'Mahogany' and the missed opportunity of Diana Ross' movie career

Diana Ross in Mahogany

Hollywood really didn't know what to do with a formidable female actress of color in the 1970s. That sad fact becomes abundantly clear when you look at the all to brief movie career of legendary diva Diana Ross.

Sure, one could counter that contention by citing blaxploitation icon Pam Grier, but I would argue that she simply rose above the mediocre material she was given. She wouldn't get an opportunity to play a fully realized role until Quentin Tarantino resuscitated her career in the late '90s with Jackie Brown.

Ross, along with women like Cicely Tyson and Diahann Carroll (the other sole women of color to score Oscar nominations that decade), was one of the few black women to get parts in 'respectable' mainstream Hollywood films. And she gave a remarkable performance in her first film, taking on an incredibly difficult role -- of tragic jazz singer Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues -- which few thought she was right for.

Certainly, that film plays to her strengths since she plays a singer and famously is one in real life, but Ross brought an exuberant, loose-limb physicality to the role that rightfully caught many critics' attention. In the film Ross has to play a woman from childhood to adulthood, from the first burst of fame through her drug induced downfall, with an admittedly made-up romantic subplot to boot, featuring Billy Dee Williams in his breakthrough movie role.

She and Williams particularly had special chemistry, and for a brief spell they were the most glamorous black pairing in all of cinema. They parlayed their appeal into a second, decidedly more campy film -- the fashion industry melodrama Mahogany -- which today plays like a case study in how Ross' natural acting talent was squandered.

It's the very definition of a vanity project, directed by her then on-again, off-again real life love interest and head of Motown entertainment Berry Gordy. The movie starts off promising enough with Ross as a put-upon wannabe designer falling for Williams' Jesse Jackson-esque local activist. But once Ross is "discovered" -- and becomes somehow both a model and a mogul at the same time -- the movie goes off the rails in a huge way.

It's not just the silly fashion shoot montages or the simplistic screenplay, which sets up a misogynistic power play over who gets to control Ross' livelihood -- it's Ross herself who is clearly being directed by someone who wants to indulge her and can't view her objectively. The story itself almost seems to be a commentary on Gordy and Ross' private drama -- and arguably the movie could be fascinating if read that way.

But instead it chooses to go a more tawdry route -- including a strange subplot involving an over the top Anthony Perkins as a sexually stunted sociopath photographer. That story culminates with two scenes that are at least delightfully strange. A vaguely homoerotic fight over what turns out to be an unloaded gun between Williams and Perkins -- and a cartoonish scene where Perkins goads Ross into being photographed while he drives erratically on an overpass.

That got weird

These scenes -- and an infamous one where Ross drunkenly declares "I'm a winner" while Williams defines what he considers the value of success -- are entertaining but also crude and silly. Ross really deserved better. And it'd be interesting to see what kind of work she could have produced if she was working with a director who wasn't interested in tailoring her star image, but instead wringing a real performance out of her.

However, when Ross did work with a truly great director -- Sidney Lumet -- on her third and final movie, the big budget musical The Wiz, the results were not much better. The Wiz is a lot of fun, with unassailable music and dancing -- but even its greatest defenders (including myself) acknowledge that Ross was the weakest link. She is simply, clearly too old for the role and the strain of watching her play a lonely, single young woman shows on her face and voice.

In other words, right director, wrong movie, and the wrong time. The movie was deemed a costly flop and Ross would never attempt a big screen career again. And with hindsight its clear that producers couldn't see past her off-screen star persona as a popular singer to give her roles which would require real chops.

At 72, she's still young enough to make a comeback with a triumphant new role, but even if she doesn't we can still marvel at her work at Lady Sings the Blues and wonder what might have been.