The Great DebatersProduct Description
Two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington (American Gangster) directs and stars with Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker (Last King of Scotland) in this important and deeply inspiring page from the not-so-distant past (Richard Roeper, At the Movies with Ebert and Roeper). Inspired by a true story, Washington shines as a brilliant but politically radical debate team coach who uses the power of words to transform a group of underdog African American college students into an historical powerhouse that took on the Harvard elite. DVD Special Features:
Deleted Scenes
The Great Debaters: An Historical Perspective. Thats What My Baby Likes Music Video.
My Soul Is A Witness Music Video
Theatrical Trailer
Sneak Peeks: Grace is Gone, Cassandras Dream, Im Not There, Hunting Party
Amazon.com
Inspired by real events, the fascinating
The Great Debaters reveals one of the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement in its story of Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington in a captivating performance) and his champion 1935 debate club from the all-African-American Wiley College in Texas. Tolson, a Wiley professor, labor organizer, modernist poet, and much else, runs a rigorous debate program at the school, selecting four students as his team in 35, among them the future founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker). Washington, who directed
The Great Debaters from a script by Robert Eisele (
The Dale Earnhardt Story), anchors the story with the teams measurable progress, but the film is also about the state of race relations in America at the height of the Great Depression. With lynchings of black men and women a common form of entertainment and black subjugation for many rural whites, the idea of talented and highly intelligent African-American young people learning to think on their feet during debates would seem almost a hopeless endeavor. But thats not the way Tolson sees it, as his students serve themselves and the cause of racial equality in America with energetic arguments in favor of progressive government and non-violence as a viable social movement. There are some startling moments in this movie, particularly the sight of a man found lynched and burned to death, and an extraordinary moment in which we see black sharecroppers and white farmers engaged with Tolson in arguments about unionizing together. Forest Whitaker is outstanding as Farmers emotionally-reserved father, also a Wiley professor. This is the kind of film where one hopes two great actors such as the elder Whitaker and Washington will have a scene together, and when it comes its as powerful as one might hope.
--Tom KeoghRate Points :4.5
Binding :DVD
Brand :WELLSPRING/GENIUS
Label :Genius Products (TVN)
Manufacturer :Genius Products (TVN)
MPN :WEID81070D
ProductGroup :DVD
Studio :Genius Products (TVN)
Publisher :Genius Products (TVN)
UPC :796019810708
EAN :0796019810708
Price :$29.95USD
Lowest Price :$4.23USD
Customer ReviewsTHE GREAT DEBATERS.....NOT THAT GREAT! Rating Point :3 Helpful Point :0 I know there are a lot of people who loved this film and I did enjoy it, but it felt like something was missing. The cast is excellent as well as the subject matter, but many scenes have very uninspired dialogue. The film is also a bit long and that might not have mattered if the dialogue was better throughout. its a good film worth seeing, but its not as great as some reviewers would want you to believe.
A Tragic Triumphant Film Rating Point :5 Helpful Point :0 Professor Melvin Tolson, the character in this movie played by Denzel Washington, describes debate as a "blood sport." Hollywood has taken his words to heart this film has all the formulaic qualities of a sports film about an underdog team that triumphs despite external and internal obstacles. A hockey team, a minor league baseball team, the plot outline is the same. There was a real triumph upon which this film is based in 1935, the debate team from the "colored" Wiley College of Marshall, Texas, did in actuality travel to California and win its historic debate against USC, then the national debate champions. The film fictionalizes that debate, transposing the event to Harvard College nevertheless, literally a true story or not, the cinematic triumph is emotionally powerful and meaningful.
Tolson was a real person, a poet and teacher associated with the "Harlem Renaissance." Likewise, the father and son characters in the film - James Farmer, Sr. and Jr. - were real people. The portrayal of these three is as close to biographical veracity as anyone could ask. The other two debaters are said to be based on real people, but their names have been changed and their characters are essentially fictionalized. I have some hesitation about this Hollywood fictionalizing of such significant historical events I would have preferred less glamour and more candor.
What is NOT fictional -- what is tragic -- is the portrayal of Jim Crow apartheid and racial violence in America. The events portrayed in the film occurred in the 1930s, but enough of segregation, racial humiliation, and racist depravity still existed in the 1950s for me to remember it and to testify in this court of opinion. The cars were different from those in the film but the bigotry and cruelty were the same. I spent my junior high and high school years in Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, and then in rural communities in California that were culturally Southern satellites. Yes, yes, I KNOW that racism existed in the North, West, Midwest, etc., but the institutionally sanctioned apartheid of the South was different -- more humiliating, more violent, more absolutely a deprivation of any decent kind of life.
...
This film vividly reminds me of that shame. But I also feel a twinge of pride and self-esteem at having been a very small part of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s. James Farmer Jr., the 14-year-old Wiley College student in the film, was a hero of mine then, an activist with CORE and SLID (SDS), two organizations I had a tiny part in. Hes the person who coined the phrase "Freedom Ride", and I was a Freedom Rider, going south from Harvard (of all places!) and taking my share of terror and rough treatment. Any American my age who wasnt a Freedom Rider missed the chance to partake of the noblest and most redemptive act of our lives.
