“The Six Triple Eight” represents a leap in ambition for one-man movie studio Tyler Perry. It’s a broadscale period drama that casts a spotlight on a neglected chapter of World War II history: The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion of the Women’s Army Corps was the only Black WAC unit sent overseas to Europe, where they unplugged a three-year bottleneck of mail from GIs to the folks back home and vice versa. All this in the face of an Army brass that didn’t think they were up to the task and didn’t want them there in the first place.
Landing squarely in the “Hidden Figures” genre of American Heroes You Don’t Know About but Should, the movie features a large cast acting their hearts out, to varying degrees of success, plus Perry’s earnest, soapy screenwriting and his standard directorial style, which is to say not much style at all. It’s a good thing the story is inspiring, since the filmmaking is uninspired.
Still, it’s an easy watch, and the most amateurish scenes are out of the way early: the youthful interracial romance between Lena Derriecott (Ebony Obsidian) and Abram David (Gregg Sulkin), the latter playing a wealthy small-town Jewish teenager with the enthusiasm of a small child in a school play. Abram’s early death in World War II is the spur that gets Lena to enlist in the WACs, and “The Six Triple Eight” abruptly cuts to her boarding the train for basic training with her fellow recruits.
They include Bernice (Kylie Jefferson), a classy Harlem-ite with a gift for jitterbugging; prim preacher’s daughter Elaine (Pepi Sonuga); half-Mexican Dolores (Sarah Jeffery); and Johnnie Mae (Shanice Shantay), a big-mama country girl with a vocabulary ripe enough to singe the hair of the preacher’s daughter. Perry interweaves the standard wartime training montage with scenes showing how poorly the Black WACs are treated by White officers and enlisted men. Only a handful are verbally abusive, but the baseline racism is systemic, deeply ingrained and humiliating on a grinding day-to-day basis.
The movie’s real hero emerges in these scenes: the 6888th’s commanding officer, Maj. Charity Adams (Kerry Washington, who executive produced), an academic genius and base camp hard case who whips the women into shape as a point of necessary pride. “Because you are Negroes and women,” she tells them, “you do not have the luxury to be as good as the White soldiers. You have the burden to be better.”
Once shipped overseas – in a commercial passenger ship with no escort in U-boat-infested waters – the 6888th is given the monumental task of sifting through thousands of mailbags containing 17 million letters and packages that have been sitting in an airplane hangar, undelivered and gathering dust throughout the war. They have six months to come up with a system to get the mail to the soldiers – not so easy when 7,500 of them are named Robert Smith – and to their families. “They did not send us because they thought we could do it,” Maj. Adams assures her troops. “We are here because they are sure we cannot.”
Spoiler alert: The 6888th delivered all 17 million letters in 90 days.
Whose idea was this in the first place? Why, Eleanor Roosevelt’s, of course, as played by Susan Sarandon with gusto and an alarming set of false teeth. Backed by Mary McLeod Bethune (Oprah Winfrey), head of the first lady’s unofficial “Black Cabinet,” Eleanor convinces F.D.R. (a sprightly Sam Waterston) to assign Adams’ WACs the job over the objections of a racist general (Dean Norris of “Breaking Bad”), who becomes the worst of many thorns in the major’s side once everyone is over in England.
That conflict leads to a faceoff between Adams and the general that has become a defiant high point in the real-life major’s biography; it says something that she now has a U.S. Army fort named after her and, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t.
“The Six Triple Eight” tacks between these upper echelon scenes and various lower-rank melodramas, with the stop-and-start romance between Lena and a handsome Army private (Jay Reeves) taking precedence. The dialogue is shopworn and the performances adequate at best; most of director Perry’s energy seems to have gone into the convincing re-creation of wartime America and Europe. It’s nevertheless a good story of duty, sacrifice, toughness and delayed redemption, with the voice of Michelle Obama over the end credits honoring members of the 6888th in 2015. In 2022, President Joe Biden awarded the battalion the Congressional Gold Medal. You don’t need great filmmaking to tell a good story about great Americans.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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