The Story of a Three Day Pass

Melvin Van Peebles died on September 21 at the age of 89. His contributions to film, I thought, had been limited to the so-called “blaxploitation” genre of the 1970s. His film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) is thrown together - unfairly - with films like Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy, as well as others of wildly varying quality and crassness. The films combined commercial pandering to stereotypes of both black and white people with an unfathomable irony. The only way the movie industry in the 1970s was interested in black people was through formulaic depictions of the criminal underworld. So the presence of black actors and filmmakers was tolerated by the industry only through the representation – and reinforcement – of stereotypes. 

Van Peebles accepted these severe limitations because it gave him opportunities to work in American film. What I knew nothing about, I’m ashamed to admit, until reading Van Peebles’s obituaries was that his filmmaking career had begun in the late 1950s with three short films with which he bravely tried to interest Hollywood movie producers. When they showed no interest Van Peebles took his family and moved to the Netherlands in 1960. His short films were shown to none other than Henri Langlois and Lotte Eisner, who were so impressed by them they invited Van Peebles (who adopted the “Van” in the Netherlands) to come to France. He wrote novels and plays in French, and one of his novels, called La Permission, he was able to make into his first feature film, known by its English title The Story of a Three Day Pass.  With some difficulty I found a copy of it, and I've at last seen it. 

Turner is a soldier at a U.S. Army post in France.(1) We first see him looking in a mirror and his reflection is telling him he is about to get a promotion and a 3-day pass with it. But, his reflection tells him, he got it by being his unit commander’s “Uncle Tom” – obedient, uncomplaining, obliging to his superior. But Turner smiles in the mirror because it’s what he has to do to get what he wants. 

With his three day pass, Turner goes to Paris, where he wanders alone in the November city. He returns to his hotel and waits for night to fall. He goes to a nightclub, and after several failed attempts to find a girl to dance with him, he stumbles and his sunglasses, behind which he has been coolly hiding all day, fall and break on the floor. The last girl who refuses his offer to dance, Miriam (Nicole Berger) helps him find his broken sunglasses and, under the table together, they both laugh. The ice broken, they dance and talk all night, and she persuades him to accompany her to the beach in Normandy the next day. Normandy is actually beyond the geographical limits of Turner's pass, but he knows he is taking an even greater risk by being in the company of Miriam. 

There is an element of desperation in these relationships, that have to run the gamut from A to Z in a matter of hours, or in the case of Turner and Miriam, three days. Men in the military have an undeserved reputation of being oversexed. For much of the time they are deprived of female companionship, so that when they are finally at liberty, they always seem to be in a hurry – when, in fact, they are both making up for lost time and creating memories that will last them until their next pass. 

Inevitably, Turner is reminded of his race – distinct from everyone else – even when the reminder is well-intended. In a bar in Normandy, a flamenco performer dedicates a song to Miriam and Turner – for “Miss Ojos Grandes y Señor Negrito.” Upon hearing the word “negro,” Turner flies into a rage and beats the performer. Outside on the darkened street, after being thrown out of the club, Miriam tries to understand his rage and explain that the performer’s use of the word “negro” wasn’t meant as a slur. But Turner doesn’t believe her.  They walk away down the dark street together as Turner asks “How can anyone think that ‘black’ is a compliment?” 

This astonishing scene accentuates what it means – what it is – to be a black man in a white world, but it also tells us of the history that Turner must carry around with him, like weighty old luggage – the centuries-old history of slavery and Jim Crow, of the common practice of prejudice in the U.S. It is a history that many whites would rather forget and would rather wasn’t taught to children in schools. 

Van Peebles uses non-professional players in many scenes. The night club scene, for instance, in which Turner meets Miriam, only comes to life when we see the face of Nicole Berger, the only other actor in the scene. She was almost a decade older than she was in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Her presence in Three Day Pass is vital to its overall effect, and she doesn’t disappoint. When, near the end of the film, Turner’s restriction is suspended and he runs to the telephone booth to call her, we feel as let down as he is when a man’s voice – her father’s perhaps – curtly informs him that she is “sick.” In April 1967, shortly after shooting on Three Day Pass was completed, Berger was killed in a car crash. She was just 32.

As I mentioned, The Story of a Three Day Pass was based on a novel Van Peebles had written and published in France called La Permission. It was also used as the French title of the film. This is a more ambiguous and more serviceable title for the film because there are some things that Turner has been granted permission to do – like have three days off in which to visit Paris and “see the sights.” But Turner is not given permission to “miscegenate” – the ugly term used to describe the sexual mixing of the races. Van Peebles knew too well what the limitations of being a black man were in the U.S., even if some of those limitations didn’t exist in France. 

The film is an extraordinary piece of subjective filmmaking. It's told entirely from the point of view of Turner. The only time Van Peebles enters the thoughts of Miriam, it's to show us her utterly limited understanding of black people. She fantasizes that she is threatened by a crowd of black men in primitive garb, when Turner appears like an African chieftain (a large bone through his afro) and embraces her. Meanwhile, Turner is fantasizing he's a French nobleman on horseback visting Miriam in a chateau. Harry Baird, who was frim Guyana in South America, acted in 36 films in a long career, but Three Day Pass was his only starring role, which is puzzling because he is so assured as Turner. He retired from acting when glaucoma rendered him blind and he died in 2005.

Seeing The Story of a Three Day Pass has been a revelation for me, as it must have been for everyone who saw it in 1968. The reasons for my not seeing it until now make no sense, though they are probably as mundane as copyright restrictions and just bad luck. How can I have overlooked it for so long? It was shown at the 1968 San Francisco International Film Festival as France’s entry and it won an award.(2) On the strength of its success, Van Peebles finally attracted the interest of Hollywood producers and he was able to make his first feature film in America, Watermelon Man (1970). 

(1) Late in the film when Turner is recruited to give a tour of the Army post to a group of women gospel singers from Harlem, he tells them that most of the men there have been transferred. On March 7, 1966 De Gaulle ordered all American military installations out of France. 

(2) An interview with Van Peebles from 1967 in San Francisco can be seen here.