The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: 'Black Enough' by Galt MacDermot

       If one were to judge the most successful films to come out of the ‘blaxploitation’ era of film, it would have to be Shaft. There were certainly films that were successful, Blacula, Super Fly, Dolemite, enough for some of them to get sequels, but they didn’t really persist outside of their time beyond the occasional reference or parody. Shaft not only got several sequels, but also a revival film, another revival film, and a couple comic books on the side. It’s not exactly a Star Wars level franchise, sure, but for a movie with a Black lead that catered primarily to a Black audience it managed an impressive amount of acclaim.

       However Shaft was not the only hardboiled crime story in the ‘blaxploitation’ genre, nor was it the only one based on a novel. So it was between this and Barry Shear’s classic crime film Across 110th Street, and this one was easier to find.

       Released in 1970, Cotton Comes to Harlem was directed by Ossie Davis, written by Davis and Arnold Perl and produced by Samuel Goldwyn Jr. through Formosa Productions. Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques star as Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson respectively, two Black cops working the beat in Harlem. In the year 1970 the man of the hour isn’t Jones or Ed, it’s the Reverend Deke O’Malley, who amassed quite the following in Harlem for his ‘Back to Africa’ movement. 87,000 dollars worth in fact, which is promptly stolen by a gang of masked gunmen, who manage to escape despite their getaway car exploding at one point. The only evidence left at the scene of the crime is a wad of unprocessed cotton, the kind typically shipped in bales. Where exactly are you supposed to find cotton in Harlem? Is O’Malley’s heart really in the right place? That’s what Ed and Jones are going to find out.

       In case you’re not from the U.S., the whole ‘Back to Africa’ thing was not an invention of this movie, but rather a persistent thread in Black communities going back to the early 20th century. The logic being that conditions were so bad in America for Black people that the only solution was to pack up and move back to ancestral Africa. America being a racist hellhole doesn’t matter if you don’t live in America anymore, and obviously the nations of Africa will be perfectly fine with thousands of people sailing in and deciding that they live there now. There’s a reason that the KKK listed Marcus Garvey as the ‘Black Moses’, and also why he eventually got caught scamming his followers, because the easiest grifts are the one pulled on the most vulnerable people. Yet in spite of my opinion it’s clear to see why such a movement had legs, and why the theft of that 87,000 hits so hard. It’s a paltry sum compared to the haul you usually see in movies, but to the people of Harlem that was their hopes and dreams up in smoke.

       As I said this is a hardboiled detective story, and if Shaft brought to mind the morally ambiguous tales of Raymond Chandler, then Cotton Comes to Harlem is more in line with Mickey Spillane. There’s nothing ambiguous here, Ed and Jones are a freight train barreling through the story with nothing but some snarky quips and a loaded revolver. Beating up a drug addict? Well he had useful information. Misleading fellow officers and disobeying direct orders from a superior? Well they’re white, so they don't matter. Shooting a guy in the stomach with a flare gun and lighting him on fire? Well it’s quicker than pulling out a gun and showing restraint. Slapping around a woman? Well it’s frowned upon, but she was working with the bad guy so it’s fine. Ed and Jones believe themselves to be in the right and so everything they do in the pursuit of their goal is justified, that they decide what the law and justice is and how its carried out. Which in a dramatic bit of coincidence places Cotton Comes to Harlem far closer to Dirty Harry than it ever does to Shaft. Arguably a more damning statement than the praise this film has for Marcus Garvey, as it encourages Black people to believe in and trust the police if the officers are Black as well, which is something that been used against Black communities in the past.

       This film also has a weird sense of humor, which has nothing to do with the kinds of jokes so much as it decided to add jokes in the first place. If it were limited strictly to those quips I mentioned you probably wouldn’t notice, but the amount of visual gags end up feeling incongruous. I mean this isn’t a pacifistic movie -- A lot of people die, quite violently, and there are enough explosions to make Chuck Norris nod his head in approval, but then you’ve got people getting a pie in the face and Redd Foxx as the lovable hobo. Again if the tone were satirical, even darkly satirical in the vein of Robocop it would’ve worked, but as it is the zig-zagging tone doesn’t feel quite right.

