel that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005) — and died in 2014. His son, David Greaves, and granddaughter, Liani Greaves, have put together the footage from this 1972 party, gently adding bits of context without disrupting the flow of the afternoon. The result is a document of a time long past but still as alive as these urgent voices can make it.
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‘Once Upon a Time in Harlem’
★★★★
Opens Friday, November 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some disturbing images, strong racial language, smoking, and brief partial nudity. Running time: 100 minutes.