As a bonus, I would like to quote this bit of trivia from Kim Newman's review from Screen Daily:
Now, here's the thing. Like G.O.B. Bluth, I'm white. So when I watch a comedy made by black Americans for black audiences in the 1970s, I frequently find myself deciding "all right, I assume the filmmakers know what they're doing, I'm going to laugh at this." And yet feeling kind of nervous about laughing. This happened sporadically during Emma Mae back in February, and it happened pretty much throughout Cotton Comes to Harlem.
E.g. this movie has a white character idiotically try to disguise himself with blackface. The tactic is even less effective than when the Marx Brothers tried it in A Day at the Races. It's kinda funny even in 2013 because it's such an obviously dumb idea, not like A Day at the Races where you think Harpo's magic might allow it to actually work, but seriously movie, you're doing a blackface joke? Similarly for a lot of the humor about the cultural divide between
urban and rural blacks. (Emma Mae sided with the hicks; Cotton Comes to Harlem is very pro-city, although most of its humor is at the expense of the city slickers.)
None of this is supposed to be particularly transgressive! It's a zany '70s studio-indie film. The contemporaneous Times review mentions the most jaw-dropping moment of the movie in a casual aside. But times have changed. If you made this film today it would be disjointed: half Hollywood-friendly buddy-cop stuff and half edgy in-your-face comedy.
The guest curator who introduced the movie said he thought director Ossie Davis shot his wad too early with the excellent car chase at the beginning of the movie. (Classic sight gag: guy in top hat and tails watches the car chase with glee, then pulls on white gloves and runs back into his storefront; turns out he runs the local funeral parlor.) And maybe so, but the movie ends with a fight scene in the Apollo Theater's prop room, and I think that's a pretty good bookend.
The stand-out bits are a young Jessica Walter in a minor role, and three show-stopping set-piece rants. The first two are by stand-up comics: Godfrey Cambridge (the funny man to Raymond St. Jacques's straight man in Cotton Goes to Harlem) as a cab driver, and Alan King as a rabbi delivering a eulogy. The third is a rambling, moving monologue by star George Segal, bringing the inhabitants of a cemetery up to date as a way of facing his own mortality. ("TV is really good... pollution is bad... we're going to the moon!... We discovered cures for some diseases that might have kept you alive a little longer; you're not really missing much.")
If you're the sort of 1960s Jewish intellectual depicted in this movie (as director Sidney Lumet clearly was) I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy it. But it doesn't have a lot of crossover appeal, the way a Woody Allen film does. I think I got most of the jokes, and it was still a tough slog for me.
Remember Norman Mailer's huge futurist Lego apartment building? Well, that model is the aesthetic linchpin of this movie which doesn't seem to exist! Director Dick Fontaine uses window reflections to superimpose the huge Lego structure onto the real-life New York skyline, blocking out the real buildings as Mailer explains his frankly insane vision for an 200-story apartment block that will house fifty thousand people, some of whom ought to be "adventurous" types interested in renting an apartment on the tip of one of the structures, which might sway five feet back and forth in a high wind.
It's a clear metaphor for Mailer's mayoral campaign and his Napoleon of Notting Hill-esque platform for making New York City the nation's 51st state, turning the neighborhoods into townships, and devolving the power of the mayor's office onto the townships. After the primary, in which Mailer gets a surprisingly high five percent of the vote, you see the Lego structure again, but this time there are no reflection tricks; perspective integrates the Lego building with the skyline behind it.
I tend to think of writers as introverts, but Norman Mailer is definitely an extrovert. And I think of smart extroverts as being natural politicians, but Mailer is a terrible politician. And the personality feature that makes him a terrible politician is the feature I recognize in him as a fellow writer. It's what led him to build that Lego model and to imagine a guy who's excited to rent an apartment where you have to bolt the furniture to the floor to keep it from sliding back and forth.
He hates being boring. He hates for things to be like they always have been. He thinks that he can win an election by making the election really interesting, so that the obvious next plot point is that he wins.
And he knows this about himself. From a museum-provided contextual interview that barely mentions the nonexistent movie it's contextualizing:
The other reason Norman Mailer is a terrible politician is that he constantly overrides the much better political operatives he somehow got to work his campaign. In particular, he has very bad judgement about radio ads. Just thought I'd mention that; a little freelance political criticism to go with the film review.