Watching this film in February of 2009 puts it in a special perspective. It was made and released in 2007, at a time when very few people would have dared to predict that an African-American would be elected President of the USA in November 2008! And thats the true triumph, of which the Wiley College debate-team victory was a symbolic foretaste. The fact that Denzel Washington, an African-American, is a box-office star for White as well as Black audiences is also a triumphant outcome of the long struggle for Civil Rights. Washington, its worth knowing, donated $1,000,000 to Wiley College, after the filming, to re-establish its debate team. Who in Marshall TX in 1935 could have imagined a Negro with a million bucks to give away, or a Negro President?
It should be obvious by now that I cant evaluate this film as a piece of entertainment or a feat of acting. The events mean too much to me. Watch it and weep! And cheer!
Awesome Show of Spirit Rating Point :5 Helpful Point :0 Denzel Washington has woven the subculture of social fabric, that of the Black South, into a much greater universal spirit -- into the Spirit of enternal principles of Truth, Justice in this film. He creates on the screen the character that Americans all love -- the James Dean, the John Wayne, the lone fighter who struggles against all odds around him to become singularly victorious and to ultimately change the very social fabric that was holding him back. The victorious underdog is a classic icon of American film and has inspired a dogged determination that lead people to real-life success. Denzel Washington takes an element of history, which is ostensibly a subculture -- that of the Black South, and illustrates that at its heart is it really captured the spirit of the American Culture -- the spirit of determination, dedication, honor, justice and, ultimately, victory. This movie inspired me deeply -- it rekindled my love for freedom, democracy and Denzel. Hes an extraordinary film director and actor.
I had never heard of Melvin B. Tolson, Samantha Booke, Henry Lowe and James Farmer before this film and I am indebted to Director Denzel for bringing them into my life. This film is history, American spirit and awe-inspiring drama.
greast seller, will seek out again Rating Point :5 Helpful Point :0 The great debaters is a great movie shows the power of thinking as well as the power which all people would do well to remember when it comes to providing pro bono assistance to those less fortunate
A Case Of Black Pride Rating Point :5 Helpful Point :0 Although there is some confusion, if not controversy, surrounding the facts on which this commercial film "The Great Debaters" is based it is nevertheless a well-done piece of cinema. When one says the name Denzel Washington, who starred in and directed the film, and adds the imprimatur of Ophrah Winfrey as producer then those factors alone usually insure a well thought out presentation. Add in a slice of pre-1960s civil rights movement Southern Jim Crow black history surrounding the extraordinary abilities of the debate team at Wiley College, a small black Texas college, and the headline of this entry - "A Case Of Black Pride"- tells the tale.
The subject matter of this film: the trials and tribulations of a debate team as it tries to make its mark in the intellectual world would not, on the face it, seem to be a natural subject for a two hour film. Nor would the fact that this debate team was composed of and led by the black "talented tenth" of the 1930s, including James Farmer, Jr. who would later will fame as a main stream "establishment" civil rights leader (and the scorn of younger black militants in the 1960s). However it does. The glue here is the performance of Denzel Washington as the somewhat mysterious hard-driving Northern black intellectual (and friend of Langston Hughes whose work in Spain in the 1930s I have explored elsewhere in this space). Professor Tolson, however, is more than some eccentric college don because he has enlisted in the struggle (or was sent, probably by the Communist or Socialist Party who were both organizing this strata of the agrarian working class in the South at the time) to organize the desperately poor black and white Texas sharecroppers. That story is also a subject worthy of separate discussion at a later time.
As the story unfolds we get a glimpse at black college life in the 1930s with its marching bands, its social life and its pecking orders. What that part of the film looked like was the universality of the college experience, except here everyone was black. The mere fact of being in college in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression meant that these student were training to be part of the black elite. Along the way, however, a different reality intrudes, as we are also exposed to black life in the South- Jim Crow style, even for W.E.B. Dubois "talented tenth". Two of the most dramatic scenes in the movie are when Reverend James Farmer, Sr., by all accounts an extremely learned man if somewhat distant father, is humbled by some local "white trash"-for merely driving while black and the seemingly obligatory gratuitous lynching of a black man that the debate team witnessed in its travels. Powerful stuff.
The controversy surrounding the facts, if that is the case, is the question of whether the centerpiece of the 1935-36 debating season, a debate with the august Harvard University team actually occurred and whether the subject matter of this seminal debate was on the virtues and vices of civil disobedience. This would hardly be the first, and will probably not be the last, commercial film to "juice up" the story in order to create better dramatic tension. In short, to make it a "feel good" movie for the black and progressive audiences that I assume it was intended to reach. That should not take away from the achievements of this debate team, the courage of Professor Tolson in organizing Southern sharecroppers or the hard reality of "lynch law" in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. Well acted, well thought out and well-intended it deserves a careful watching. Do so.
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