Cinema: The Three Faces of Steve the Color Purple

Directed by Steven Spielberg; Screenplay by Menno Meyjes

You don't get to be the most powerful boy in Hollywood without being a man of many faces. There is Steven Spielberg the Good: he directs terrific pictures with sentiment and smarts. There is Steven the Strong: he godfathers Spielberg-style films that soar (Back to the Future) more often than they flop (Young Sherlock Holmes). But from the geriatric elite of Hollywood, Spielberg got no respect--no Oscars, that is. So here comes Steven the Nice, with his first "respectable" motion picture, an adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel The Color Purple. It bears the same relation to his more personal films...

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