       By the way, the music here is done by Galt MacDermot, a Canadian musician who had previously done work for the film Woman is Sweeter. It’s not bad, but considering other blaxploitation films at the time had folks like Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield at the helm it does come off as a bit underwhelming. Director Ossie Davis contributed lyrics to several of these songs and yep, they read like lyrics from someone who isn’t a songwriter by trade.

       Cotton Comes to Harlem doesn’t get the recommendation. While it’s perfectly fine on a technical level, enough so that crime movie fans will likely have a decent time, personally it never grabbed me. I think I’ll stick with Shaft for now.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - Even Dwarves Started Small (1970), directed by Werner Herzog

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Nobody Spoil My Fun", by Dwarves

     Because of the nature of the Marathon, and my own rather hectic schedule, it’s rare that I get to take in a movie by directors like Werner Herzog. I was familiar with his work prior, the infamous documentary Grizzly Man, My Best Fiend, detailing his tumultuous relationship with actor Klaus Kinski, his little moments on Metalocalypse, and so on. As far as actually covering his films on the blog however, the only one that seemed appropriate at the time was Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, his interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Operative words being ‘at the time’. It’s a new time now, and since the tide has turned towards nostalgia and sentimentality, it seemed right to pull out another Herzog.

     And no, that’s not sexual innuendo.

     Related to us via a flashback at a police station, Even Dwarves Started Small brings us to a remote institution in the German countryside, populated by little people, or ‘dwarves’ in the context of this film. When the head doctor leaves for the day to get groceries, the dwarves, left to their own devices, decide to take over the joint. They destroy private property, steal the doctor’s things, kill and torture animals and the handicapped (a couple of the patients at the facility are blind) and generally lay waste to the place which has been their home and apparently their prison for so long. A lone instructor (also a dwarf) tries desperately to maintain a shred of order in the chaos, even resorting to taking one of them hostage within the administration building, but his demands fall on deaf ears. The inmates are running the asylum now, and they’re going to have the times of their lives.

     I’ve read that this film is meant to be an allegory for the dangers of a total liberation of the mind, which sounds Teutonic enough to be Herzog, and I’d say that theory makes sense. The dwarves act more like children and toddlers than the grown adults they are, completely self-centered and with the impulse control to match. No action or thought is considered more than once, moods and whims change at the drop of a hat, and it is done with a glee that borders on the perverse. A never-ending, anarchic quest to feed the id, in any way possible. In practice, it feels less like you’re watching a film and more like you’re suffering through a fever dream: A gaggle of middle-aged little people shouting at each other like 5 year olds, giggling constantly, as they burn trees and look at nudie magazines and tie monkeys to a cross while mariachi and African folk music plays in the background. The exact same thing you expect to see when you take exactly too much acid, or the exact right amount of magic mushrooms.

     Therein lies the major issue with this film though; It’s literally an hour and an half of watching a group of little people breaking shit and other random events. There’s not a coherent plot, little to no characters with a strongly defined character (most of the folks you see on screen don’t even have names, far as I can remember), and the soundtrack consists of two that are constantly repeated throughout the film. I’m a guy who has exposed himself to a lot of weird movies over the years so I had no issue, but I imagine this is one of those motion pictures that would be downright insufferable to those who aren’t used to it. Hell, despite my tolerance even I felt a little bit impatient during the seemingly endless variations on the ‘dwarves break stuff/instructor looks on awkwardly/music plays’ structure Herzog has built his movie on, and I’ve sat through Flesh for Frankenstein AND The Amityville Horror, so you know it takes a certain kind of mood to get into it.

