Cinema: Ill Wind

COOL BREEZE

Directed by BARRY POLLACK Screenplay by BARRY POLLACK

This sleazy remake of John Huston's fine The Asphalt Jungle is cast primarily with blacks, but the men who made it—Scenarist-Director Barry Pollack, Producer Gene Gorman—are white. Their interest is not so much in reaching the new-found black audience (TIME, April 10) as in exploiting it.

The Asphalt Jungle was a taut and precise study of the way a robbery went wrong as a result of the psychological quirks of the perpetrators. In Cool Breeze, the gang is given a vaguely altruistic motive (the money from the job will go to start a "black people's bank"), which once proposed is rapidly forgotten. Pollack's script uses this political ploy as a kind of sop, an attempt to make the gang not merely crooks but criminal revolutionaries.

The movie is all jiveass and jungle bunnies. The men (Thalmus Rasulala, Raymond St. Jacques, Jim Watkins) chortle and slap one another's palms. The women (Judy Pace, Margaret Avery) mostly moan and gyrate in transports of synthetic sexual passion. Director Pollack is singularly catholic in his taste for stereotypes.

J.C.