Cinema: Negative

Up Tight, by Director Jules Dassin, is really two films. One is a groping attempt to comprehend the current state of black militancy. The other is a creaky pastiche of John Ford's 1935 masterpiece, The Informer. The analogy of the Irish and Negro rebels is less natural than it is facile, but in Dassin's hands, there is little attempt to translate the classic into contemporary cinema. Instead, he has simply sought to make a negative of the original, with shades of black instead of grades of white.

An alcoholic steelworker, appropriately named Tank (Julian Mayfield), is rejected by his white employers and his black power-hungry companions. When one of the rebels murders a man during a holdup, Tank, blinded by resentment and fumes of booze, turns him in for $1,000 in reward money. Assailed by guilt, he abruptly endows a sidewalk preacher and a bunch of barflies with $20 bills. Militants spot the trail of green and run Tank to earth. Almost gratefully he accepts their revenge: a bullet in the stomach.

In the original, Victor McLaglen played the informer as a wounded bull. Mayfield portrays him as a dray horse, faithfully clopping to the fadeout. The Informer was consistently Irish. If Up Tight's cast is Negro, the script is in straight blackface, with such lines as "Nonviolence is a self-defeating mother." Its bogus climaxes are reminiscent of the '30s' group-theater lyricism, as when Tank wails at a smeltery, "You noisy beautiful bastard, remember me?", or when he roars, "The city is killing me ... it's killing both of us." Because Up Tight was filmed in the ghetto of Cleveland, it occasionally rings true, like a quarter in a handful of slugs. Roscoe Lee Browne as a traitorous homosexual and Raymond St. Jacques as the head of a cryptofascist cell seem authentic archetypes emerging from a historical shadow. Boris Kaufman's camera work briskly comes to life when Negroes scatter the police with a hail of curses and broken bottles. But such fragments stand alone in an unawakened film that can only pretend to tell the truth. In search of black authenticity, the viewer might better spend his time reading LeRoi Jones or Eldridge Cleaver. One may find these men intolerable, but it is possible to respect them. Up Tight is far more tolerable—but it is impossible to respect.