Little Devil Film

[Shanel Arrendell]

MaeMurray stars as the devil of the title, a nice Irish girl who pretends to be bad to land a job on the stage. Rudolph Valentino (under two tons of pale greasepaint) is her nice Irish boy love interest. Oh brother.

Murray is as twitchy and annoying as ever, Valentino seems confused as to why he is there, the audience is treated to ethnic stereotypes in lieu of actual characters and then we get a madcap rape scene. You know, for the kids! Avoid unless you are inexplicably a Murray fan (seriously, have you seen her films?) or if you are a Valentino completist.

In Australia and some European countries, an English-language version of the film, with local subtitles, has been screened and circulated on VHS. In the English version, the voices of the main actors have been dubbed by themselves; some scenes might have been filmed in both languages.

In the North American Pontifical College in Rome, Father Maurice is in deep turmoil because of Patricia, a woman who loves him and expects him to make up his mind regarding his intentions toward her. While making an attempt, he is summoned by a novice for an emergency, that of an overweight woman possessed by a demon. Father Maurice performs the rite of exorcism, expelling the demon from the woman.

The demon, an escaped little devil named Giuditta, not wanting to return whence he came, starts following Father Maurice everywhere and often indulges in mischief, sometimes innocently getting Father Maurice into trouble. Father Maurice fails several times to get rid of Giuditta, who, in one instance, replaces an ill Father Maurice at Mass, turning the solemn ceremony into a fashion parade. Seeing that he is showing signs of exhaustion, Father Maurice's peers advise him to take a vacation. Eventually, another agent "from the same place as Giuditta" appears and manages to attract Giuditta, who finally leaves Maurice and follows her "elsewhere".

Vivitar had a good thing going, back in the day. They produced just about anything you needed if you were a photographer. Lenses, cases, lens caps, filters, camera bags, straps, flashes, even whole camera sets. I have a number of pieces of gear from them. A lens, a camera body, a flash gun, and at least indirectly, this little Devil.

Vivitar built this little camera first. It was called the Wide and Slim. Plastic through and through, no focus, no shutter speeds, no f stops, no nothing. You can choose a different film stock to change how the image looked, that was all. The camera as something of a flop back in its day. The ultra-wide lens (22mm) was soft and vignetted something fierce. Hardly the way you wanted to capture the family vacation or a graduation. It died out long before Vivitar eventually did.

While George had over 225 screen credits, it is fitting that one of his biggest and best known parts was in a film called The Unknown, for little is known about his private life, other than that he came from Aleppo, Syria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) and emigrated to the U.S. when he was about 13.

In his last years George worked mostly in television. One of his bigger late parts was on the show The Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu (1956). He also worked regularly as a crowd extra on Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Death Valley Days, and Have Gun Will Travel. John George retired in 1962.

One of the moments Hanif Abdurraqib stops to examine in his new book A Little Devil in America took place during the 1981 inaugural celebration of Ronald Reagan. Actor Ben Vereen, a celebrity thanks to his Emmy-nominated performance in Roots, decided to stage a tribute to Bert Williams: an African American vaudeville artist who'd performed in blackface. When Vereen came out in blackface himself, "wide-eyed," writes Abdurraqib, "his face somewhere at the intersection of sadness and horror," the newly sworn-in president had a good laugh.

Reagan, whose 1943 film This is the Army featured one musical number performed by segregated Black soldiers and a separate number by white soldiers doing minstrelsy in blackface, seemingly didn't think to consider that Vereen might have been challenging or confronting his audience. To Reagan, it was seemingly just a good old fashioned minstrel show, and he might have taken Vereen's presence on the inaugural stage as just another indication of how he was uniting America around his blithe vision of hope.

A Little Devil points to the true complexities of that moment, and of many more: like the moment Whitney Houston opened the 1988 Grammys with a performance of "I Wanna Dance with Somebody," despite the fact that she couldn't really dance, very successfully courting a white audience with material that would get booed later that year at the Soul Train Music Awards by a crowd angry at Houston's seeming complicity with a music industry that was positioning her as (in Abdurraqib's words) "an exceptional Black person, who transcended race itself."

Abdurraqib also takes us into the studio with Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton, recording her harrowing vocal part ("Rape! Murder!") on "Gimme Shelter." Clayton dragged herself out of bed, pregnant, to record the part; "after a playback," writes Abdurraqib, "Mick Jagger asked her if she wanted to do just one more and really give it everything she had." The Stones would later perform the song at Altamont, where a Black man named Meredith Hunter was fatally stabbed by a Hells Angel who was acquitted by an all-white jury.

Clayton's performance, a triumph inextricably comingled with tragedy, is the kind of touchpoint that Abdurraqib approaches with appreciation and empathy. A collection of essays both intimate and sweeping, A Little Devil doesn't offer a thesis as such, but asks readers to pause and reflect on artists like Clayton: to appreciate them in a way that goes beyond the kind of glib praise or reductive bathos that observers, most particularly white observers, have been wont to dispense when writing about Black performance.

Abdurraqib wishes for a movie where Don Shirley, the pianist whose relationship with his white chauffeur is dramatized in Green Book (the author and his friends walked out), isn't manipulated "to serve the American thirst for easy resolution. If only all movies about Black people struggling against the machinery of this country were, instead, movies about Black people living."

He writes rapturously of Amazing Grace, the long-shelved Aretha Franklin gospel concert film, but he notes that he respects Franklin's decision to block its release during her lifetime: aside from the sound synchronization issues that bedeviled producers until the development of digital technology, there was the fact that Franklin wasn't happy with the proposed revenue split. "Aretha wanted a large share of the profits that the film was slated to gain, and that was fair," writes Abdurraqib. "She was the basis for whatever success the film might have."

A Little Devil isn't just about icons like Franklin and Shirley, though: it's also an achingly personal reminisce by the author, who opens each of the book's five sections with a prose poem about his own relationship to music, movement, and community. Raised Muslim in Columbus, Ohio, where he returned to live as an adult ("being from this place had become inextricably linked to my identity, and so I push myself to love it"), Abdurraqib rose to prominence among music critics with the collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, then hit the bestseller list with his complex tribute Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest. A Little Devil in America is his widest-ranging collection yet, and yet also his most focused in the way he circles again and again around the theme of Black performance in all its layers.

The book's title comes from Josephine Baker, who said, "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too." Abdurraqib's tribute to that artist is a chapter titled "The Josephine Baker Monument Can Never Be Large Enough," wondering in awe at the entertainer "who left America before it could persuade her to fall in love with it." The cover illustration depicts a Black couple dancing the Lindy Hop; it corresponds to an opening chapter that muses on African Americans' absence from histories of '20s dance marathons ("what is endurance to a people who have already endured?") and salutes Don Cornelius, who created Soul Train to showcase Black excellence.

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