The 1974 romance Claudine is one of the few true depictions of working-class life in a decade of great films that rarely addressed the topic.
In an episode of Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcom Good Times, the mother (Esther Rolle) and father (John Amos) raise their kids in the Chicago projects look for a movie to see on their date night, and the only thing showing that isn’t a blaxploitation outing is the 1974 romance Claudine. Twentieth Century Fox used that difference in order to sell the movie. In contrast to the badass poses struck in the ads for Shaft and Super Fly and Foxy Brown and Slaughter and Hell Up in Harlem and all the rest, the poster for Claudine shows a beaming extended family striding toward the camera above the tagline, “A heart and soul comedy. Can you dig it?” But far from the family-friendly sap that poster promised, Claudine, which has been released on DVD and Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection, reaches right back to the tough-nosed and wised-up attitude that featured American comedies and melodramas in the 1930s. Like those movies, it cuts right through Hollywood sentimentality, showing life as it’s lived by what the Golden Age British mystery novelist Henry Wade called “hard-worked people.”
Claudine (Diahann Carroll) is thirty-six and in eighteen years has acquired two ex-husbands, two ex-almost-husbands, and six kids. All seven of them are squeezed into a rundown Harlem apartment where they live on top of one another, fighting for time in the bathroom, or clustered in front of a boxy old flickering TV, the oldest girl Charlene (the remarkable Tamu) taking offense that her Black siblings are cheering on Tarzan. The family’s only regular visitor is the one they could do without: the snooty welfare officer ready to take any minor improvement, even one as small as a new iron or coffee pot, as an excuse to reduce Claudine’s benefits. What the welfare lady doesn’t know is that Claudine is working, catching the bus to Westchester every weekday for a gig as maid to a bitchy boss who complains that she’s late but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge her existence. It’s there that Claudine and Roop (James Earl Jones) get an eyeful of one another. What he sees is a gorgeous woman, clearly unused to being treated as a gorgeous woman. And what Claudine sees when Roop hoists trash cans into the garbage truck he works on is a solidly built workingman, muscles fighting it out with incipient fat, whose smile is that of someone who hasn’t forgotten the possibility of pleasure. The romance catches them both unawares because it isn’t deterred by the exhaustion that threatens to overtake them. The first night they go out, Roop shows up in his slick white convertible before Claudine even gets home from work. When she does turn up, laden with groceries, she can’t get time in her own bathroom. She finally grabbed a dress and decided to bathe and change at Roop’s place. Their evening out becomes an evening in with Claudine falling asleep in Roop’s tub, and then falling into his bed.
The movies of the 1970s in which women coming out of bad marriages get a second chance at love were some of the first of the era to be in tune with contemporary feminist sensibility. In movies like Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, the obstacles are almost always dilemmas of independence versus freedom. Does the heroine want to settle when she’s certain that there exists an ephemeral something more? Those were always questions for people who had the options to entertain them. For Claudine, working so hard to take care of her family that she has no time to define herself any other way, those questions would be alien and frivolous.
From the beginning of her relationship with Roop, Claudine is determined to enjoy it while she can and to go on her way, she hopes amicably, when it ends. But when the two realized that this could be something more, the problems that surface aren’t questions of commitment or independence or finding their identity. These characters know who they are, and they know what it is that’s getting in their way. Claudine’s welfare payments are so pitiful she has to work under the table. The movie doesn’t judge her for that, though just two years later, Ronald Reagan, making his first run for president, would tell racist stories about welfare queens to stoke the white resentment that would carry him to the White House in 1980. Claudine’s fiddling the welfare state is in a movie tradition with the starving chorus girls in Gold Diggers of 1933 stealing their neighbor’s milk. It’s what working people do to survive.