     If you’re the type of person with relatively tame or modern tastes, or if you’ve tried tried watching movies while high, then you might prefer to skip over Even Dwarves Started Small this Halloween. Those fans of the weird, or 80s music videos, will likely have a better time of things. Just remember to not have too much fun though. And be kind to animals too folks, that’s just the right thing to do.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2017 - Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), directed by Ted Post

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "We Got The Neutron Bomb", by The Weirdos

     At the time I write this, War for the Planet of the Apes has been out for a little bit, capping off a primate trilogy that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of Apes, and continued in 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. I haven’t had the chance to see it yet but by all accounts it seems to be pretty damn good, as are the previous films in the series. Seems weird that in this modern age we can have successful sci-fi franchises without spending a billion dollars a movie and one running story, rather than trying to stitch ten different movies with dozens of different characters and plotlines into one cohesive narrative, but it appears that the Apes movies have got us covered.

     Have I mentioned how I’m tired of the cinematic universe concept yet?

     War of the Planet of the Apes’ success shouldn’t really surprise anyone though. After all, the very first Planet of the Apes film, directed by Patton’s Franklin J. Schaffner, written by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and starring Ben-Hur’s Charlton Heston, was one of the most successful science fiction films in Hollywood history, at a time when the genre was relegated to oversized bugs and pie plates on strings. It spawned 4 sequels, a TV series, an animated series, multiple comic book series, video games, a shitty movie directed by Tim Burton and now this new reboot series. People just can’t enough of talking apes doing stuff, especially if it involves the utter destruction of the human race and everything we’ve ever built. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are like our fetish or something.

     Although movie studios aren’t always the smartest knifes in the drawer, at the very least they understand the concept of ‘if something makes money, make more of that thing’ (sometimes too well), and so two years later we got a sequel: Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Set directly after the original film, in fact Beneath actually opens with the ending of the OG Apes, because we needed to devalue that twist as soon as possible, you would think that Beneath would focus on our doomed astronaut Taylor, wandering across the desolate ruins of an Earth devastated by nuclear war and inhabited by intelligent, murderous primates, but you’d be wrong. Instead we focus on Brent, another astronaut who was sent to find Taylor and the original rocket and who also happened to crash land on this ‘alien planet’. Of course Taylor conveniently fell down a hole at the beginning of the movie, and so it is up to Brent to navigate the peril of Ape City, driven to imperialism and conquest due to an ongoing famine, and somehow find his missing compatriot. However, finding Taylor means journeying into the heart of the Forbidden Zone, the forsaken, hellish remains of Earth’s former rulers, only barely more tolerable than the Richard Elfman film. Which might not be as inhabited as was once believed…

     As far as sequels go, Beneath doesn’t stray too far from its source material, and from the overarching ‘talking apes doing stuff’ motif. Generally speaking that’s a good thing, you don’t want to fix something that ain’t broke, but I think there’s an argument to be made that Beneath takes that advice a bit too literally. Up until the third act, in fact, Beneath seems content to just do Planet of the Apes again, with little to no difference. Astronaut crash-landing on what he originally believes to be an alien planet? Check. Scene where astronaut gets thrown into a cage with a bunch of other humans? Check. Scene where astronaut discovers some artifact that proves he’s been on Earth the whole time, throwing in a bitter, recriminatory one-liner as he does so? Check. Zira and Cornelius being basically useless? All there, only with no sense of wonder and danger attached because we’ve been through all this before. We know it’s a planet of the apes guys, we saw the last one, we read the title of the movie, you’re not blowing any minds on that front.

     That is not to say that Beneath doesn’t make its own mark in the Apethology, however. Although the apes occasionally feel like ancillary characters in their own movie (it ain’t called Planet of the Humans), we do get a deeper look into their civilization and social dynamics, including some anti-war commentary that was no doubt very familiar in those Vietnam years. Perhaps more importantly though, at least in the context of the film is the introduction of the other intelligent race on the planet, a society of telepathic Mutants living in the ruins of New York City who worship an active nuclear missile. I’m not a fan of the inclusion of things like psychic powers into the franchise, as fantastical as the concept of the films are, Schaffner’s execution of it in the first film was fairly grounded, which I thought gave it a more serious, if not realistic, feel. The scenes of the Mutant city however, the subterranean bunker carved out of the melted corpse of downtown New York, and the towering golden ICBM that acts as their god, is easily the most iconic imagery in the Apes franchise, right up there with the destroyed Statue of Liberty. Kind of surprising how little of it you get, considering how much it’s been referenced since then.

