A compendium of Liberal Postures of the day, this race-oriented social satire about a rich, entitled white kid who buys a brownstone ‘fixer-upper’ to renovate in a Black neighborhood is both essential & embarrassing viewing today. (Sell-by dates for edgy progressive attitudes always short.) In a directing debut with New Wave embellishments, nonconformist Hal Ashby was bumped up from editor when producer Norman Jewison started work on FIDDLER ON THE ROOF/’71. The Bill Gunn script frontloads the Racist White/hipster Black clichés*, slowly trimming the story’s more obvious touches as Beau Bridges (too much the guileless simpleton rather than trusting naïf) starts to warm up to tenants he planned on evicting; falling hard for one of them, Diana Sands (who wouldn’t?). Their interracial romance rare and rarely explicit for the time. This now works better than some of the coyer scenes of humanist/racial harmony acclaimed at the time. A bonding scene for Bridges’ mom Lee Grant and wise/sassy tenant Pearl Bailey serving up the well-meant but condescending tone avoided elsewhere. And if Ashby overindulges in tricky edits and time jumps, he always has Gordon Willis’s dark-hued cinematography to fall back on. Generally improving as it goes along (was it shot in continuity or does Bill Gunn’s script simply relax and stop making points?), the film may perhaps be better to think back on than to watch.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Just ten more Hal Ashby films before he died at 59 in 1988. Try his third, a quietly satisfying, forgotten little masterpiece, THE LAST DETAIL/73. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-last-detail-1973.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *BLACKFACE ALERT! Gunn not above using BlackFace at an All-White Charity Benefit to get a point across.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Kudos to whomever designed the weirdly sexually suggestive poster.
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