By Steven Boone
How desperate was Hollywood in 1970? It let Hal Ashby make The Landlord, a crazed, profane racial satire written by negroes.
It was the dawn of the New Hollywood. Studios that had failed to pull Americans away from their televisions with colossal epics like Cleopatra targeted the youth market with relatively cheap flicks by new filmmakers. Ashby, the Oscar-nominated editor of In the Heat of the Night, must have seemed like a safe bet, even after he grew a long, shaggy beard and expressed hippie sympathies. The support of Ashby's commercially successful mentor, Night director Norman Jewison -- who signed on as the film's producer -- surely helped.
Little did United Artists know. Thirty-seven years on, The Landlord is still shocking, but not because it's salacious or cynical. The film is shocking because of how tenderly and patiently Ashby attends to certain transgressive moments while asserting that in a sane, just world, they wouldn't be taboo at all.
The film starts off in rapid-fire, farcical mode as 29-year old Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) contemplates finally leaving his rich parents' home to purchase one of his own. Ashby cuts between Elgar's future residence, a rundown Park Slope brownstone inhabited by poor black folks, and Elgar's musings on this matter as he plays squash and relaxes in his parents' backyard. Elgar wants to renovate the building and evict the rent-delinquent tenants, but something else happens: He falls in love with them. Like Ashby's second film, Harold and Maude, The Landlord is about a spoiled white boy who breaks free of his stifling family by pursuing a forbidden love. In this case, his new love is The Black Community, in all its ragged beauty.
It definitely ain't love at first sight. Beyond clueless in his preppie gear and plush convertible full of floral arrangements, Elgar arrives at his new home to a welcoming committee of shit-talking Brothers who send him running down the street shrieking. A chain-smoking little kid, a black militant professor, a shotgun-toting mama, and a crazy activist Copey (Louis Gossett, Jr.) are among the tenants who give him near-constant grief. Back at the Enders' estate, Elgar's family resists the idea of his housing blacks in a Park Slope "slum." His casually racist mother (Lee Grant) and arch-conservative father (Walter Brooke) treat his real estate ambitions as just another childish diversion. Even his hippie sister (Susan Anspach), who cheers him on, says she couldn't "stomach" dealing with blacks herself. Elgar's brother (Will McKenzie) and future brother-in-law (Robert Klein) are just passive and aloof. In each case, the family member makes his or her feelings known in broad, theatrical, screwball dialog. Elgar gets so fed up with them during dinner one night that he announces to his sister's fiance that the Enders are octaroons. All hell breaks loose.
The first half of The Landlord cuts between these two surrealistic cartoon worlds--one black, one white-- before getting down to square business. Raucous ensemble scenes give way to some lovely duets: Elgar befriending and flirting with the activist's loopy, frustrated wife Francine (the amazing Diana Sands); a series of arguments with his mother that reveal more emotional complexity in their relationship; Elgar winning over a standoffish mulatto club dancer (Marki Bey) with his boyish sincerity; Mrs. Enders and the shotgun-carrying tenant, Marge (a sly, luminous Pearl Bailey) drinking and laughing together in Marge's cramped apartment. Hardcore realism comes crashing in when when Copey gets some bad news that sends him on a rampage-turned-nervous breakdown. Gossett takes the film to a haunted place in a confused, self-hating black man's heart that I haven't seen since the end of August Wilson's stage masterpiece Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. It tore me up.
Such scenes make one miss the unpredictable way people fought, bonded, grieved and made love in the great '70s films. Ashby allows the most important interactions to occur in gorgeous stretches of what feels like real time. When Elgar and Francine find themselves alone in her apartment, struggling with their attraction for each other, Ashby lets the moment draw long, sensuous breaths. Has any mainstream American film before or since let an honest moment like this pass between black and white characters of opposite genders? In Monster's Ball, Black Snake Moan and Jungle Fever, scenes of mixed-race intimacy are footnoted by history, politics, symbolism, paranoia and mutual resentment; you can sense the filmmakers crowding the room, not even as voyeurs (that could be hot), but as sober lecturers. Here, though, Ashby stops time, stops the world, to let Francine be a woman and Elgar be a man. His cinematographer, Gordon Willis, heightens the poetry with a wash of red lamp light that paints Elgar and Francine roughly the same color.
Oh, man, Gordon Willis. Even though The Godfather series, Alan J. Pakula thrillers and Woody Allen flicks were still in his future, The Landlord, with its use of naturalistic lighting and underexposure, might be his wildest adventure. Rooms and faces have an "unlit," documentary feel, but what modest light there is lends a warmth and ruminative feeling in perfect step with Ashby's stealth seriousness. Impenetrable shadows fall in precisely jagged sheets, swallowing up figures like tar pools. In the Enders estate scenes, Willis goes bright and flat, but the brownstone interiors are visual Soul.