     It’s a bit of a bummer too, you know? I mean the original movie was pretty grim in that classic Serling style, but Beneath is just flat out depressing. You got the astronauts, who are stuck in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, with the only remaining humans a bunch of feral slaves to some damn dirty apes. You got the Mutants, sterile lunatics who worship the world’s most dangerous phallic symbol and a proclivity for mind control. Even the Apes, the stars of the show, are showing positively human levels of barbarism as a famine is driving them towards extinction. And that ending… Man, break out the Valium. A bit of a pain to have to follow up too, I imagine.

     Planet of the Apes is a movie that never really needed a sequel, much less 4 of them. Still, if there needed to be one (and money demanded that it be so), Beneath the Planet of the Apes does a pretty good job of it, capturing the essence of the original while pushing things forward. If you liked the first one, then it’s a good bet that you’ll like this one. If you hated it, or just hate apes in general, then I’m sure you’ll be able to find something else this Halloween. Also if you live in the NYC area, you might want to consider moving out. Seems like it's going to get a bit hairy in about two thousand years.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2016: El Topo (1970), directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground", by Basom Lamar Lunsford

     Confession time: Although I’ve made numerous references to the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky in the past, in particular the documentary of his ultimately doomed attempt at Dune, I’ve never actually seen a film of his. I’ve sampled some of his graphic novels, the Metabarons and the Incal (which are quite impressive), but it was his work in the medium of film that established his career, and it’s the work that he’s probably most famous for in pop culture. So this year, in the Marathon tradition of trying new things (and proper name drop etiquette), I decided to take the plunge and try one out. Is it Halloween appropriate? Are any of the films I feature on this list Halloween appropriate? Hard to say.

     So what is El Topo about? Well, the implication appears to be that it’s about a lot of things, but at it’s most basic it’s about the journey of the titular Topo (played by Jodorowsky), a wandering gunslinger in a very metaphorical version of the Old West. El Topo (spanish for The Mole) is a brutal and morally destitute type of killer, whose skill with the pistol has left him acting as if he were some angry god. As good as El Topo is, there are supposedly 4 masters of shooting that exist in this harsh desert land, and so he sets off to murder them and prove something to somebody (his estranged father, perhaps). What Topo doesn’t realize however, isn’t that this isn’t the mission of death that he’s planning it to be. It’s his chance at redemption.

     Aside from that, you’ve got a little socio-political commentary on man’s inhumanity to man (African-Americans literally being hunted down and branded like cattle), the military and their abuse of power (the colonel character literally has people act like dogs), the church’s ability to cloud men’s minds (the local priest has his followers playing Russian roulette with god), and for some reason melding an otherwise Christian-centric setting with Buddhist themes (the 4 masters behave and even look more like gurus than they do gunslingers, and Topo ends up having a very Siddartha-esque meditative experience). Oh, and sex, lots and lots of sex and things relating to sex. Topo finding actual eggs under his lady friends legs, water shooting out a very phallic rock, outlaws making out with priests, a girl licking a prickly pear like she was auditioning for pornhub, and so on in that fashion. And people thought Brokeback Mountain was a controversial cowboy movie.

     Unfortunately, assuming that there is a meaning beyond these strange and mysterious images beyond confusing and mystifying those who watch it, then it’s a movie that demands multiple viewings in order to fully process itself. This list is about first impressions than it is advanced film study however, and to a first time viewer, Jodorowsky’s aim fails to show itself. Is he using the Western (a traditionally violent genre of film) to comment on the violent times that the world found itself in during the major years of the Vietnam War? Is he saying Christianity has become more an excuse for violence for its followers than a religion of peace, and that it holds no sway over the populace anymore? Is the gun just supposed to be penis? It’s unclear, and unless you take the time to sit down and dig through it all, all that’s left to do is to sit there and watch random things happen at seemingly random times and just hope that they get to another gunfight at some point. Which they do away with by the second half either way.

