The Honoraries: Danny Glover in "To Sleep With Anger"

We'll be celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their career. First up is Danny Glover.

First and foremost, a big fucking congratulations to Danny Glover, whose long, reliable, multi-pronged career is tremendously deserving of the Jean Hersholt Award he will be awarded this year. 2021’s absolutely superb group of Honorary winners makes it all the more fucking absurd these shows aren’t televised, but that’s a whole other tangent. We here at The Film Experience are paying tribute to our favorites among Glover’s remarkable body of work, and when pressed about my favorite of his performances, I immediately went for Charles Burnett’s 1990 feature To Sleep With Anger.

As with Places of the Heart, Glover’s arrival comes just around the fifteen minute mark, by which time we have not only met most of the cast but have gotten acquainted with To Sleep With Anger’s unusual tone...

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Take Three: Danny Glover

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Danny Glover

Over the last decade Glover hasn’t seen the prolonged exposure that he once enjoyed, yet mostly still deserves. But he’s been doing good work in a vast array of projects, both mainstream and arthouse none the less. In a quintet of artful independents The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Manderlay (2005), Bamako (2006), Honeydripper (2007) and Blindness (2008) he gave strong, varied turns. Barnyard, The Shaggy Dog (both 2006) and Alpha and Omega added family fare to his résumé. A couple of pay-the-rent Saws (first and fifth) and a thankless turn in Death at a Funeral (2010) didn’t harm his career. A couple of presidential engagements, Battle for Terra (2006) and 2012 (2009), kept him afloat. And finally some bona fide solid gold support in Dreamgirls (2006) and Shooter (2007) reminded multiplex audiences just how good he is.

Take One: Be Kind Rewind (2008)
But the most recent role in which he’s perhaps been most memorable was as the ageing, single, Fats Waller-loving video-shop owner Mr. Fletcher in Michel Gondry’s 2008 comic throwback Be Kind Rewind. He starts out like a kind of reluctant, but good-hearted curmudgeon unwilling to embrace DVD, but he ends up an accidental impresario of both old-school values and new ventures by joining the ranks of the neighbourhood “sweders” to make a community doc on Fats Waller. He typifies both the film’s antiquated side (VHS), but also its embracing of new technologies (DVD, digital) and social connection (people + cinema = growth). The scenes of him trotting off to memorialise Fats and snoop on his rivals would make an endearing film of its own. If Danny Glover could “swede” a film of himself doing just that, I’d be happy.

Two more takes after the jump including the Angry film for which we hope he will be remembered...

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