Bone

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In the United States, race relations are and will remain a relevant issue for many years to come. The current Presidential Race has revealed that, despite the superficial progress this country has made, race relations haven't really improved all that much. Yes there's a black man on the brink of becoming the first black President, but considering it has taken almost 300 years for this country to even consider the black man to be a worthy candidate is, in itself, a reflection of how blacks in the US remain second class citizens politically, economically and socially. Today, blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but also 30 percent of people arrested, 41 percent of people in jail and 49 percent of those in prison. One in ten black men in their twenties and early thirties are in prison or jail. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws. This is hardly the picture of equality.

Hollywood has had many kicks at the racial cat, but few have been as brazen as Larry Cohen's 1972 Bone. Cohen opens the film with a title card that declares "The year is 1970. The most powerful nation on earth wages war against one of the poorest countries -- which it finds impossible to defeat. And in this great and affluent nation exists its smallest richest city...And it is called Beverly Hills." With this opening Cohen defines the battlefield of a class war that spans the globe, one where the white ruling elite (aka The Establishment) is intent on keeping its vice grips tight on the throat of the poor. But to the eroding Establishment's chagrin, the poor -- oppressed, disenfranchised and pi$$ed off -- are fighting back. Cohen isn't subtle about getting his point across and this opening shot of a light bulb turning on then off sends a clear message to the audience: like it or not, you will be illuminated.

The characters within Cohen's story represent the ideological instead of the individual. Yaphet Kotto who stars as the titular character epitomizes white establishments greatest fear: black, big, strong, motivated, angry and smart. Bone represents the uprising, more specifically the black power movement, and, ultimately, the same poor people who the most powerful nation in the world cannot defeat: the Viet Cong. Bone's presence sets into motion a series of events that reveal things are not as cozy as they seem in white America: its broke (both financially and spiritually), its in denial and its in decline.

Andrew Duggan is Bill, a famous, rich, car dealership owner/car salesman, who is selling a failing American Dream. When Bone pulls the veil off of Bill, the Establishment is revealed as a bankrupt and immoral sham. Bill's only love is for paper and after Bone sends Bill on an errand to clean out his bank account or suffer the loss of his wife, Bill sides with his money despite a half-hearted attempt to maintain his carefully constructed and maintained public appearance.

Cohen recognizes the white elite are an obvious and easy target, and as quickly as Bill is emasculated, Cohen redirects his critique to the Uprising, showing that once the disenfranchised have a taste of wealth, they too lose sight of their ideals. Bill's wife Bernadette symbolizes the ignorance/innocence of the status quo and once Bone gains her respect/acceptance, he allows himself to be seduced by her. This slave/slave owner's wife seduction symbolizes a misdirected/idealized quest for power that is reduced to fu**ing the same force that has been fu**ing you your entire life. But this conquest results in selling out to the same system, thusly subsuming the Uprising through assimilation. In other words, once the Uprising buys into the system, the Uprising becomes the Establishment.

But Cohen doesn't stop there, in fact, he goes to great length to ensure that no one gets a free pass. The secondary characters within Bone also represent particular demographics, and they too are indicted with equal impunity. Bone's strength is that it chooses not to make a hero out of anyone or any cause and in doing so, it distributes the blame equally. We are the sum total of all our decisions and no matter how hard we fight to change things, all we're ever capable of doing is rearranging the chess pieces on the chess board.

Watching Bone today makes you realize that as much as times have changed, they remain exactly the same. That's not to say Bone isn't dated by specifics (wardrobe, production design, The Vietnam War, etc) - it definitely is a film that encapsulates its era - but what is striking is its depiction of an America bitterly divided (see above still for visual metaphor) by race, sex, class and ideology. Sound familiar?

Larry Cohen's BONE (1972) is a strange but interesting little film from an era when it was actually okay to lambast the capitalist mucky-mucks. Bone (Yaphet Kotto) is a young black tough who wanders into Beverly Hills and menaces a bourgeois white couple played by Andrew Duggan and Joyce Van Patten. Duggan is a slimy car salesman and Van Patten plays his trophy wife. (They have a grown son, who is in a Spanish jail for trying to smuggle hashish.) The film is supposed to be a satire of white racism and male privilege--and it is, but it's uneven at best. The film is well acted but a stronger, more coherent script would have helped. (Bonus moment: there's a hilarious moment when a hippie girl deliberately puts down a banana peel in a grocery store and--you guessed it--a hapless clerk goes sailing into a display in one of the best pratfalls ever recorded on film.)

BONE (3+ outta 5 stars) Very odd film that gets better and better the more times you see it. The plot sounds like an average thriller... but the movie is really a comedy... a very black, very subversive comedy. A well-to-do middle-aged couple (Andrew Duggan, Joyce Van Patten) have their bickering interrupted by a mysterious, threatening black man (Yaphet Kotto) who seems to come out of nowhere. He ransacks the house, looking for money. After coming up dry he sends the husband to the bank to withdraw some cash... if he doesn't come back in an hour he is going to rape the wife. Well, the husband takes the opportunity to run out on his wife and have a one night stand with a crazy woman he meets outside of the bank. The wife and her captor, in the meantime, actually begin to form a bond... and soon take off after the errant husband to seek their revenge. Or do they? Excellent performances and dialogue. I was a little taken aback by the movie the first time I saw it because I wasn't sure where it was going... so you'll need to keep an open mind to fully appreciate it. Why was Yaphet Kotto never a big movie star? He OWNS this movie! (Then again, he pretty well owns EVERY movie he appears in.) Classic opening dream sequence of Andrew Duggan selling used cars filled with gruesome accident victims!

An superb and breathtaking movie - purely character driven, unpredictable and mesmerising. Fabulous performances all round, an intriguing script, some good satire and excellent pacing throughout.

I'd recommend seeing it without any preconceptions - don't read any plot summaries, and don't be put off by any conclusions you may draw about the movie in the first 15 minutes...

This is an absolute gem!

At last I have found the holy grail of modern cinema. 'Housewife' is the film many people spend half their lives looking for. The stylized approach to incidental music, flashback techniques and the coming together of elusive plot strands all go towards making a truly first class motion picture. This film stands as a beacon shining in the darkness from continent to continent, breaking every mould, chasing its own hysteria which the film makes no bones about concealing. 'Housewife' is the yardstick for a truly wonderful film.