What saves all of this fine craftsmanship from becoming Dances with Negroes (a white man's extended vacation in an exotic, therapeutic culture) is the rich, searching material it serves. Kristin Davis, a black woman, created the Elgar Enders character in her novel The Landlord. The visionary black filmmaker Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess) wrote the screenplay adaptation. So we get a sheltered white male character's impressions of black folk as imagined by a black female novelist and mixed-race filmmaking team. What an exquisite filter system.
With so many brilliant collaborators and points of view, whose movie--whose dream--is it anyway? Ashby seems to say it's all of ours. At the film's heart is baby-faced Bridges, playing Elgar as a sensitive boy through-and-through. He's foolish, impulsive and painfully ignorant, but that doesn't stop him from diving into the eye of the storm to see what it's all about. He might get laughed at, beat up, ostracized, but his emotional generosity and curiosity about other human beings is unstoppable; it makes him fearless. For this and a thousand other reasons, The Landlord now looks like a more ambitious and audacious debut film than Citizen Kane. You heard me right.
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The Landlord runs through Tuesday, September 25 at Film Forum in New York City. Steven Boone is a New York-based critic and filmmaker, a contributor to Vinyl is Heavy and the publisher of the pop culture blog Big Media Vandalism.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
The Landlord: Whose dream is it, anyway?
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13 comments:
You lose me a little bit with the comparison to Citizen Kane, which strikes me as both unnecessary and a bit strident (borne, I'll admit out of a loving protectiveness for Kane, which I just saw -- and loved -- for the first time a couple of nights ago).
Nonetheless, you're right on about The Landlord. I caught this by accident on cable on a lazy Saturday afternoon last year and was very impressed on several levels. I fully expected it to be some laughably dated, hippy-dippy bit of 70s flower power naivete, but it's so much more thoughtful and interesting than that.
As a current resident of Park Slope, it's also a fascinating documentary of the racial and class geography of New York City 40 years ago. It's so hard to imagine Park Slope as a "bad" neighborhood of slums, for example.
Looking at the poster you included, I'm also struck by what a hard sell this film must have been. The poster, with it's door buzzers as breasts imagery, reveals almost nothing pertinent about what kind of movie this is, and, now that I think about it, one of the reasons why I expected this film to be trash was because the onscreen cable guide's description made it sound like that, also.
Indeed it's hard to imagine a film like this getting made nowadays, or at least getting any kind of distribution.
Articles like this are why I love this blog so much. Where else is one going to find a discussion of a film like The Landlord in 2007?
Thanks, Steven!
Nice review. Makes me want to see the movie, even though I won't be able to since I live in Los Angeles, where they show Citizen Kane, Psycho and 2001 on a non-stop loop.
I don't understand why Beau Bridges doesn't have Jeff's career. I highly recommend him in The Christian Licorice Store, another relic from the days of yore.
More impressive than "Kane"? I don't know about that -- less perfect, certainly (Elgar's relationship with the dancer gets kind of dropped in the last act, and there are a few cross-cutting/direct address attempts that don't quite work the way Ashby wants them to). But overall, this is an astounding movie. I first saw it in college and didn't know quite what to make of it -- all I saw were people from the seventies speaking in outdated slang. I rediscovered it again courtesy of my brother, Richard, who recorded it off of one of the HD cable channels, and was mightily impressed. The film's social layer cake structure is still radical, and stylistically, it might be one of the most influential American films that almost nobody but filmmakers and film buffs has seen. The Godard-by-way-of-Richard-Lester editing style, the direct address, the lyrical musical moments -- all these elements are integral aspects of many significant modern American directors's styles (notably Spike Lee and Wes Anderson; many of their visual signatures suddenly seem like homages once you've seen "The Landlord"). Its portrait of an aimless, privileged young white man getting outside of his own head makes it feel like the unacknowledged sequel to "The Graduate" (clearly a huge influence on Ashby), but it's deeper, more playful and a hell of a lot less insular than Nichols' movie (which I love, too, but am not as impressed with having seen "The Landlord").
I'm out and about today, but you can be sure I'll revisit this comments thread later tonight with more blather about this great, moving film.
Wow, I've never even heard of this one before. Hopefully it'll become available out here on the West Coast sometime soon.
No, I don't make the Kane comparison lightly.
Matt: "...like the unacknowledged sequel to "The Graduate" (clearly a huge influence on Ashby), but it's deeper, more playful and a hell of a lot less insular than Nichols' movie..."
That comment kind of points to why The Landlord makes me dizzier, giddier than Citizen Kane: the relative insularity of Kane. I think even Welles, the man behind an all-black produtcion of Macbeth in the 1930's, would hit the brakes before venturing where The Landlord goes at its stone-craziest. Kane is a masterpiece, but it is kind of insular and more resonant, I dare say, with a certain class of folk. The Graduate, Salinger, the Wes Anderson/Noah Baumbach school of cool-prep filmmaking-- I can dig these things for their formal and emotional qualities but often feel a like I'm peering in on soemeone else's in-joke. Feels a bit chilly.