     For those with experience with surrealism and experimental films, this is probably going to be right up your alley. For those that aren’t into those kinds of movies, you’re probably going to find this more or less intolerable. Honestly, even though I have a general preference for weird movies, it still feels like Jodorowsky was taking a 2 hour detour to get to the actual point, and it doesn’t feel like much of a payoff either way. So I suppose I give the recommendation to anyone who likes weird movies that’s willing to put more time in than me, but if the extent of your experimental film experience is watching Twin Peaks and American Horror Story on netflix, this might be a little too obtuse for your tastes. Still, Halloween is about making people scared and uncomfortable, and any movie where the director films his prepubescent son walking around completely naked for about the first 15 minutes is bound to make anyone you show it to very, very uncomfortable. In the United States, at least. We throw a fit over a 2 second accidental flash of woman’s nipple during a concert, we try to ban breastfeeding at the very thought of a female breast touching public air. Showing a naked white boy in a movie, even in a case like this where it’s not really sexualized in any way and no real focus is placed upon it, would be like 3 or 4 Chernobyl’s at once. People would go fucking insane, way more than when Trump implied we should label Muslims like Germany labeled Jews in the late 30s or when that class of elementary school kids were shot to death.

     Good way to clear a room though.

White Sun of the Desert (1970), directed by Vladimir Motyl

Anyone else find it hard to write in long stretches? This entries would take half as long to write if I didn't feel the need to screw around every 5 minutes. Anyway, here we go.

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Tundra/Desert", by Modest Mouse

     The other day I was talking with a good friend of mine, J. Fortune, and I remarked how strange it was that a significant amount of my pageviews was actually coming from the Ursa Major itself, Russia. It was strange yet pleasant surprise, as I have held a fascination with the Russian people and their culture ever since I was but a young Prince Thunderbird. Hell, I was even majoring in Russian for quite some time during my years in college, although I ultimately decided to switch when I failed to progress in the language as quickly as I wished (Russia, your history is way intriguing but why do you make me study like 8 grammatical cases gurl? Also your R is backwards). So as a small way to honor my very special Eastern demographic, I decided to do an entry from the heart of the Motherland itself. Maybe if you spent more time reading FRANCE, and less time with your blancmange, you could get your own dedicated entry one day. We’ll see, we’ll see.

     For those of you who remember Rocky V, Russia was at one point known as the U.S.S.R., or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union to its friends), a Communist Bloc that stretched over a large portion of the Asian continent. The West (and most likely modern Russians) remember the Soviet Union to be a harsh and restrictive country, and there’s no doubt that the government came down much more aggressively on its citizenry than what we are used to, unless you happen to be not white. Stalin’s era was a time of strict censorship (big surprise), and films of that era tended to gear towards ‘courageous and dutiful worker extols the virtues of labor and communistic lifestyle’, or at least heavily implied it. The only person who was really into the Stalin method however was Stalin himself, and after his death Russian filmmakers were granted a great deal more freedom, not total freedom but hey, all that grant money has to come with some caveat. As it turns out, giving filmmakers the ability to make the films they want can lead to some good films, and wouldn’t you know it, the Kruschev to Brezhnev saw several critically acclaimed films of Russian descent (I have yet to see it, but Height is apparently considered one of the best films of the 1950s on the Russian cinema wikipedia page. Also the Russian cinema wikipedia page seems severely underwritten). The 80s and 90s continued with this trend of liberalization of films, probably because the Russian government had bigger problems to worry about what with their economy collapsing and everything, but the film we’re dealing with this time was right on the cusp of the 70s, 1970 in fact. It’s a little film called White Sun of the Desert and it’s what happens when Russia decides to take Italy’s advice and make their own spaghetti westerns.

     That’s right, it’s Commie Cowboy day here on the Thunderbird Ranch.

     White Sun of the Desert begins in the harsh and arid dunes of some unnamed desert in the Orient (specifically in what is now known as Tajikistan, if my findings are correct), as our protagonist Sukhov (Anatoly Kuznetsov) beats a path across the burning sands with nothing but a tea kettle of water and an all-purpose utility dagger at his side. Sukhov, it turns out a bit later, is a soldier, one of the best that the Revolutionary Army has to offer (equal to 300 men, I believe it is said) constantly journeying out into unforgiving environments at the behest of his country. Fantastic fighter though he may be, the only thing on Sukhov’s mind is getting back to his verdant home and his beloved wife Katerina (who kind of looks like a matryoshka doll). Sukhov’s narration of his letters to Katerina are a significant portion of the movie, and while I believe it’s a good way to remind the audience of our protagonist’s motivation, it’s done a bit too much for my taste. Leave ‘em wanting more Fyodor, that’s what I say.

