Bright Road

This film falls into that genre of movies which celebrate education and the power of great teaching to influence and develop young minds and hearts especially through the medium of the fine arts. Besides the several films which your other reviewers cited I could add How Green Was My Valley, Renaissance Man, Konrack, Mr. Holland's Opus, The Chorus, etc. In this film the arts were represented by the students' staging of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, just as in Renaissance Man by the Shakespeare plays, in Mr. Holland's Opus by the ensemble music they all performed together, in The Chorus by all the music the students sang together, etc.

The CT character was admirably strong. Since he was by age a 7th grader in a 4th grade class he had already reached the stage of disillusionment and could strongly insist on the non-existence of Santa Claus as well as of a god in whose image they were all supposedly made but who had failed to solve the conundrum of two different images: white and black. CT wasn't having any of that and walked out.

I discovered that this was Harry Belafonte's first movie. Indeed he seemed rather stiff in his acting and delivering his lines.

I was surprised that the segregated school the students attended was a smart looking brick building. I always imagined them as wooden shacks. Was I wrong? A jarring note in the film was the white doctor at Tanya's bedside. It implied that black people weren't smart enough to become doctors, or more likely were prevented from being so.

I found the movie a rather sugar-coated version of black life in the south, but still, all the African-American characters were treated with respect and without condescension which I found admirable.