Tag Archives: Norman Jewison

White Boy Elgar

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Marge (Pearl Bailey) welcomes Elgar (Beau Bridges), her new landlord, to the neighborhood in Hal Ashby’s debut feature, The Landlord (1970).

In the early seventies Hollywood studio executives began to realize there was a huge untapped market for films dealing with African-Americans, a situation made obvious by the unexpected success of Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), an action comedy based on the Chester Himes novel about two black cops, Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) and Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge). In the ensuing rush to capture this previously ignored audience, the “blaxploitation” film was born, but the majority of these films were urban crime thrillers like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972). Films which attempted to explore racial issues or feature complicated black and white relationships were a rarity but one unique exception was The Landlord (1970), which was virtually ignored by the public when it opened.

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Remembering Hal Ashby

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Mark Harris’s best-seller Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood pointed to 1967 as the year that the studio system crumbled and a new order emerged while Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls profiled the subsequent rise of the young turk directors in the seventies who changed cinematic conventions with their idiosyncratic films. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich are usually singled out as the prime movers and shakers by film historians of that era while the once high profile Hal Ashby is often underrated and relegated to the sidelines. Hal, Amy Scott’s new documentary on the director, is a welcome homage that attempts to elevate and restore this influential figure to his rightful place in Hollywood history.  Continue reading →