     After rescuing Said (Spartak Mishulin), who had been buried in sand and left to die, Sukhov is contacted by his fellow soldier by the name of Rakhimov. Rakhimov explains that during a raid on the hideout of bloodthirsty bandit leader ‘Black’ Abdullah (Kakhi Kaysadze), his forces had been able to capture Abdullah’s harem in the aftermath: Dzhamilya, Zarina, Gyuzel, Saida, Khafiza, Zukhra, Leila, Zulfia and Gyulachatai. As he is unable/unwilling to watch over these women, and knowing that Abdullah will no doubt stop at nothing to either retrieve his harem or murder them to remove the problem, Rakhimov implores Sukhov to transport the former wives to the nearby village/museum of Penjikent, and ensure their continued liberation until his forces can return to and transport them out of the country/satellite. Sukhov agrees, and thus the series of events that can be called a movie is set into motion.

     While I did say that this movie was the Russian equivalent of the spaghetti western, that is not to say that White Sun of the Desert is ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly but with Russians’. Think of it more of an interpretation, taking things like the barren landscapes and classic archetypes (Said is the man searching for his father’s killer, Abdullah is the unredeemable villain, Vereshchagin (Pavel Luspekayev) is the old drunk obsessed with his long past days of glory, etc) and placing it within the Russian perspective, rather than trying to emulate the American West as the Italians did. It’s unique, from a Western perspective at least, to see how foreign countries transform elements of our culture in strange new ways, especially in things that you wouldn’t expect. Russia has just as much, if not more large untamed frontiers than the United States, the biggest surprise is that they didn’t start making their own gunslinger movies years before. Cossacks were practically nomadic cowboys, it totally could have worked out.

     Similarly, while we do see Sukhov blast some fuckers away with some hot lead, he is not the stoic protagonist that Clint Eastwood made into a amazing career. Sukhov is a likable, sometimes comical character (his daydream of how his life would be like with a harem seems more from a comedy film than a serious drama), who seems to use his mind as much as his weapon when it comes to taking out his enemies. ‘The warrior who doesn’t seem like a warrior’ is not an uncommon thing in fiction, but I think Anatoly walks the line between unassuming and serious quite well.

     The only major complaint that I have, and it might not be a legitimate one, is that there isn’t as much of the culture clash as I would have liked to see. It’s touched upon a little, such as when Abdullah’s former harem assume that Sukhov is their new master, unable to understand the concept of monogamous marriages despite their newfound liberty, but that’s about it. The women, despite acting as the driving force of the plot, aren’t really fleshed out as characters, Gyulachatai being the only one of the women to to hold any sort of significant role. There’s no real sense of conflict in being a stranger in a strange land, and I feel like it was a wasted opportunity to showcase the merging of mainland Russian culture and those of its satellite nations. Of course, given that the Soviet government’s idea of unifying disparate cultures under the Russian umbrella seemed to follow the policy of ‘wipe out foreign lifestyle and beliefs, replace it with Russian lifestyle and beliefs’, it’s possible that what I’m seeing is what was a huge leap forward at the time. If only the Polish were so lucky, eh?

     King Thunderbird: The most up-to-date references possible, all the time.

     In summary, those interested in old-school foreign cinema or the cinema of Russia in particular would do well in checking out White Sun of the Desert, throwing it in between their copies of Brother and Battleship Potemkin (not alphabetically though). For those who are actually Russian, hopefully I haven’t proven myself to be an ignorant dumbass in regards to your history or ways of life or anything, and you continue to read and enjoy this stupid little blog of mine. Oh, and watch the movie if you haven’t already. You won’t even need subtitles or anything.

Result: Recommended