TROUBLE MAN
1972
Directed by Ivan Dixon
Written by John D.F. Black
By 1972, blaxploitation was in full swing, having, perhaps, already reached its very peak the previous year, seeing epochal successes on either side of the scale with Shaft on the one end and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song on the other (while, in fact, the scrappier Sweet Sweetback won that particular contest). But then, 1972 saw the release of the single highest-grossing blaxploitation film, Super Fly, and that same year the one blaxploitation hero with a household-name franchise got his first sequel, Shaft's Big Score!, likewise bringing in a very respectable amount of money, while also being, I don't know for sure but I'd venture the claim, the highest-budgeted film by a black director up till that point. In other words, blaxploitation could be big business, even having contemporary multiracial appeal, and what's important, for today's subject, is that 1971 was when the actual (white establishment, needless to mention) studios realized how big that business could be. Thus for our present purposes Shaft is—though not just for this one reason—the key forerunner, as one of the very few films that MGM made any profit on (but, proportionally, a ton of profit) in the year of 1971, as that studio limped down its sad path towards the empty logo it is today. A few miles up the street, another Hollywood titan hobbled by the 1960s, 20th Century-Fox, evidently saw the potential in a genre that, hypothetically, didn't need enormous budgets to reap success, and they decided to have their own Shaft, minimally-funded in expectation of a giant return on their investment, and while all this is easily determined—though I'm hardly any expert on blaxploitation—expert or not, I do know what I like, and Trouble Man is it.
It didn't work out for Fox—data for Trouble Man is sketchy, but it soft-flopped—and I suppose there are comprehensible reasons for its failure. For starters, one could suppose that while Shaft represented a mild risk for MGM, for which they repaid Gordon Parks with $2 million to make its sequel, Fox doesn't look like it was willing to spend as much as MGM did the first time, so set against Parks's lushly-photographed, five-months-earlier Big Score!, the visibly-cheap Trouble Man isn't even competing in that weight class, and there's a certain disrespect to that, coming from Fox, rather than, say, AIP, let alone a contemporary black-owned production. On the other hand, I have doubts that any filmgoing demographic was vetting the industrial credentials of their movies in 1972 like we do today, so it could be, if we wish to compare it to the first Shaft, more a matter of what a modest budget can get you in Los Angeles, the setting of Trouble Man, and what a modest budget can get you in Shaft's Manhattan; the latter has the automatic scale, inherent visual interest, and unavoidable ethnography, while L.A. can just look like "Town," on top of looking like "the Town in every other movie." (This isn't a uniform condition for Trouble Man; nor is it devoid of settings that are interesting, ethnographically or visually, in their own way.) A part of it simply might be that Trouble Man is too patient for its own financial health. I'm going to tell you, that's more a strength, but I'll admit that I began to wonder if it still could have any serious action scenes up its sleeve, until this 99 minute movie breaks out its conjoined pair of violent thriller sequences that are, essentially, just a single, ever-escalating—by God, I'd tentatively suggest groundbreaking—21 minute action scene.
So let's not be down on it, even if audiences were, because audiences get shit wrong all the time; this is great, and those comparisons to Shaft I've been making have an even more concrete justification, because it was written by one of the same guys, John D.F. Black (ironically white), likewise taking an executive producer credit on this one, perhaps jealous of his Shaft co-writer Ernest Tidyman who, being the novelist who created John Shaft, was presently rolling in Shaft money. That jealousy seems justified, given that without Black, Tidyman wrote Shaft's Big Score!, and as that's the main place that Shaft's rushed-into-theaters sequel falters, the obvious speculation would be that Black's contribution to their shared screenplay was the more important one. Trouble Man, anyway, is drumtight, like Shaft—deceptively so, and an exceedingly lived-in kind of tight, but one hell of a meticulous crime thriller. (As for being like Shaft's Big Score!, it shares more-or-less the same plot: "what if, in Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars, the hero didn't know he was helping kick off a gigantic gang war, wouldn't that be suspenseful?") (The answer is "yes.")
So, in L.A. we find the man known only and ever as Mr. T (it simply cannot be a coincidence) (Robert Hooks), a fixer with Robin Hood tendencies and essentially every skill, the latter demonstrated when he confronts a cocky out-of-town pool shark (James "Texas Blood" Brown), winning not necessarily because he's more skilled, but because he is, as the establishment's owner Jimmy observes, cool, in the temperamental sense. Jimmy notes that the shark is still pretty good, but he lacks that particular quality—"Then he's not good, Jim." And that's some of that unshowy drumtightness right there, but then the whole scene is masterfully efficient without breaking a sweat, exactly like its hero: establishing T's decency, by agreeing to put the squeeze on a scumbag slumlord, gratis, and establishing T's stern judgment, by putting his weight behind an effort to get a supplicant's obvious flight-risk of a nephew a bail bondsman, but for a wad of cash, all while handily beating the shark and meeting his aggressions with aggression and precision, all part of a typical morning for T when he holds court (his office is in the back, though he has his own, personal table, and a nearby elevated chair that comes off like a modest throne, and, correct me if I'm wrong because I've obviously never seen many of them, is a shoeshine seat, which would be some nice quiet symbolism if so).