BTW, that interview also has this gem:
No, not God. Don. D.A. Pennebaker. It definitely has the style, capturing both the sleaze of the '70s streets and the tackiness of the middle-class '70s interior shots. But the substance... there's some good excitement at the end, and a great musical montage in which people of all races come together to buy cocaine from Priest; the sort of sardonic commentary that Breaking Bad also does really well. But most of what I remember is people driving around really slowly like they're looking for parking—a classic low-budget tell, as anyone who's watched a lot of MST3K knows.
I know not everyone shares my preference for comedy over drama, so I understand why Superfly is considered a proto-blaxploitation classic while I'd never even heard of Cotton Comes to Harlem. But I think it's a failing of Superfly that its grittiness never made as uncomfortable as did the lighthearted comedy of Cotton Comes to Harlem.
And I can indeed take it, but seriously, this is probably the darkest movie I've ever seen. It's a zombie movie where it turns out the main character was a zombie the whole time, just waiting for everyone else to become zombies. If that's your cup of tea (and you won't be disappointed when it turns out I don't mean "zombies" 100% literally and Elliot Gould doesn't go shuffling around biting people in the head), here's your comedic nihilism-fest.
You may be wondering why my mother was showing this movie to her fifteen-year-old son. It's a good question, and the true answer will never be known, but I think there were two reasons. First, both this movie and Harold and Maude came out in 1971, when my mother was in college. I think she thought I was finally at a point where I could appreciate these movies the way she had, the way we had bonded over Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) when I was about twelve. She was wrong, but these things happen.
Second, as I've alluded to before, as a kid I had serious emotional problems. Not something we need to talk about now, but definitely something to worry about if you're the parent of such a kid. And now that I've finally made it all the way through Little Murders, I think I see why my mom rented these particular movies. She was trying to show me that there are people with darkness within them, horrors that fifteen-year-old Leonard can't even imagine, but who are able to channel the darkness to creative ends and generally be productive members of society (screenwriter Jules Feiffer illustrated my beloved Phantom Tollbooth, for heaven's sake!), without "selling out" or closing their eyes to society's problems. So thanks for that, mom.
On the scale of "use of classic New York grime in location shots", I would rate this movie: very poor. To quote Paul Zimmerman's Newsweek review, "[Director Ján] Kádar's unfamiliarity with New York shows. His camera views the city as if it were a tourist unwilling to wander too far from his hotel." Zero Mostel is great as always.
After thinking about the Cornetto Trilogy as a whole, I went to IMDB and saw that the collective shares my opinion: all three movies are great, but Hot Fuzz is better than The World's End (7.9 vs. 7.8), and Shaun of the Dead (8.0) is better than Hot Fuzz. Honestly, at this point you know what to expect. You hear a bit of banter at the beginning of the movie, know that it precisely foreshadows the events of the movie, and it doesn't even matter. It's like knowing that Ulysses is based on the Odyssey. That's not a "spoiler"; it's the structure of the piece. We have here three great movies around two eternal themes: society as a threat to individuality, and the indestructable love between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, regardless of who is playing the responsible one and who is playing the screwup.
In case you haven't had enough of my idiosyncratic approach to movie quality (and you probably haven't, or why are you reading this), consider the following: if I had to pick only one movie from the Cornetto Trilogy, it would be Hot Fuzz. Not Shaun of the Dead, which is definitely a better and more influential movie. Because Hot Fuzz is the movie that caters to my specific kink: stories about people obsessed with stories, to the point where they let the stories run their lives, who get to save the day when they're suddenly thrust into a situation where the rules from the stories are the only ones that apply.
This month and next the museum is showing every film Howard Hawks ever made, so search for his name on IMDB and prepare for the Cary Grant-fest. SEE IT BIG is also returning, and I'm looking forward to seeing the Howard Hawks Scarface on the 21st and then the Brian De Palma Scarface on the 22nd.
Tue Sep 03 2013 14:13 August Film Roundup:
Not the blockbuster month as I was anticipating—I missed all of the museum's big-name Pacino/de Niro movies due to other committments—but a lot of interesting movies, and movies that were uninteresting in interesting ways, among the nine I did see.
Wary of international cinema after Borat, the Kazakh authorities were evidently persuaded to support this effort by a strategic decision to cast the favourite grand-daughter of the President in a small, key role (which the little girl aces) in the climax.
[B]eing in these kinds of things is never easy. At a certain point you go into overdrive and you feel something ugly in your ego functioning. You are selling something you don’t quite believe in. Why? To keep the movie moving and to keep it interesting so you aren’t a bore like other people you see in documentaries.
Did you feel afterwards that Don had any kind of obligation to put the camera down and intervene?
[Mishearing the question] I always assume God to be much too occupied. I see God as a tired general.
Oh! Boy, I thought we really getting into top gear fast.
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