The Story of a Three Day Pass: Ordinary Love

A love story that boldly portrays interracial intimacy and unflinchingly confronts the distortions of racism, The Story of a Three Day Pass is infused with what Van Peebles has termed “bittersweet lyricism.” To tell this story, he adopts a formally eclectic style—borrowing from and innovating within the French New Wave experimentation happening all around him—described by a French journalist as “almost a manual of everything that you can do with a camera.” As Van Peebles later recollected, “The reason I did what I did cinematically was because I didn’t know what I couldn’t do.” Filming in black and white, he employs techniques such as temporal and spatial elliptical editing, nondiegetic (existing outside of the story world) inserts, experimental sound, jump cuts, stop-motion editing, superimposition, double dolly shots (to be famously adopted by Spike Lee), and direct address to the camera. This last device becomes a recurring motif across the film as Van Peebles posits the mirror as the site of Turner’s subconscious, the surface not just reflecting his anxieties but talking back to him in caustic, cynical articulations of his self-doubt. Besides showing the character’s interiority, the mirror also allows Turner to be presented as he sees himself rather than from the perspective of the white secondary characters. In this way, Van Peebles asserts his character’s inner conflict and resists the flatness of Black characters in most Hollywood films. “Since it was all new to me, I just did it the way I felt it should be done,” Van Peebles would explain.

“The Story of a Three Day Pass rejects ideals and allows its characters to be flawed beings, no less worthy of love.”

Like many aspiring filmmakers before him, Van Peebles took his short films to Hollywood as a calling card. Not surprisingly, he was rebuffed. As one agent told him, “If you can tap-dance, I might find you some work. But that’s about all.” He was met with a similar response from potential publishers for his first novel, which to white literary taste didn’t seem “Negro” enough. Fed up with these barriers and seeking new opportunities, he and his wife, actor and photographer Maria Marx, and their two small children, Mario and Megan, moved to Holland, where in 1959 he enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Amsterdam in astronomy—his air-force specialization.

Van Peebles didn’t entirely abandon his pursuit of filmmaking. When he was on his way from San Francisco to the Netherlands, he traveled through New York, where he sought out Amos Vogel, founder of the influential film society Cinema 16. Impressed with the young filmmaker, Vogel acquired Sunlight and Three Pickup Men for Herrick for distribution on the 16 mm educational film market. Vogel would also give him a theatrical platform, programming Three Pickup Men with Edward O. Bland’s The Cry of Jazz in February 1960. The screening was followed by a discussion with Bland, novelist Mark Kennedy, jazz critic Marshall Stearns, activist and journalist Nat Hentoff, and Ralph Ellison (as a replacement for the advertised James Baldwin). A didactic essay film, The Cry of Jazz argues for the political valence of jazz music as emblematic of Black life, asserting both intergenerational Black trauma and persistent and ongoing white culpability. At this screening, Bland’s film was met with fury, drawing police intervention and overshadowing the subtler Three Pickup Men. More significant for Van Peebles’s filmmaking career, Vogel included his short films in a set of 16 mm prints he took to the Cinémathèque française in Paris, where they were enthusiastically received by Henri Langlois, Mary Meerson, and Lotte Eisner. The French cinephiles tracked down Van Peebles at the University of Amsterdam and invited him to Paris in 1959, saying, as Van Peebles recalled, “What are you doing in astronomy? You’re made for cinema.”

