Once Upon a Time in Harlem Review: Late to the Party

In August of 1972, an invitation was sent out to a select few for a cocktail party at the home of Duke Ellington. Filmmaker David Greaves was the architect of the gathering – the guy with the bright idea to get on camera the surviving movers and shakers of the Harlem Renaissance and capture them before their dwindling generation disappeared altogether. After all, they’d already lost Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay …  Time was running out for the rest of them.

The footage, seen now theatrically for the first time, is a marvelous relic of bygone eras – a remembrance of an early century’s cultural flowering and, in tandem, a peripatetic portrait of a radically changed but still buzzing Upper Manhattan in the 1970s. But the story of how it came together is its own layer cake of poignancy. Greaves was never able to turn the footage into a finished film, so after his death in 2014, it became the passion project of his surviving family. All told, four generations worked on the documentary, including son David, who was a camera operator on the original shoot and directed this new assembly, and granddaughter Liani, who produced (with Anne de Mare). 

And passion certainly infuses Once Upon a Time in Harlem, offscreen and onscreen. Shot cinema-verité style on sumptuously aged 16mm, the film documents the arrival of these elder statesmen and women, nattily dressed in rakish hats, pocket squares, and jangling bracelets, as they reunite in Duke’s townhouse to recollect, eulogize, and revive old arguments. In a room where the median age appears to be seventysomething at least, trailblazing actor Leigh Whipper, at 98, is treated reverentially by the assembled, while socialist bookseller Richard B. Moore, a natural contrarian, ruffles a few feathers. Where their perspectives and memories align and diverge is fascinating in itself – naturally, the socialist bookseller thinks differently than, say, the poet and the muralist and the society writer. For so many characters introduced so quickly and in jostling proximity – this is, after all, a cocktail party – the film effectively delineates their backstories and helpfully runs identifiers throughout. They’re not all bold-faced names you might remember from a Harlem Renaissance unit in American History, but you’ll walk away with at least half-dozen you’ll want to study up on afterwards. 

There’s a little bloviating amongst the gathering, which you might expect at any cocktail party, especially one with this many aging hipsters, artists, and intelligentsia. Mostly, their conversations are electric. Equal parts class reunion, wake, and salon, there are heady, sometimes heated exchanges about the extraordinary moment in time they had in common – and its ongoing legacy. If only they could have lived to see this wonderful monument to that legacy.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem

2026, NR, 100 min. Conceived and filmed by William Greaves. Directed by David Greaves.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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