Cinema: A Child of Mother Harlem

The Cool World. Fifth Avenue, for all the U.S. moviegoer knows, comes to a dead end at 110th Street. Beyond that point lies Harlem, the black hole of Manhattan, where almost half a million Negroes and Puerto Ricans are confined by pressures of prejudice and poverty; and beyond that point, U.S. moviemakers seldom venture. Indeed, this film is the first full-length movie that has ever been shot in Harlem. Produced by Frederick Wiseman and directed by Shirley (The Connection) Clarke, The Cool World is a crude but often effective sociological shocker: a story of how cold old Mother Harlem indifferently devours one of her children.

Duke is his name, and he is 15 years old. He inhabits a dingy tenement with his mother and her latest "husband," slopes through the shabby streets of Harlem day and night with a huddle of incipient hoods who call themselves the Pythons. Most of them are even younger than Duke, but all of them fight booze, smoke tea, use girls, snag purses and carry switchblades. A knife, alas, is not enough for Duke. He longs with mystical intensity to possess a gun: a scepter to define his will and a power to impose it upon the white man's world. The film describes how Duke fails to find the object of his obsession but discovers that a knife is also able to kill a man. At the fade, two white policemen begin to beat him brutally.

What's wrong with this scene is what's wrong with the film as a whole: it so furiously resents the race prejudice of the whites that it unconsciously adopts the race prejudice of the Negroes. In The Cool World, all Negroes are innocent, even when they are guilty; all whites are wrong, especially when they are right. Furthermore, the moviemakers too often splice sociology with sensation, documentary with melodrama. And finally, the cinematography is inexcusably sloppy—U.S. audiences, wise in the ways of the hand-held camera, are no longer likely to confuse the absence of art with the presence of truth. Still and all, The Cool World has an impact and a fascination. Who will not remember the beautiful wild faces of the children, blooming like bright manna in the desolation? To see them is to die a little.