Someone has murdered the top sergeant of an all-black Army company in the middle of World War II and a lawyer -- a black lawyer, Howard E. Rollins, Jr. -- is sent from Washington to investigate the case. The enlisted men in the Southern camp are all black. The officers are all white except Rollins, who is a captain. They've never seen an African-American officer before. In the face of all kinds of opposition from the other officers, who are either naive or racists, and overcoming the recalcitrance of the enlisted men, Rollins pushes ahead until the culprits are discovered and the case solved.
The victim, Adolph Caesar, was the highest-ranking enlisted man who had seen service in France in World War I. Man, is he a complicated person. The men alternatively respect him for his spit-and-polish demands or hate him for his persecution of unsophisticated blacks from the country, the kind who play blues on the guitar and carry around Lucky Tiger balm. Caesar is short and skinny, like the early Frank Sinatra, but he's tough as nails too and is able to clobber a much larger Denzel Washington in a bare-knuckled fist fight. Suspects abound.
It's far from a traditional detective story though, and there are scenes of questioning, accompanied by flashbacks, but no climactic courtroom confrontation. In recent cop movies we know right away who the villains are. In the old-fashioned mysteries, Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe keep a tight rein on their judgments until the final reveal. Not here. The cool Rollins takes his job seriously -- too seriously perhaps -- and wants to arrest everyone seriatim upon whom suspicion happens to fall at any given moment -- men and officers alike. And he's always mistaken until the last few minutes when the miscreants give themselves away and spill the beans gratuitously, even in the absence of any evidence against them. I mean, I should say, there is not a "shred" of evidence against them except their confession. (All evidence comes in "shreds".) The movie is never dull but it meanders around, covering baseballs games and combat exercises. Rollins strides manfully and quietly through his part, linking all these various dynamics and ancillary events, but the show belongs to Adolph Caesar as the heart-breakingly torn-up top sergeant who doesn't know which race he owes allegiance to. That coffee-grinder voice! What a performance. He died two years after the movie was released.
The location shooting is colorful and evocative. Not just the vast emptiness of Fort Chafee, Arkansas, but the brief glimpses we get of "Tynan, Louisiana," where the summer evenings are so hot and drenched, and the air conditioners so uninvented that people simply move their parlors and floor lamps out onto the sidewalks and fan themselves while playing checkers. Everyone glistens with sweat. Once in a while I thought I smelled body odor.
The plot, though, has its weaknesses. Nobody could describe it as taut. That's not necessarily bad. Life itself is rarely taut. But the impression left by the film is not that art is imitating life but that the writer isn't sure where he's going, or how much in the way of drama and significance he can pack into the running time. And none of the white guys are particularly admirable either, though there's plenty of diversity among the black enlisted men. Dennis Lipscomb is the white captain who is Rollins' counterpart. He wants to get the whole thing over with as quickly and quietly as possible. The character redeems himself, but Lipscomb is not a forceful actor but rather the sort who would make a satisfactory clerk, the truculent kind who informs you that the rules preclude his complying with your request.
But, as I say, you're very unlikely to get bored. And although the chief conundrum, which has to do with racial identity, is buried beneath a multitude of digressions, it still lends the movie a deathless power. Fortunately, though the problem still exists, it's not as demanding as it once was. At least the now-integrated armed forces have African-American officers, and some have achieved even higher rank.
The victim, Adolph Caesar, was the highest-ranking enlisted man who had seen service in France in World War I. Man, is he a complicated person. The men alternatively respect him for his spit-and-polish demands or hate him for his persecution of unsophisticated blacks from the country, the kind who play blues on the guitar and carry around Lucky Tiger balm. Caesar is short and skinny, like the early Frank Sinatra, but he's tough as nails too and is able to clobber a much larger Denzel Washington in a bare-knuckled fist fight. Suspects abound.
It's far from a traditional detective story though, and there are scenes of questioning, accompanied by flashbacks, but no climactic courtroom confrontation. In recent cop movies we know right away who the villains are. In the old-fashioned mysteries, Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe keep a tight rein on their judgments until the final reveal. Not here. The cool Rollins takes his job seriously -- too seriously perhaps -- and wants to arrest everyone seriatim upon whom suspicion happens to fall at any given moment -- men and officers alike. And he's always mistaken until the last few minutes when the miscreants give themselves away and spill the beans gratuitously, even in the absence of any evidence against them. I mean, I should say, there is not a "shred" of evidence against them except their confession. (All evidence comes in "shreds".) The movie is never dull but it meanders around, covering baseballs games and combat exercises. Rollins strides manfully and quietly through his part, linking all these various dynamics and ancillary events, but the show belongs to Adolph Caesar as the heart-breakingly torn-up top sergeant who doesn't know which race he owes allegiance to. That coffee-grinder voice! What a performance. He died two years after the movie was released.
The location shooting is colorful and evocative. Not just the vast emptiness of Fort Chafee, Arkansas, but the brief glimpses we get of "Tynan, Louisiana," where the summer evenings are so hot and drenched, and the air conditioners so uninvented that people simply move their parlors and floor lamps out onto the sidewalks and fan themselves while playing checkers. Everyone glistens with sweat. Once in a while I thought I smelled body odor.
The plot, though, has its weaknesses. Nobody could describe it as taut. That's not necessarily bad. Life itself is rarely taut. But the impression left by the film is not that art is imitating life but that the writer isn't sure where he's going, or how much in the way of drama and significance he can pack into the running time. And none of the white guys are particularly admirable either, though there's plenty of diversity among the black enlisted men. Dennis Lipscomb is the white captain who is Rollins' counterpart. He wants to get the whole thing over with as quickly and quietly as possible. The character redeems himself, but Lipscomb is not a forceful actor but rather the sort who would make a satisfactory clerk, the truculent kind who informs you that the rules preclude his complying with your request.
But, as I say, you're very unlikely to get bored. And although the chief conundrum, which has to do with racial identity, is buried beneath a multitude of digressions, it still lends the movie a deathless power. Fortunately, though the problem still exists, it's not as demanding as it once was. At least the now-integrated armed forces have African-American officers, and some have achieved even higher rank.