Set in Cleveland in the days after Martin Luther King's funeral, this gorgeous film interweaves several stories about what seems like typical Black urban America. There are people struggling to survive, there are revolutionaries (this is 1968), and there is the leading man, Tank, who is troubled by failure and drink, and by King's death.
So crime in the name of racial justice collides with ordinary people who have their own kind of individual justice, or just decency, but strained and compromised.
In a way, this is about life, ordinary life, except the times are not ordinary at all, and the drama of having a social cause elevates and distorts ordinary things.
The director, Jules Dassin, is known for a couple or three great noirs, and maybe that suits the mood here, twenty years later. But the big credit is just him taking on a movie with this kind of topical meaning, and with sincerity. The political meeting in the center of movie is a bit clichéd no doubt, but it feels close enough to get the point across.
The story has classic roots, in a weird way-it's based on a 1925 book, "The Informer," about the Irish resistance. It was made into a British (ironically) film in 1929, and then a more famous (and highly regarded) 1935 John Ford film. This tranferrance to the Black Revolution, with parallels to the Black Panthers in their insistence that guns are necessary to real revolution, is strong and interesting, and it comes straight from the period, without the filters and aesthetic distance that a later film would have not avoided.
I have to say this is a beautiful film. Almost every scene is at night, and the stark interiors and dramatic exteriors, with layers of light and rain and sweat (and a notable early scene in the shower) make it really sizzle. Cinematographer Boris Kaufman really gets it. It's vivid just on visual terms (including a 720 degree camera spin after a shootout, another at the end). He shot "On the Waterfront" and "Baby Doll" and "Long Day's Journey into Night" for just three classics.
However, it isn't uniformly thoughtful, and an attempt at some humorous surreal commentary at a funhouse is both fun and awkward. This is followed by a born-again street preacher who might seem believable to some but it seems more symbolic, and pushy. But then, this is followed a scene of family and friends in a big, quiet meeting where Tank arrives drunk, and the editing and filming seems to compare to the careful head shots in Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc." Seriously.
This is an almost entirely black cast, and set in squalid, cramped inner city situations. Look for fabulous performances by Ruby Dee (as a mother filled with dignity), and Rosco Lee Jones (as a homosexual), in addition to Tank, played by Julian Mayfield. For those who like blaxploitation films, this is more sincere and yet still filled with the exaggerations and details of urban Black America from that same era (or actually a few years before most of them).
