A rich ‘Color Purple’
Alice Walker’s 1982 novel “The Color Purple” never needed a Steven Spielberg film adaptation to become a cultural touchstone – it had already achieved that before the director’s 1986 movie version made it to the screen – but it didn’t hurt, either.
Making stars of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in the process, Spielberg’s film – his foray into “serious” cinema – brought Walker’s epistolatory tale of early 20th-century Black life in Georgia to the attention of new audiences.
Setting aside modern attitudes about Black narratives being interpreted by white storytellers, it was undeniably a “watershed moment,” when a seminal piece of Black literature – one that “spoke truth to power” while transcending notions of race, gender, and sexuality and asserting the rich cultural heritage of Black Americans – became part of mainstream consciousness.
That all happened nearly 40 years ago, but neither Walker’s book nor the multi-Oscar-nominated film it inspired have faded from public memory – and now, the latest evolution of the material that started it all has reached movie screens, just in time to become a must-see Christmas event for families across America.
