Our Favorite Movies Adapted From Black Books
The Color Purple
The 1985 period drama The Color Purple, starring Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Avery, Danny Glover and of course Whoopi Goldberg, was a masterful remake of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. The amazing story centered on the life of Celie Harris, yet illuminated greater issues of race, poverty and gender in the early 1900s in the south. The movie was excellent as well, but compared to the book, it actually left out some of the symbolic and thematic elements (like the use of purple and lesbianism) that made the original story so groundbreaking. Nevertheless, both the movie and novel are classics, and both belong in your libraries.
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
-Alice Walker, The Color Purple
