In September 1984, a film hit the streets that had the folks we now call “seasoned saints” in a headlock. “A Soldier’s Story,” based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play written by the late, great Black playwright Charles Fuller, was directed by legendary (white) director Norman Jewison and depicted, via a story about a Jim Crow-era segregated Army regiment, how white supremacy can cause Black folks with power to terrorize Black folks without any.
But what makes “A Soldier’s Story” most notable is that it features a breakout performances of a nearly-30-year-old Denzel Washington, who is only in a supporting role but is dripping with the charisma that we all know and love him for decades later. It came out five years before “Glory” nabbed Washington his first Oscar nomination and set him on the path of Hollywood legend.
The film clearly had Black intellectuals buying popcorn in 1984. But seeing how it made over , everyday Black folks went to see it too.
“A Soldier’s Story” tells the story of a segregated Army regiment in the Jim Crow south. Since so many Black men had just come home from Vietnam a decade or so before the film’s release, they helped the film nab more than $21 million off a $6 million budget.
Washington’s costars in “A Soldier’s Story” were no slouches: Adolph Caesar was an established theater actor before he embodied the film’s central character: The alcoholic and tyrannical Sgt. Vernon Waters. His character showed us how trying to impress white folks led Waters down a path where the Black soldiers under his command would eventually kill him.
Just a few years before “In Living Color,” David Alan Grier showed us he was a damn good dramatic actor. The film also features a wonderful performance by Howard Rollins, one of your grandmother’s favorite actors who she never knew was probably gay. And though he was never a big name despite popping up in films we’ve all seen, Art Evans gives a striking performance as a man who plays a central role in how the film ends.
Though Caesar nabbed an Oscar nomination for the role, Washington showed us why he would eventually go on to become that diamond-in-the-rough Black actor. His portrayal of PFC. Melvin Peterson is the reason kids today say rizz. He is funny. He is sympathetic. And while you will not always agree with his choices, but you understand why he makes the decisions he does.
Washington is that rare actor of any race that everyone knows you’re talking about when you say his first name only. Arguably, you couldn’t do that with his predecessor Sidney Poitier, and you can’t do it with his successor, Michael B. Jordan (yet).
(Wesley Snipes came for Washington’s crown in the 1990s, but he lost his way when he started messing around with a non-Black woman. But that’s a conversation for another column.)
Watch “A Soldier’s Story.” It is an insightful movie about race, but, if you’re not into all that, you should watch it because it might as well have been called “Damn, dat boy Denzel Washington sho’ can act.”
