American Gangster's Ruby Dee Is A Rarity Statistically, Too

A trip to west side L.A.'s Landmark Theater to see the DVD-version Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's American Gangster confirmed two things--first, that this cut's additional 18 minutes make the film play more like the epic the director clearly had in mind when he started shooting, and second, Ruby Dee is a true force of nature. In a scene late in the film where Denzel Washington's Frank Lucas about to do something foolish, Dee's steely, unrelenting command in the scene opposite him puts one in mind of--to borrow a cameo character from the film--Joe Louis' second, 1938 fight with Max Schmeling, the wind-milling one-rounder in which Schmeling had no chance.

Scott acknowledged as much with an anecdote about the day he told Washington who'd be playing his mom. "I know Ruby," said Denzel, "Every scene I do, she'll upstage me." In going from a seemingly sweet little matriarch to a suburban Medea, Dee makes such good use of fairly brief screen time that she has as good a chance as anyone in the extremely tight Supporting Actress field (along with Cate Blanchett. Tilda Swinton, Amy Ryan and Saoirse Ronan) that is the Oscars' most competitive race this year. The 83-year-old actress was recently rewarded by her eers with the Screen Actors Guild award in the category.

The kind of odds she fought to get there are made quite clear in a report released yesterday by the Annenberg School of Communications at University of Southern California, detailing a system so exclusionary for women (and people of color, and older than 40) that Susan Thorne, vice chair of the Screen acors Guild Women's Committee said the answer might be a re-staging of the womens' movement: ,"We have to do it again. They didn't get it."

Entitled "Gender Balance Askew In Oscar Race", the report found:
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..there has been no improvement in gender balance in Academy Award-nominated films during the past 30 years in the "best picture" category.

The data show there are almost three speaking males for every one female and more than four white speaking characters for every one non-white character. The researchers separated the sample into three periods by release date (1977-1986; 1987-1996; 1997-2006).

"Unfortunately, females are grossly underrepresented in these prestigious films," said Stacy Smith, USC Annenberg communication professor and principal researcher. "The gender-imbalance findings are a microcosm of a much bigger representational phenomenon in American film and television," she added.

The findings coincide with broader research unveiled at a January conference sponsored by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and the Media (no less), that showed fewer than 28 percent of speaking characters in G-rated films from 1990-2006 are female; females were more than five times likely than males to be shown in sexually revealing clothing in the top 400 movies from 1990-2006.

Interestingly, with a female director, the amount of female speaking characters jumped from 27 percent to 41 percent. A small irony in that context is that it was Scott's 1991 Thelma and Louise that made Davis (along with co-star Susan Sarandon) a feminist icon of sorts.

Touted early on as an Oscar contender, American Gangster eventually took a back seat to other (far less lucrative) entires, notably the seeming Best Picture and Director shoo-in, No Country For Old Men.

It did get a second nomination for Scott regular Arthur Max's Art Direction, and that's the field in which Scott began his career at the BBC five decades ago. "That was the passion," he told the full house (which Universal Home Entertainment surprised with free copies of the DVD afterwards), "It still is." The film had tested at a highly encouraging 86 approval rating in the longer version, but when a subsequent short cut earned a 92, he agreed ("Being a commercial bastard.") with the studio that the shorter cut should be released.

(Denzel Washington's Frank Lucas shows Ruby Dee, as his mother, her new and palatial home up north in American Gangster; photo courtesy Universal Pictures)