The Final Comedown

My earliest memories of Billy Dee Williams were him as Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back. At that time I knew him as a relaxed hair heart throb to many women of color. I never knew he had a film like this to his credit.

This movie is excellent and it was 100% socially relevant for 1972.

Billy Dee plays Johnny Johnson, a frustrated young Black man like so many others at that time. He was educated, angry, and being crushed under the weight of being young, educated and Black in America. He externalized all of that frustration and acted on that frustration and that's where the movie picks up: at the point of no return.

This movie is not for everyone, Black or White. This movie is an uncensored, no holds barred reflection of American society at that time. It's a perspective that was never seen on T.V. or heard on radio. It's a perspective that one would only get by entering the ghettos and projects of America. The dialog was heavy and the actions taken were costly, but such a thing was almost inevitable.

This movie had to be made just as it was because it is a chronicling of an era. Whether the names and the people were real is immaterial. What was real was the anger, the frustration, the repression, the oppression, and the natural bubbling over from all of that being mixed together. I'm glad this movie was made and that I had the opportunity to watch it.

Far more than the majority of exploitation-oriented releases that defined "blaxploitation," this 1972 is inspired by the prior "Sweet Sweetback" in its flashback structure and overt Black Power agenda. It's not primarily about violence and T&A, though there's some of both. Billy Dee Williams (in a role strikingly different to his in "Lady Sings the Blues" that same year) plays an angry young man gradually radicalized by racial injustices, leading to his being besieged by police as a Panthers-type leader in the present-tense framing sequences.

"Final Comedown" is no zenith of the cinematic arts--it's dated and crude at times. But it also makes an effort not to be cartoonish: There are scenes in which some white people (notably a Jewish couple, an employment-office secretary, and some SDS types) are outraged by the racism of other white people. There are also scenes that rather charmingly exist just to promote local (I'm presuming L.A.) black-owned businesses, a diner and Africanist clothes store included.

The film touches on a lot of then (still?) relevant points, from Vietnam War post-traumatic stress to drug addiction. It's not subtle or slick, but it really tries to articulate all complicated causes for Black Power rage, not just exploit them as a trendy attitude a la Superfly, Slaughter, Shaft, Rudy Ray Moore (much as I love that guy!), etc. Some eventual cruel ironies are well-judged, though it must be said the overall narrative shaping as well as the huge death-toll shootout sequences are pretty clumsy.

This isn't exactly a good film, but it reflects its precise cultural moment in ways more mainstream films seldom did/do. Despite all rough edges it's a more complicated and intelligent narrative airing of U.S. racial tensions circa 1972 than many better-known films. In that sense it's the antithesis of the terrific current parody "Black Dynamite," which made fun of the period's tritest "blaxploitation" films. This one isn't laughable--it's a serious statement. (Though the major histrionics by veteran actress Maidie Norman as Williams' mother are pretty humorous.)

"The Final Comedown" wants to "say something" about racism and inner-city violence; unfortunately, the message is invalidated by the nonsensical script, the amateurish production, and the heavy-handed polemics. How heavy-handed, you ask? To give you just one example, a black doctor comes out of his hiding place, unarmed, with his hands up in the air, ready to surrender to the police: one of the (all-white) cops says "Don't shoot him, he's a doctor", to which another cop replies: "So what? He's still a n****r", and proceeds to shoot him in cold blood. The cops are portrayed as ignorant, racist killers, even though at the end there are just as many dead people among them as there are among the black people who staged the riot. And this whole event was meant somehow to "sensitize" the white folks to the demeaning treatment of the black folks, when in fact something like this can only breed more hate and violence on both sides. Pamela Jones, as Williams' girlfriend, briefly lights up the screen with her smile and body, particularly in a tender sex scene, and elevates the rating of this movie from 1 to 2 out of 10.

I was really touched by this film. I thought the cinematography was excellent in it. It's a pretty depressing movie, and it shouldn't be looked down upon just because it's propaganda. It's well edited and well crafted. Reminded me of the battleship potemkin in this regard.

This has (as a given, or as it should be) righteous and furious anger at a society that has oppressed and enslaved people for centuries, and that more crucially and literally the racism of one side towards another into policies and something as simple as who can get a breakfast or an adult to get a job is being passed down to the next generation(s). It's the kind of movie that I assume Ibrahim X Kendi would screen if he had a film connected to his How to be an Anti-Racist book, and I mean that as a compliment (albeit I'm not sure what he'd think of the bullet strewn and blood-soaked meyley of the last 15 minutes, and I may just have it on my mind as I'm listening to the audiobook now, but I digress, sort of).

What I mean by all this is I am on board with what this film is presenting, in particular that Johnny's path to picking up a gun doesn't come out of nowhere and, invariably, leads to the kind of tragedy that we still see today if not on this exact scale (and god knows what the pigs of the 60s and 70s would do with the firepower of today), and I wish as a movie in and of itself I loved it more. I think it is ultimately a good movie, with some staggering bits of editing, and Billy Dee of course who takes this role for everything he's got, but I'm not sure if (adaptor and director) Williams transcended the stage roots.

I'm not familiar with the play or when it was written (I assume it came right at the same time as when the Black Panthers were on the rise, and all the drama that goes with that, and naturally this pairs well with Judas and the Black Messiah), but there are scenes and dialog exchanges that feel taken verbatim from a stage text and... You can tell, it's sometimes that feeling, and frankly not entirely in the writing but in the performance of like Johnny's mother or a few of the other militants, it's not quite as natural as it could have been.

But if this flaw exists, it doesn't hamper the overall impact and stylistic intensity of the production. Sure, the editor has seen Easy Rider or other films that have that one-two-three cutting technique to jump us back and forth through time, and some of the edits are even kind of rough to the point where one can almost see the scratches from the Steenbeck. But there are amazing bits as well, like when the Vietnam Vet is having that incredible bout of PTSD and it throws him into a frenzy. I thought that really got at what a lot of what Williams and his collaborators were after. And there are other moments that strike hard and deep with little dialog, like when Johnny is applying for the job and sees the white man pulling the secretary in and he and us know what's about to come next. All on faces and largely about POV.

Sure, much of this is didactic too, but so what? American cinema needed that sometimes in its polemics, and it does feel more of a cousin to a Battle of Algiers or even one of Godard's more ornery (but for him coherent) works than a Foxy Brown or what have you. It was made on a low budget (and all praise to AFI who get some credit in the title cards), and it has aged poorly in some parts - frankly I wish there had been more room for a stronger female presence here, and practically none are in the shootout - but it also has, as one more comparison, the ethos of a Night of the Living Dead: it doesn't lie to you what it's on about and its in-your-face presence is refreshing.

And to reiterate: good god Billy Dee Williams is amazing in this.