Van Peebles seized this invitation as the encouragement that Hollywood had refused, but the accolades didn’t immediately translate into opportunities. They did, however, give him, in his words, “the most dangerous thing”—hope and confidence to pursue filmmaking. He performed odd jobs to survive in Paris: he sang in the street, worked as a journalist for France-Observateur, was hired by the satirical magazine Hara-kiri (the precursor to Charlie Hebdo) as a writer and comics editor, and was named editor of the French edition of Mad magazine. He also spent time writing novels, initially in English and then in French. During this time, he made another short film, under the name “Melvin”: Les cinq cent balles (Five Hundred Francs, 1961), about a kid who tries in vain to get a five-hundred-franc note out of a gutter. With this simple premise, the film served as an exercise in shooting in the streets and experimenting with the effect of natural light on faces, objects, and water—experimentation that would inform his subsequent features. He also learned, as he put it, “which way the wind was blowing” in the French film production system. Ingeniously, he took advantage of a rule of the French film director’s guild that granted membership to any writer who wanted to make a film adaptation of their own work. He had published several novels and a collection of essays in French between 1964 and 1967, and therefore was able to obtain a government subsidy of the equivalent of sixty thousand dollars to adapt his story La permission for the cinema. While the film would premiere in the U.S. as “based on his novel,” the actual chronology again demonstrates Van Peebles’s ingenuity in working the system to his advantage; the story was first written as a screen treatment (and given the subsidy on that basis), then novelized after the film was shot, though it appeared in print before the film premiered in France in April 1968.

Van Peebles took near total control of the project, through postproduction. As he told the actors and crew, “Do it my way or we won’t do it.” Filmed in Paris and the Normandy towns of Honfleur and Étretat, The Story of a Three Day Pass was shot over six weeks for two hundred thousand dollars, financed by a new production company, OPERA. While largely a self-taught filmmaker, Van Peebles hired veteran cinematographer Michel Kelber, who had worked with major directors such as Claude Autant-Lara, Robert Siodmak, Jean Renoir, Nicholas Ray, and Sidney Lumet. Van Peebles controlled the music as well, as he had with his short films, collaborating on the film’s jazz soundtrack with his fellow African American expat Mickey Baker.

For the part of the American soldier, Van Peebles cast Harry Baird, a British Guyanese actor. For the role of Miriam, he cast Nicole Berger (born Nicole Gouspeyre), an actor with experience in the French New Wave (she had played Charles Aznavour’s wife in François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player) and the stepdaughter of film producer Pierre Braunberger. Berger described the role of the fragile but determined Miriam as one imbued with “tenderness and femininity.” As she noted of the connection between her character and Turner, “Laughter is very important. It constitutes the main form of communication between two beings who have difficulty speaking the same language.” This was to be her last role; she died from a car crash shortly after filming wrapped, giving more poignance to her character’s sense of melancholy.

What I want most in the world is to demonstrate that a Negro can stand on his own two feet and be his own master . . . I want to get The Man’s foot out of our backsides.

MVP, 1968

Van Peebles’s major break came by chance. At a party in Paris, he met San Francisco International Film Festival program director Albert Johnson. Johnson, also African American, was in Europe scouting for the festival. Johnson had served as assistant editor for Film Quarterly and was critical of the way American films treated Black subjects, lamenting, “Not one film or play written by a white author captures anything truthful about the Negro.” The two men hit it off, and Johnson invited Van Peebles to premiere The Story of a Three Day Pass (under its French title, La permission) as part of the New Directors program at the 1967 festival. As Van Peebles told readers of Ebony in 2005, “While Hollywood was dragging its feet about letting any power out of white hands—BLAM—I show up at the San Francisco Film Festival with my African American self, with my mahogany rear end, as a delegate from France.” His arrival at the festival under the auspices of the French delegation caused considerable embarrassment to the Americans. As Cineaste noted in 1969, “It is, of course, a sad comment on our society when a filmmaker must gain recognition in his own country as a ‘delegate’ from another.” However, it precipitated his move to Hollywood and his multifeature deal with Columbia Pictures, which would result in his only studio film, Watermelon Man (1970).

After its success in San Francisco, The Story of a Three Day Pass was acquired for distribution by Sigma III Corporation, owned by Filmways, Inc. Several majors had bid on it, but negotiations fell apart when Van Peebles refused the requested cut of one use of profanity—the final line in the film, where Turner’s mirror image taunts him and he replies, “Fuck you!” The director lamented the way the film’s initial reception highlighted the subject matter and obscured his experimentation with formal techniques: “These journalist cats here, they talk about race riots, and I say, ‘Shut up, let’s talk about film editing.’”

They want me to be obsessed with the racial problem and I’m obsessed with the human problem.

MVP, 1967