Bette Davis's eyes, Joan Crawford's bitchy elegance, Stepin Fetchit's stereotype, Sidney Poitier's superhuman black man...  These are the movie stars and the qualities that influenced James Baldwin...  and now become part of his incisive look at racism in American movies.

Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist, offering us a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions.  Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness.  And here, too, is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

From The Birth of a Nation to The Exorcist--one of America's most important writers turns his critical eye to American film.

--Michael Ondaatje

"The best essayist in this country--a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country."

--The New York Times Book Review

"It will be hard for the reader to see these films in quite the same way again."

--The Christian Science Monitor

"He has taken the old subject of race and made it even more personal probing perhaps more deeply than ever before into American racial practices."

--The Nation

"A provocative discussion."

--Saturday Review