As one person who has toiled in the State House for years observed, it looked like an "abandoned planet" with "some signs of life".
The subtleness and sensitivity of Lee Daniels's film captures what some of most perceptive black writers of the civil-rights years observed at the time.
"They never had sales easels before," Yacine Diop, 34, who has worked at the Benetton shop for five years, observed of the competition.
Yet his friend Corey Gammill, who was one of Tom's captains for six years, observed that "Jason would catch fish some other guys didn't, but he also put himself in rough water more.
"During the war years," observed the writer and bon vivant Lucius Beebe, "battle-scarred warriors in New Caledonia and Tunisia, who would rather have been bottle-scarred, dreamed of the cool, dim recesses of Vic's".
"I certainly would think he would have to be looked on as a serious potential music director of a major orchestra of the world in the next 5 to 10 years," observed Henry Fogel, president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