So it's not obviously something different when the plot, in the form of Chalky Price (Paul Winfield) and Pete Cockrell (Ralph Waite), black and white gangsters maintaining an entente cordial over their shared sector of L.A., walks in. Likewise paying proper deference (even Pete only needs to be told once), they commission T to uncover the masked, gloved, deracinated hoods who've been shaking down their gambling dens lately. It's not even all that stressed (earnestly, I didn't realize we had the plot already), but you won't be too surprised that this job goes wrong, at least for T: the hoods arrive, but we already know there's a lot more to Chalky and Pete's scheme because they've got a rival's lieutenant, dressed identically to one of their goons, contriving to kill that lieutenant right in front of T, while doing such a bad job of framing T for the killing that we can't even assume that was exactly what they were doing, as part of a complex scheme to take down Big (Julius Harris, who, for these sins I suppose, got demoted to only being a henchman of Big, in Live and Let Die). A gang war seems imminent, the cops (principally William Smithers) get involved, but before T can realize his enemies' true object he's been suckered into a much better frame-up—but even on the backfoot, they've underestimated how easy he's going to take to being their patsy.
So, for the record, T is pretty damn regular cool, too. He fucks, obviously—practically a genre requirement—albeit offscreen (so we could identify another possible reason that Trouble Man didn't get the success it deserved, since for blaxploitation, it is supremely demure—for a Goddamn PG-rated adventure movie in 1972, it would be demure—and I'm frankly comfortable agreeing it's a mild demerit). In any case, a lot of this is already there in Black's script, which is terrific and snappy all over the place in its cunningly offhand way—Trouble Man winds up with a whole galaxy of antagonists portending some level of threat, all of whom relate to T in distinctive ways (you can kind of feel Black having to physically restrain himself with the white detective who, despite their mutual rancor, still slightly comes off like he wants to hang out with T), and come in a wide variety of temperaments themselves, Winfield getting to ride Chalky into a semi-controlled nervous breakdown, because he knows how badly they've fucked up, while Waite's Pete's a smug son of a bitch all the way down the line, though there's something to how neither one has even thought about selling the other out. (It's actually a surprisingly integrated film, above and beyond the script, but carefully, without ever wishing itself into some fantasy where racism—in this blaxploitation movie—doesn't exist.)
But a huge part of the appeal is Hooks, offering a performance that must've been harder than he ever makes it look: with Hooks, T is a massively charismatic professional, which couldn't have been entirely effortless because—only slightly uncharitably—on the page, T's a snappish prig. But Hooks makes his snippiness simply a zero tolerance policy for bullshit; he leavens his humorlessness with the ornery fun he's having with the hard-boiled dialogue; he even manages to make his bourgeois fastidiousness, that's absolutely an intentional comedic gesture (the movie positively wants you to notice that T changes his clothes twice a day) into something more like stylish cool. Which could be another hang-up with the movie's reception: middle-class aspirations didn't hurt Shaft any, but Shaft still had a bohemian streak, and T is practically an out-and-out yuppie; but it takes all kinds to make a thriving film genre, and it just works, firstly because it's just a reflection, down the socioeconomic ladder, of that Bond fantasy of aristocratic pretensions while reserving a pronounced disdain for actual aristocracy. But Hooks and Black are also using it to silently establish a code of conduct for this mercenary—this killer, when it comes to it—one nearly fetishistic about being surgically clean about removing the cancerous growths that have snuck up on him. It's a distinctive thing, and I'd prefer to think it's complementary to the hotter-blooded blaxploitation films I've seen, but it makes for a cool criminal movie of merit, no matter how you spin it. Altogether, Hooks is simply putting on the kind of invisibly-controlled star turn where his command over his corner of the world comes so naturally that the only natural thing to do in return is watch him as closely as possible, with every confidence that no matter how things appear, he's always got a countermove; plus, when the time comes, he's game for that stuntwork we're eventually getting, as our reward for watching all those countermoves only put him one step ahead of the law, while he keeps winding up two steps behind his enemies.