The Landlord has more of a democratic feel, with none of the loss of focus or intensity that that adjective implies.
But my biggest reason for, um, raising Kane is the ensemble acting in The Landlord. (Damn, now Altman has just jumped in my head, and comes up short as well.) The acting "duets" in The Landlord that I mentioned simply blow anything in Kane off the screen in terms of subtlety and realism. (And don't give me no stuff about how screen acting "evolved." Jimmy Stewart, for example, was raw and real enough in the 1940's to hold his own in the grittiest of '70s flicks.) Also remember that the comparison here is between feature directing debuts. If Kane moves down a notch, Spielberg's The Sugarland Express slides even further.
I think folks get high blood pressure when you say something's better than Kane mainly because their mind goes immediately to Welles's camera eye, which has so few peers. I'm mostly referring to Ashby's direction of actors and the overall artistic vision here, but it could be argued that Gordon Willis takes as many photographic leaps in The Landlord as does Greg Toland in Kane. Anybody in NYC should take a good look at the 35mm print at Film Forum before ordering my straightjacket. When I used to flip past the milky or contrasty prints of The landlord on local TV, it didn't strike me as anything special.
Steve: "I'm mostly referring to Ashby's direction of actors and the overall artistic vision here, but it could be argued that Gordon Willis takes as many photographic leaps in The Landlord as does Greg Toland in Kane."
Yeah, I can see your point. "Kane" was as stylistically adventurous in its time as "The Landlord" was in 1970, but Ashby takes more risks with content and has more tonal variation in his cast, from actor to actor, scene to scene and moment to moment.
This is sort of like, "Which is better, 'September of my Years' or 'Fear of a Black Planet'? The two things being compared are separated by so many thematic and technical elements, and enough time, that they can hardly be compared at all. Still, damned if it isn't fun.
Gossett takes the film to a haunted place in a confused, self-hating black man's heart ... It tore me up.
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Me, too.
Steven, remind me who delivered this line, since I haven't seen this movie for decades, but the most searing moment is when a black character accuses the rich white boy of 'growing up casual.' It comes late in the flick, after we really care about the characters, and this is more than a putdown of single white man. With compressed eloquence, it damns the racial/economic divide and infuriates the audience that this is the world we live in (sadly, to this day).
"Articles like this are why I love this blog so much. Where else is one going to find a discussion of a film like The Landlord in 2007?"
Um, well... the New York Times for one, which just ran a very nice appreciation of THE LANDLORD in honor of its one-week run at Film Forum.
Still, nice essay.
Oh for God's sake this movie isn't THAT good! I'll take KANE and, now that you brought it up, NASHVILLE many miles over this admittedly great and underseen film, but pointing to the collaborative acting as a reason why this is better seems mighty weak.
Guys, guys - it's a great film. I saw it at Film Forum a few years back at (I think) an Ashby retrospective. . .but come on. It does ramble a little in the middle and is a little over the top.
kensington: Belated thanks.
virgil p: Diana Sands uttered the line about wanting her baby to "grow up casual," like Elgar. Devastating.
Anon: "come on. It does ramble a little in the middle and is a little over the top."
The same could be said of Kane.
I HATE to put it like this, but: Maybe you have to have been poor and black at some point to really dig this film's finer qualities and nuances. I doubt it, but could be. Most of what made me want to stand up in the middle of the theater and let out some kind of Zulu howl had to do with how the film addressed an area of the Black Experience you never see: the eccentrics. Lou Gossett with his bow and arrow talking about deadly barbeque sauce. Pearl Bailey and her pot likker. I never see these people onscreen, in all their weirdness and intelligence, and they are everywhere in the so-called ghetto. Like the best August Wilson, The Landlord finds that their "madness" is a factor of survival.
Matt: "This is sort of like, "Which is better, 'September of my Years' or 'Fear of a Black Planet'? The two things being compared are separated by so many thematic and technical elements, and enough time, that they can hardly be compared at all."
Again, the point of connection (and maybe it's a superficial one) is that they're first features. And I think the whole sentiment behind The Landlord is, Why not mash up your Sinatra with your Chuck D?
"Kane" stuff aside, it's a pretty incredible film, so much so that even its missteps are fascinating. It's also Ashby's most adventurous movie, photographically and in terms of editing, performance and variety of tone. If anything, he tamped it down a bit after this.
If you live in the NYC area, see it on a big screen. If you don't, definitely keep an eye peeled for the inevitable DVD.
I originally saw this on cable late at night probably about ten years ago. It's definitely worth revisiting or enough to put me on a Hal Ashby bender. Seeing a pre-double-wide baby stroller Park Slope is worth the price of admission too. Great work Steve.
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