The film goes immediately to the heart of the problem, reporting that black people are a tenth of the American population but make up more than a sixth of the unemployed. Before the advent of the WPA, the narrator states, a quarter of African-Americans were receiving assistance from pubic or private sources. "Without jobs, we had no money," the narration continues. "And without money we could not purchase food for the hungry mouths at home. Our only hope lay in charity....Then came the federal government's work program. One by one, it took us out of the bread lines. It gave us a new chance to take a normal place in the life of our community."
These points are illustrated by documentary footage of down-and-out black citizens scanning want ads, pounding the pavement, and looking for nonexistent work any way they can. But most of the film portrays the positive accomplishments of the WPA, showing men at work in construction jobs - building airports, housing, swimming pools, and other facilities - and women working as teachers, nurses, and the like or taking "household training" courses centered on domestic skills.
We Work Again is a movie of its time, dividing types of employment along traditional gender lines and failing to mention that none of the scenes and situations it shows are racially integrated. Although the narrator speaks of the African-American community with a generalized "we," his stereotypical white-male-authority voice is an uneasy fit with the images on the screen.
The film switches gears about halfway through its fifteen-minute running time, and this is when it gets most interesting for aficionados of the arts. To demonstrate the WPA's strong cultural component, it shows the pianist and composer William Lawrence leading a performance by a classical-music vocal group, followed by the popular actress and singer Juanita Hall conducting a choir in one of the great Negro spirituals.
Best of all, the film closes with about four minutes of rare footage documenting the so-called "Voodoo Macbeth," a Federal Theater Project production of William Shakespeare's play directed by the young Orson Welles, who moved the setting from medieval Scotland to nineteenth-century Haiti and assembled an all-black cast with professionals and nonprofessionals acting side by side. Welles's adaptation was a theatrical landmark, showcasing African-American talents while radically reinterpreting a classic drama. The historically priceless excerpt in We Work Again show the play's last moments, which are quite different from Shakespeare's original, thanks to Welles's willingness to reshape even revered material according to his own imagination. It's an excellent finale for a moving and informative film.
Producer: Alfred Edgar Smith
With: William Lawrence, Juanita Hall, Jack Carter, Maurice Ellis, Eric Burroughs, Lawrence Chenault, Alma Dickson, Zola King, Josephine Williams, Wilhelmina Williams
BW-15m.
by David Sterritt