Which is where Trouble Man's director comes in, one Ivan Dixon (it may be worth explicitly pointing out that the guy named "Ivan" is black), who arrived from acting (notably on Hogan's Heroes), gathering up the technical skills by watching and learning and getting a little TV directing under his belt before casually blowing your doors off here on his feature debut. (Unfortunately, between this film's underperformance and his controversial follow-up, The Spook Who Sat By the Door, it was no long-lived feature career, though at least Dixon landed on his feet, back in television.) Now, it's not "flashy 70s," though it could be nothing besides the 70s—the suits and wallpaper alone—and especially in Michael Hugo's photography. That's is where that "visibly cheap" observation comes in (it's potentially a little less intentional in its lighting, overall, than Hugo's Mission: Impossibles were), tending towards a flatness that might well go even beyond the "flat naturalism" of fluorescent-lit low-rent spaces, sufficiently artless in the interiors that the green-tinged fluorescence of the lamps hanging over that pool table, that might've been dramatic, are just one more extra layer of light on his face; it's not bad, all told, and there's more care taken in exteriors that at least aren't underlit (especially with Hooks, whom we discover looks—get this—pretty cool under countervailing sidelights that send a jagged streak of noirish shadow down his face), and whether Dixon started working Hugo out or not, at a minimum the photography becomes rather more rigidly-designed as it goes on, and I have the littlest suspicion that that's a deliberate strategy considering the geographically and sociologically distinct environment Dixon sends T into at the end. Dixon, though, just has the knack, and he may've been taking himself in hand, becoming stronger as the movie goes along, even reaching for a fair bit of "flashy 70s" framing and blocking by the time the climax is in sight. The marvelous thing, however, is his execution of Black's script—the pull of Hooks's performance might even lie in Dixon's direction, confident in how little exposition he needs while his storytelling gives it a downright tangible sensation of mystery and suspense, like invisible hands slowly closing themselves right around our hero's neck.
But Dixon did not, I presume, need to take in hand his editor, except possibly right after the very first editorial gesture of the film, and who knows who the fuck's idea that was—the third shot of the movie is a brutal cut to a fuzzy blow-up of the shot we're already in, evidently to get a close-up of Hooks they forgot to shoot. (Though let's not count some self-deprecating good humor from these low-budget filmmakers in some symmetry on the backend: the final shot is one of the most damnably awkward freeze-frames you ever did see, just this car crossing the road.) But, leave that aside, because this film has a most wonderful secret and he's named Michael Kahn. If you don't immediately recognize that name, well, it wouldn't have been recognizable to anybody in 1972, the 37 year old seeming to have recently descended from editing heaven, with barely any work to date; which suggests the Goddamn tantalizing idea that without the action-thrillers called "blaxploitation," we don't get Kahn and hence we kind of don't get Steven Spielberg. It's an impressive training ground Dixon's laid out for him regardless, and they work together splendidly, Dixon knowing exactly how he wants his scenes to play out in space and entrusting Kahn to move us analytically through them—that opening pool game is an unfussy masterclass in eyelines, organically taking us around the table, unobtrusively exploring this environment, and making T the rock-solid center of it.
It's all like that, or better than that, when Kahn starts on his thriller cutting, from something as simple as the startle-cuts to the goons who've already encircled poor Jimmy before he even knows it, to that all-timer of an action climax I mentioned. I can say, safely, T goes on the counterattack, infiltrating two buildings, one apiece for his two primary villains, and it's no small wonder that two infiltrations in a row still feel like different, intensifying stages of the same action sequence. It's immoderately clever in its details, and it should be out-and-out iconic, though let's take a moment to say "not perfect": this has to blamed on inexperience, in one case it's Dixon making the misstep—there's a demivillain hunting T because he personally hates T, and even if crabby laconism is what the movie's been all about, it's still slightly overdoing it to blast the featured henchman with no more emphasis than the two unfeatured henchmen who came in with him—while in another, it's Kahn and Dixon, neither one of whom quite let the kaleidoscopic imagery of T's battle's conclusion, which the marketers clearly recognized as something special, land on us the way that amazing poster promises. But that's it, no other notes: this is some brilliantly tactical, brain vs. brawns stealth action that Dixon's got cooking, short staccato bursts of intelligent and creative violence, and cunningly almost-silent, your attention fixed instead by Marvin Gaye's score (the only thing about the movie that's famous yet these cues aren't even on his album), boiling over from a grim mellowness to the urgency of screeching guitars. Maybe even better, Dixon is exploiting the hell out of his climactic location, the modernist (and white) fastness of Century City, doing an even better job of it than Conquest of the Planet of the Apes had when Fox made its other 1972 movie designed to take advantage of the strange and inhumane geometries of the development that used to be their backlot. Dixon rips some outright Escheresques from T's infiltration of the center, and then moves into his showdown in the sky—I do not want to be wrong, so I will not say this is the first "action hero battles his way up a high-rise" sequence in history. But I do not know an earlier one, and so in addition to being great it feels primal, with a straight line between this and the finale of Cowboy Bebop, and not a very crooked a line between this and The Raid, or Die Hard, or a John Wick. All that is high praise, and you get the feeling that the brevity of Dixon's time in movies was our great loss, and Trouble Man, although not fated to fall into complete obscurity, deserves more rehabilitation than it's gotten yet.
Score: 9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment