Billy Woodberry

(On Cable TV, August 2022) There is, at first glance, not much to Bless Their Little Hearts. As a gritty realist slice-of-life drama about a struggling black family in South-Central L.A., it revels in grainy black-and-white cinematography, lackadaisical camera placement, small-scale drama and low-end production values. It’s meant to show us the life of a lower-class family, even though the father having a second family isn’t quite “typical” in any sense of the word. The characters are barely in control of their destiny, tossed around by unemployment, families and expectations. There’s little here in terms of spectacle, thrills, laughs or edification. But that’s the point of Bless Their Little Hearts and the reason why it reverberates today. For a very, very long time, such depictions of ordinary black people were never captured on film. Movies were expensive to shoot, and non-privileged people did not have access to the means of cultural production. This is largely why the L.A. Rebellion movement of the late-1970s and early-1980s (of which director Billy Woodberry belonged to) was so important: it started to empower those who were not captured in their own worlds in movies. (It also bridged the gap between blaxploitation and the type of black cinema exemplified by Spike Lee, which is a big blank spot in most cinema histories.) I may not particularly like watching Bless Their Little Hearts all that much—too long, too slow, too ordinary for my genre-craving tastes (although the character of the wife, played by Kaycee Moore, gets at least a pair of great scenes)—but I recognize that it’s an important film in its own specific way.