Cinema
Black bastards
Christopher Hudson
The blacks, we are told, form the last reliable bloc of filmgoers in the United States — which no doubt accounts for the rash of all-black gangster films, some of which have been finding their way to Britain. On current showing, this is a development to be encouraged. The three or four that I've seen have been witty, fastpaced — and sexy if the word doesn't sound patronising. The latest to arrive is Cool Breeze (' X ') at the Ritz with Shaft 'X') in a double bill which makes an excellent introduction to the genre. The great attraction of these films is that the way they regenerate the gangster idiom of the 'thirties and 'forties is wholly believable. ' White' gangster films, increasingly nowadays, seem either to rely on a display of highly sophisticated tech nological hardware, or else to dwell in close detail upon one psychopathic mentality. Films which go on in the old vein (like Hitchcock's Frenzy) are unusual enough to appear deliberately anachronistic. Black gangsters, on the other hand, have their own dialect, however repetitive, and tlnir own setting which is as alien and closedoff to most British audiences as Chandler's hoodlum twilight was all those years ago. A white with a Homburg low over his eyes taking a revolver out of a heavy overcoat and bursting open a door with the words, " Git your ass outa here," might well come out of Gumshoe or some similar parody. Richard Roundtree as Shaft, or Thalmus Rasulala as the smart-alec villain in Cool Breeze carry their own conviction. What's more, the comedy to be got out of the dumb white cops who figure as stooges for the mordant irony of the blacks, heroes and villains alike, adds a new flavour to the old confection. It is this racial mockery which gives a contemporary sharpness to Cool Breeze (in other respects a remake of John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle). And both films have a lightness and joyousness which none of the violence or hard-nosed cynicism can finally discredit.
With the exception of the new Bogdanovitch comedy, which will have to be left until next week, there is nothing else that I can even begin to recommend. Catlow (' A' Leicester Square Theatre) is a western for children, starring Yul Brynner as a likeable cattle-rustler and Richard Crenna as an even more likeable marshal who keeps on trying to arrest him and never quite succeeds. Nobody of importance gets killed, and bullets are dispensed with the casual friendliness of a handshake.
To the Casino Cinerama, replacing some appalling cowboy slush called The Revengers, comes The Red Tent (' U ') an only slightly better film, made three years ago and wisely delayed until now. The story of General Nobile's ill-fated dirigible expedition to the North Pole, it employs the archaic device of having all the protagonists appear as ghosts in Nobile's modern apartment and interrupt the narrative with arguments about where to lay the blame for the crash and the subsequent disorganization. The polar sequences are welldirected and quite gripping, but the moral issue never comes alive.
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