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‘C-Men’ and Tricksters in<i>Smile Orange</i>

2009· article· en· W149285645 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Rachel Moseley-Wood

Bibliographic record

VenueCaribbean Quarterly · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCaribbean history, culture, and politics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMovie theaterDisappointmentFilm directorHistoryMedia studiesArt historySociologyPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Mention Jamaican cinema and inevitably, one thinks of The Harder They Come, the Perry Henzell film that marked the country's entry into feature film production in 1972. Indeed, The Harder They Come enjoyed such critical and popular success, both at home and abroad, that it created unrealistically high expectations for the future of film production in Jamaica. So that, although the following decade saw the emergence of a small number, but some notable films, the years following The Harder They Come were popularly regarded as a period of disappointment when the films that did emerge - Smile Orange (1975), Rockers (1978), Children of Babylon (1980) and Countryman (1982) - failed to achieve either the critical acclaim or box office success of their forerunner. However, the publication of Ex-Iles1 in 1992, a collection of essays on Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean cinema, and Keith Q. Warner's On Location2 in 2000, signalled new interest in a body of work that had previously been largely eclipsed by Henzell' s now iconic film. These publications notwithstanding, omissions and oversights still occur. Milton Vickerman's 1999 article, Representing West Indians in Film: Ciphers, Coons, and Criminals, which examines stereotypes of West Indians, mainly in films made outside the region, lists in an appendix, 1 13 films with West Indian characters or themes released between 1 92 1 and 1993 3 The list makes note of The Harder They Come (which is also briefly referred to in the body of the article), Rockers, Countryman and The Lunatic (1992), but fails to mention two Jamaican films that fall within that period, Smile Orange and Children of Babylon. An omission of this type may unwittingly help to cement the invisibility of lesser known works: a listing of 113 films suggests an exhaustive and complete accounting, and eventually becomes a point of reference and source of information. One of the objectives of this article, therefore, is to draw critical attention to one of those early films, Smile Orange. Lacking The Harder They Corners major marketing asset - a reggae soundtrack - Smile Orange did not successfully penetrate overseas markets, despite initial favourable reviews and screenings at film festivals outside of Jamaica. Thanks to the release of the film on DVD, however, it is known in Jamaica and Jamaica diaspora communities. Directed by Trevor Rhone, whose achievements in the Jamaican theatre are well known, but whose work in the cinema is not sufficiently celebrated, Smile Orange is an adaptation of his immensely popular play of the same name. Rhone's first big hit as a playwright, Smile Orange enjoyed an unprecedented run of 245 performances when it was first staged in Jamaica in 1971 under the direction of Dennis Scott.4 Rhone, along with David Ogden, wrote the screenplay for Smile Orange and directed the film himself. Rhone has actually worked on a number of films; in addition to co-writing the screenplay for The Harder They Come, with Director, Perry Henzell, he also co-wrote the sceenplay for Milk and Honey (1986), a Canadian production that was partly filmed in Jamaica (for which he won a Genie Award), and more recently, he wrote the screenplay for One Love (2003). As Rhone's first and, so far, only attempt at film directing, Smile Orange is visually uninspiring; the sensibility and aesthetic of the playwright rather than the cinematographer is evident. But the talented cast's strong performance, in particular Carl Bradshaw in the lead role as Ringo, brings to life a screenplay that is layered with irony and hilarious from beginning to end. The film adaptation is faithful to the original work, retaining much of the original plot, as well as much of the original dialogue, and it reflects the concerns and themes of the play. Mervyn Morris's description of the play as, Funny and deadly serious... a devastating comment on attitudes the tourist industry harbours or can breed,5 is equally applicable to the movie. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.709
Threshold uncertainty score0.670

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.266
Teacher spread0.255 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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