I’ve spent the last couple days mainlining African-American noir films that I might include in my upcoming first year seminar. I was disappointed in Deep Cover. I thought John Singleton’s Shaft (1990) started off well but then gut muddy. I thought the original Shaft had a terrific tone – which is meaningful in its own right – but that it lacked substance.
So, by the time I got to Across 110th Street, I was pretty jaded. I wanted a movie that would frame noir as I continue to define it: a kind of applied ethics. That is, in a world where right and wrong cease to be clearly defined, the central question is how can we act for the good.
This film not only asks that, but it asks it from an almost dizzying range of perspectives. It’s hard to watch, hard for the provocative reason that it never lets us settle into any one character as our fixed point of view. Yaphet Kotto is absolutely compelling as a young, college-educated, African-American police lieutenant who wants to modernize policing. He has political backing as the investigation of several murdered gangsters – three black and three white – and two policemen threatens to roil Harlem. He’s against old-school rubber-hose tactics, but it’s clear he doesn’t entirely understand how business has always been done. He is right in wanting to use a lighter hand, but if he wants to solve the crime and perhaps forestall others’ deaths he’ll have to reconsider.
He plays opposite Anthony Quinn whom I haven’t seen on-screen in at least a decade. On the one hand, it’s striking to see how old-fashioned his grand gestures and over-the-top yelling can be. On the other, it still packs power. He plays an old-school Italian-American cop. He’s called a racist throughout, but I don’t know that that’s entirely true. Yes, he has trouble accepting Kotto’s character as his equal, and yes he has no trouble seeing some African-Americans as not-quite-human.
At the same time, he knows his community. There’s a powerful but passing moment early when, with half a neighborhood being held in police custody, a woman asks him to see what he can do for her husband. Quinn’s character knows immediately that the husband is innocent, knows that a by-the-book approach will insult the man and lead to potential trouble later. So he pulls rank and has the man released. Then, on a dime, he starts whomping on another man held at the same time. He may have racism in him, but he sees the people of his neighborhood as real and individual. He knows them, and Kotto can only look on with a great and understated bewilderment and envy. He’s also a corrupt cop, on the take from the African-American mob. He defends it by claiming he takes only gambling money, not drug or prostitution.
I expected the film to come down to a perverse buddy-cop experience with our sympathies going from one man to the other. As it turns out, though, the film is richer than that. We go long stretches without seeing either Kotto or Quinn and, instead, focus on some of the purportedly secondary characters. All of them come across as multi-dimensional, as confused people trying to do what they believe is the good.
There’s a mafioso, Nick D’Salvio, who’s clearly in over his head. He’s handsome and self-possessed, but he knows – and others taunt him – that he has his status because the “old man’s” daughter has married him. You don’t rise in a violent game because a woman takes a liking to you, so the unspoken thinking goes; therefore he must be soft.
In several of the early scenes, we see him happier when he’s at a family party or holding onto his kids. When he does punch someone, he looks at his bloody hands and shakes. It’s compelling; he doesn’t want to do what his role demands that he does. He thinks he is ‘doing right’ by fulfilling his father-in-law’s demands, but we can see the toll it takes on him. He becomes tougher and uglier. He ceases to be the man he was at the start.
There’s Richard Ward as Doc Johnson, the African-American boss of Harlem. (Interestingly, Shaft has a Bumpy Jones character in the same role. Both are clearly references to the real-life Bumpy Johnson.) He’s “the king” where he lives, but only because the Italians have backed him. He resents their condescension, and he chafes at the rules they expect him to play by. He has no problem having people killed, and he sells drugs as readily as he runs numbers, but he also has a cultural pride. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s “boy,” and – while I’ll have to watch it again to untangle some of the finer plot points – his betrayal of the Italians at the end allows the police to get to a hold-up-man on the run before the mafia, ultimately depriving them of $100k.
If there’s a standout performance in my book, though – and there are a lot to choose from – it’s Paul Benjamin as one of the hold-up guys. He carries whole scenes on his face, impassive except for a powerful quiver along his jaw. In rare unguarded moments, we see the innocence that might have been as he daydreams about living beside water so he can fish and garden. More often, though, he is as he tells his loving wife: a 42-year-old ex-con with a medical condition (epilepsy) who has no shot at a future…no shot except that, through a crazily fortunate turn of events, he’s managed to steal $100k in mafia money.
Just as the film never lets us settle into any one perspective, it does remarkable things with sound. The music by 1970s soul great Bobby Womack and 1950s jazz great J.J. Johnson is fabulous. But, as often as we get proto-Scorsese or Tarantino overdubs of it, we also get stretches of aching quiet. Director Barry Shear flat out gets it in the way the loud and the quiet call on us to switch perspective in that other fashion.
If all of that weren’t enough, this ends with a remarkable shocker. [SPOILER: DON’T READ THIS UNTIL YOU SEE THE FILM] As the climax arrives, with the two other hold-up men tortured to death, Benjamin’s character is on the run from the detectives and, though he’s less aware of it, Johnson’s soldiers. Fatally wounded, he tosses the money to the street below, where a bunch of schoolchildren realize what it is and disperse the money. Then, he turns his attention to the approaching Quinn and gets ready to fire.
Kotto stops him, firing the fatal bullets and saving Quinn. It’s a strange moment of affirmation, but it feels earned. Kotto has had to step outside his quiet impulses, and Quinn has had to acknowledge, fully acknowledge, his partner’s capacity.
Then, and this is the real [SPOILER:], the African-American gangsters shoot Quinn from another roof. I read it as their acting on orders from the Italians to kill a copy who, once on their payroll, has proven too independent. I want to look again, though, because it may also be Johnson’s men determined to strike a blow for racial justice of a kind.
In any case, as Quinn realizes what’s happened, realizes he’s been shot in the head and will die in moments, he grabs for Kotto’s hand. A bewildered Kotto grabs it, and the camera holds on their clasped hands. It almost feels like a glitch in the movie as things stop, jump a frame, and then freeze on a single instant of the two men having found common ground. The film moves forward another couple frames, enough for us to see the hands begin to come apart, but it ends with a still of the two still holding each other.
It’s such a rich image, one that seems both earned and fleeting, that’s haunted me in the ways that the best and most compelling films do.
There is, at last, no single right way to do right. It’s a
complicated world, inflected by differences of race, wealth, and age. The film
works, and works well, because it recognizes that complicated truth and then
gives us so many excellent characters (and performances) to play it out across.
No comments:
Post a Comment