Crafted near the tail end of the twentieth century, but with its eyes cast further back over the previous decades and centuries, Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger locates an ominous threat in the tension between modernity and tradition - only not where you'd expect. Youths are corrupted not by new fashions but old ways, blinding their elders to the risk (at least those elders who don't already represent the risk themselves). Although entirely urban, the film is replete with corn liquor, chicken coops, and totems like tobies and rabbit's feet; its chorus is provided by gospel fermented in long Sunday sessions and blues cultivated in backwoods juke joints. Anger's most iconic presence is Harry Mention (Danny Glover in a fantastically charismatic, nerve-rattling performance): a wily, destructive slow-moving Tasmanian devil who took a bus from Detroit to Oakland yet somehow ended up in Los Angeles. This implausible origin story is the first of many ruses, its absurdity the very point. Harry doesn't come from Detroit; he comes from the past, Hell, and the central family's own collective psyche all at once. Harry shows up to visit old friends and makes himself so at home that he practically sinks into the woodwork while their lives fall apart, using their hospitality as an opportunity to emotionally suck them dry. Donald Liebenson has compared this quality, and Harry's initial presentation, to that of a Hollywood vampire, noting the legend that such creatures can only invade a home when already invited. The movie's richness lies in the contradictory crosscurrents calling Harry in and resisting him at the same time.
