Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee | Features

It is a joy to hear Ossie Davis tell the original story of his 57 -year -old partnership with Ruby Dee. “I got married for money,” he said with a good humor glow in his eyes.

The story, which he enjoyed for the archives of American television in 1999, begins with the two appearing in a production on tour of Anna Lucasta “in 1946. Dee would end up playing the main role in the entirely black room of Philip Yordan before embarking on New York to make a film with the boxer Joe Louis.

Davis stayed behind to finish the game race so that he could earn money to frequent Columbia University to study dramatic writing. Once he returned to New York to register, he was met at Dee central station. Now, at that time, their relationship was purely platonic. Dee told him that Louis’s film, entitled “The Fight Never Ends”, was underway in the laboratory due to short of money.

Dee hit Davis for $ 3,000, promising him that once the film has started making money, he would get the return to his investment. In short, the film remained in Hock at the time despite Davis’ contribution to his freedom; He was never going to see his money again.

When Dee told him the bad news, Davis said “Wait, Sister Ruby! You took my money! How will I protect my investment?” They finally married. “To date, if Ruby appears with $ 3,000, she is free to leave!” He said to the interviewer. “But fifty years [later]The child did not do it!

Of course, Davis joked. But, as he turned this thread, I could see Ruby Dee as clear as the day. In fact, I can’t think of one without the other, and I bet you can’t either. Like “Brackettandwilder”, the representation in a word of the partnership of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee has become “Ossiedvisandrubydee” for us. They were not only a talented American entity of artistic expression, they were a couple of black power – literally and figuratively.

As we have just recognized on the 20th^th The anniversary of the death of Davis last February, an overview of the art created by “ossiedavisandrubydee” is in order. Their professional partnership allowed them to play in the sandboxes of the film, television and scene, working for artists as varied as Joe Mankiewicz, Spike Lee and Stephen King. In addition, they appeared in films made by Sidneys Lumet and Poitier, Don Coscarelli, Ridley Scott and Jules Dassin.

Their affiliation which for decades has recalled another married couple, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.

Like Cassavetes, Davis sometimes wrote games for his wife, including his triumphant scene satire, “Victorious Purlie”. Also as Cassavetes, he acted on the screen in front of his beloved on many occasions, and not always as romantic. From the bitter black race of the 1950s, “No Way Out”, where Dee played Sidney Poitier’s wife in her beginnings, Davis and Dee were actors several times.

Sometimes they presented themselves in the cameos surprise in the concerts of the other. Dee played an old flame of the character of Davis, Ponder, in an episode of the Sitcom CBS of the 1990s of Burt Reynolds, “Svening Shade”. And Davis presented himself in a non-credited moment of flashes in the Abyssal Comedy of Reynolds “Cop and Half”, a film that obtained three stars from our beloved mentor and founder of the site, Roger Ebert.

They even tried the kind of horror, both appearing in the adaptation of the TV mini-series of Stephen King, “The Stand”. Furthermore, the Voodoo lady of Dee was the best thing in the remake of Paul Schrader’s “cat people” in 1982 while Davis shone as the Elvis Presley by John F. Kennedy in front of Bruce Campbell in the Super “Bubba Ho Tep”. (Don’t ask!)

Aside from the comedies and frightening films, Dee could be as raw as Rowlands – attend his small but memorable role as the wife of Poitier in the film by Martin Ritt in 1957, “Edge of the City”. She played a powerful scene of rage in this film, shocking simply because it was rare to see a black woman authorized to live so fully this level of pain and loss. The character of Dee is unleashed, of all the people, John Cassavetes, who played the friend and the colleague of Poitier.

This same level of intensity led to the only appointment to the dee’s Oscars for “American Gangster” in 2007. After having played the woman of Sidney Poitier four times, Dee now played the heir to Poitier’s mother, Denzel Washington. Her big scene, where she dresses in her son of a brutal gangster, touched a string sensitive to anyone who had a black mother who was tired of your mess. I have always thought that if she had had one more scene, this Oscar would have been hers. (She received the prize for best actress from the Screen Actors Guild, however.)

Davis was not outdone either, a triple threat as an actor, writer and director. Sam Goldwyn Jr. hired Davis to direct the 1970 comedy classic, “Cotton Come to Harlem” after Gordon Parks became the first black director to direct a studio film. By coincidence, it was Cassavetes who fixed the initial appointment between Parks and Warner Bros., suggesting that Parks was the best person to adapt the memories of the parks, “the learning tree” in 1968.

For “Cotton”, not only did the director Davis adapted the novel by Chester Himes with Arnold Perl, he also wrote the lyrics of the opening song sung by Melba Moore, “Ain’t Now (quite black)”. It was Dee who convinced her husband that he would make a good director of this material, because he knew Harlem like the back of his hand. She was right: the film was a success and is widely considered the first official Blaxploitation film.

In my book, “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema”, I make an argument according to which, although “Cotton” is the “official” beginning of the era of the film Blaxploitation, the BluePrint for many films that followed “informant” by Ruby Dee by John Ford “by Ruby of John Ford. “OSSIEDAVISANDANDRABYDEE” managed to change the world together!

Spike Lee’s eternal love and respect for the duo are obvious in the two films in which he launched them together, “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever”. In the latter, they are the married parents of Wesley Snipes and Samuel L. Jackson; Dee, even a dee, while Davis is a head of the head that ends up shooting his son in one of Lee’s most powerful sequences.

In the first, she is an old grumpy mother, the guard dog of the neighborhood that hates, hates, hates the kind but perpetually drunk neighborhood of the Wino district, the mayor. It’s lovely to look at these two, pretending to disagree while fighting simultaneously like an old married couple. At one point, the mayor of Da tries to court Mother Sister as she sits in his window of joy by offering her flowers. The contemptuous way that Dee looks at these plants was sufficient to bring down their petals!

“Do the right thing” and “Purlie Victorious” are the two masterpieces I always think first when I mention Ossie and Ruby, but there is something else that they did together to whom I have submitted. I swear on a pile of bibles that the two hosted a program where they introduced black films on late evening television. I clearly remember having watched them the weekend when I couldn’t sleep.

If you remember this show, please record my mental health by telling me that I did not invent! Until then, let’s celebrate that Ruby Dee has never found these three big ones to “win” his freedom. Consequently, the collaborations of “ossiedavisandrubydee” remain invaluable.