Take a Giant Step had previously been on the fringes of my radar, mainly due to it being a Globe nominee for Supporting Actress (much more on that shortly), but after Johnny Nash passed away earlier this week, I decided to actively seek it out. Having done so, I can’t say you really need to do the same, but it has a few points of interest amidst a sea of overwrought melodrama. Note that this review may contain some spoilers.

Black high schooler Spencer Scott (Nash) gets expelled for arguing with a white teacher and smoking in the bathroom after leaving the classroom. Too ashamed to tell his father (Frederick O’Neal) at work, he goes home and tells his troubles to his beloved grandmother (Estelle Hemsley). As he does so, a group of his white classmates drop by, and he confronts them about not coming around more often. When one of them reveals that his girlfriend’s father is a racist, Spencer angrily throws them out. He then borrows money from “Gram,” packs a bag, and goes across town to the black neighborhood, which his parents had moved out of in order to give him more opportunities.

He ends up at a bar, where he first chats with a group of prostitutes anxiously trying to round up clients, and then with a young woman (Ellen Holly) he’s attracted to. He suggests they form a relationship, and perhaps even marry, but she reveals that she’s already (unhappily) married, and looking for an evening’s diversion. Now rather tipsy, he leaves and encounters the prostitutes, one of whom, Violet (Pauline Meyers), takes him home with her, but he hardly computes her intentions and leaves, having haggled a dime out of her for bus fare.

He goes home, where he’s confronted by his father and mother (Beah Richards), who’ve heard from the school; his father is enraged to the point of violence, while his mother is aghast at his talking back to a white person. After a heated argument, Spencer goes to his room, and Gram confronts his parents, arguing they’ve been too focused on giving him material advantages to attend to his emotional needs. They back down and attempt to reconcile with him, but the exertion of the day causes Gram to have a fatal heart attack, leaving Spencer devastated.

Some days later, he’s telling his troubles to Christine (Ruby Dee), the Scotts’ housekeeper, and she opens up about her own past, including the loss of her husband and stillborn child. Spencer confesses his attraction to her, and it’s ambiguous as to whether she reciprocates. But since the family no longer needs a housekeeper, Mrs. Scott lets her go, then tells Spencer that she invited some of his friends over for cake and ice cream. He argues with her, claiming she’s trying to bribe them, and runs out, catching up to Christine. He asks to go with her, but she talks him down and bids him farewell. He goes home, where he has a hesitant but civil reconciliation with his friends and a warmer one with his mother.

If it sounds like Spencer does a lot of arguing and sulking and running away, well, he does. We see that he gets it from his father, who’s particularly prone to arguing with Gram (his mother-in-law, I should note), but it doesn’t change the fact that he comes off as a massive brat for most of the film. And when he’s not a pill, he’s bafflingly naive; he’s able to deduce that the women at the bar are prostitutes, but later can hardly comprehend that Violet is trying to sleep with him. Or he’s propositioning the married woman—a total stranger—as if he has no concept of how relationships work. Yes, he’s at a difficult age, but he’s so doltish it takes us out of the film.

Not that the film wasn’t already on shaky ground. It starts off with a massive miscalculation, showing Spencer in the classroom, everyone else staring at him, getting up from his chair, glaring at the teacher, then storming out and going right into the bathroom to light a cigar (!). There’s no dialogue, just a lot of angry posturing and the jazzy, bombastic score. Later we learn the reason for the confrontation: one student, to “needle” Spencer, asked why the slaves in the South needed the North to free them, and the teacher responded by explaining they were too “backwards” to do it themselves. But we really should’ve seen the incident ourselves, rather than hearing about it after the fact, and it’s a baffling omission which presages some of the film’s other shortcomings.

The film was actually based on a play by Louis S. Peterson, the first dramatic play by a black author to be produced on Broadway, and Peterson co-wrote the script with Julius J. Epstein, with several members of the cast (including Hemsley, O’Neal, and Meyers) reprising their roles from the original 1953 production—which ran only 76 performances, so one might wonder why they wanted to film it. In any case, the film feels very much like a film of a play at times, with the lengthy speeches, conversations, and restricted settings of the original. But they opted to show the aftermath of the classroom incident, so why not show us what actually led up to it? It’s just a strange choice all around.

I haven’t seen or read the actual play, so I can’t vouch for it, but on the basis of the film, there’s a reason it wasn’t a major hit then or much revived now. There are some good moments and still-relevant themes—Spencer’s father lamenting that he has to work twice as hard as his co-workers to keep his job is a particularly resonant line—but as a whole it’s a fairly standard coming-of-age drama which lives or dies on its performances. Unfortunately, the performances aren’t enough to compensate.

Nash, sadly, just isn’t up to the demands of the role. His deliveries are stiff and self-conscious, and he comes off as petulant and immature when we should be feeling for him. Granted, the script calls for Spencer to argue with and alienate almost everyone around him, so even a good actor would find the role a challenge, but Nash is too often merely tiresome. I would like to have seen how Louis Gossett Jr. handled the role on stage; I could image he achieved the pathos Nash fails to grasp.

Hemsley* was the Globe nominee for Supporting Actress, and she’s pretty easily the best part of the film. No, Gram (or Mrs. Martin if you prefer) isn’t the most original character, but she’s the take-no-shit old lady who tells everyone what’s what, and that’s archetype I generally enjoy watching. She’s got some amusing idiosyncrasies of her own, like her demanding an afternoon beer and her blithe racism; at one point, admitting her own dislike of the Polish, she says Hitler was right about them, much to Spencer’s chagrin. Hemsley gives a properly feisty performance, at times falling back on her stage cadences but always holding her own (although her death scene doesn’t come off too well). She didn’t need the nomination, and I’m not going to say she should’ve won over the actual winner (Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life, ironically a woman of Mexican-Jewish descent playing a biracial woman passing for white), but she steals the film. She’s even better as the crusty grandmother in America, America.

The rest of the cast is adequate, but mostly unremarkable. O’Neal is a bit too blustery, but Richards, with her soft voice and gently intense eyes, has a few genuinely effective moments. And Dee is unsurprisingly fairly solid, bringing some real warmth and vivacity to her scenes, in which she mostly acts as a loving foil to Spencer. One interesting supporting character is Alan (Sherman Raskin), a nerdy classmate of Spencer’s who later congratulates him for standing up to the teacher, and in the final scene suggests “being eggheads together” as he and Spencer prepare to apply for college. It’s hinted that Alan is meant to be gay, and that he might have a crush on Spencer, and while the film obviously can’t go there, it adds a layer of interest to his scenes.

Cinematically, there’s not much to be said for it. Philip Leacock’s direction is nothing special, nor is Arthur E. Arling’s cinematography. Jack Marshall’s score isn’t bad in of itself, but it’s in the wrong film; it would be at home in Rebel Without a Cause or some other drama of delinquency, but in this essentially low-key drama, it’s more distracting than anything. But in a film which doesn’t work all that well to begin with, it’s hard to mind much. It was also nominated for the long-defunct Globe for “Best Film Promoting International Understanding,” but lost to The Diary of Anne Frank, a film (and play) as iconic as this one is forgotten.

Score: 59

*No relation to Sherman that I can find. However, Dee would later appear in Purlie Victorious (and its film adaptation, Gone Are the Days!), which was later adapted into the musical Purlie, the original production of which featured…Sherman Hemsley!