Old Yorker

  • The Liberation of L B Jones

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1970)

    William Wyler’s last film has things in common with Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967).  Both are contemporary stories set in the American South:  Sparta, Mississippi in Jewison’s picture; Somerton, Tennessee in Wyler’s.  Both begin with the arrival in town of a train, carrying passengers who’ll be important in the story, and end with the same characters’ departure on another train.  Both are adaptations of novels published in 1965 and have Stirling Silliphant’s name on the screenplay – Silliphant shares the writing credit for Wyler’s movie with the novel’s author, Jesse Hill Ford.  (Although Somerton is technically fictitious, it’s based on Humboldt, Tennessee where Ford, originally from Alabama, lived at the time he wrote the novel.)   Most important, both films are much concerned with local racism – but they treat the theme very differently.  In the Heat of the Night explores and dramatises it through strong characters and an involving crime plot.  The Liberation of L B Jones’s denunciation of racism is so explicit and dominant that characters and storyline are no more than means of illustrating the abominable social and moral codes of southern US states in the early 1960s.

    The three people of interest on the arriving and departing trains don’t all sit together.  Newlywed Steve Mundine (Lee Majors, a few years before he became bionic man Steve Austin), accompanied by his wife Nella (Barbara Hershey), is coming south to Somerton to be a partner in the legal firm of his uncle, Oman Hedgepath (Lee J Cobb), the town attorney and its most respected citizen.  Elsewhere on the train, a thirtyish African American, Sonny ‘Sonny Boy’ Mosby (Yaphet Kotto), has a handgun, hidden in a cigar box, for company.  Sonny Boy is returning to Somerton, after an absence of many years, with revenge in mind.  As a young teenager, he was viciously beaten by a white police officer, Stanley Bumpas (Arch Johnson).  A renewed confrontation with Bumpas nearly happens sooner than Sonny Boy anticipated.  After jumping from the train as it slows on approach to the station, he’s spotted by two white cops, one of whom gets out of the car and questions Sonny Boy.  This is Willie Joe Worth (Anthony Zerbe).  His work partner, who stays in the car, is Stanley Bumpas.

    Although both police officers will be crucial in what happens, Worth has a lot more screen time.  He’s having an affair with Emma (Lola Falana), the much younger wife of Lord Byron Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne), whose successful funeral business has made him the most affluent Black man in Somerton.  L B Jones first appears in Hedgepath’s office while the latter is showing his nephew round:  Jones explains that he’s going to divorce Emma, who’s pregnant with Worth’s child.  Hedgepath, chiefly to stop the cop’s affair with a Black woman becoming public knowledge, discourages Jones from pursuing divorce proceedings but he’s determined to go ahead.  For her part, Emma refuses not to contest the divorce:  marriage to Jones has accustomed her to a high standard of living; she wants to end up with alimony enough to maintain it.    Worth, who’s married with kids, is panicked by the threat of a miscegenation scandal and beats Emma up.  He and Bumpas, when Jones refuses to withdraw the divorce suit, then arrest him on trumped-up charges.  Jones escapes briefly but is hunted down in a scrapyard, where the two officers handcuff and hold him at gunpoint.  Worth shoots Jones dead.  Bumpas mutilates his body with the idea of making the murder look like a Black revenge killing and hangs the corpse from a wrecker hook.

    Emma and Jones’ assistant Benny (Fayard Nicholas) are initially arrested for the killing.  When it soon emerges that Benny was already in police cells at the time the murder took place, and that his and Emma’s confessions were obtained with the help of a cattle prod, Hedgepath tells the police to drop the charges. Worth, horrified by what he and Bumpas have done, turns himself in.  Hedgepath again sorts things out, swiftly arranging a cover-up.  He disposes of the murder weapon, issues Worth with a different gun and tells him to keep his mouth shut; Somerton’s mayor (Dub Taylor), present during this interview, is happy to let Hedgepath handle things.  While Bumpas is off duty and working land that he owns, Sonny Boy Mosby takes his revenge.  Rather than use the firearm he brought with him to Somerton, he pushes Bumpas into his own threshing machine.  For nearly all the main survivors, the outcome represents a pyrrhic victory.  Worth must live with his guilt.  Emma looks set to inherit her late husband’s wealth and be ostracised by the Black community that mourns L B Jones.  Hedgepath is abandoned by his nephew, who’s dismayed by his uncle’s conduct.  Steve and Nella Mundine return whence they came, presumably up north; their inability to do anything more than that is another kind of defeat.  Taking the same train out of town, Sonny Boy Mosby at least has the satisfaction of leaving Somerton his mission accomplished.

    The Liberation of L B Jones wasn’t a great success on its original release.  Not long before his death in 1981, William Wyler told his daughter that he had aimed the film at white audiences that he hoped to embarrass and enrage.  In the event, word of mouth and some negative reviews turned those audiences off seeing the movie at all.  Variety dismissed it as an ‘inter-racial sexploitation film’ and L B Jones was widely seen as shockingly untypical of Wyler, for its violence and bloodshed, and its unrelieved pessimism – though I don’t agree the latter quality is unusual in his work.  There are few Hollywood films with an ending as breathtakingly bleak as that of The Heiress (1949); two consecutive Wyler films of the 1960s, The Children’s Hour (1961) and The Collector (1965), are hardly more cheerful.

    The BFI handout for L B Jones screenings in their ‘The Old Man is Still Alive’ season comprises an admiring 2011 Sight and Sound piece on the film from Neil Sinyard, who declares himself ‘a huge fan of Wyler’s work’.  Yet the film has also more recently been acknowledged by critics very differently disposed to Wyler but who see L B Jones as ‘a disturbingly accurate picture of what hasn’t changed in America in the intervening half century’.  That’s Richard Brody in a New Yorker article of 2020, where he also describes Wyler as ‘a reserved filmmaker – theatrically precise as a director of actors and meticulous, if fussy, as a creator of compositions’.  BFI’s ‘Old Man’ programme has been curated by Karina Longworth, host of the ‘You Must Remember This’ podcast:  in her brisk introduction to the screening of Wyler’s film that I attended, Longworth, though far from disparaging of its director, echoed Brody’s recognition of L B Jones as highly-relevant-today, and was keen to stress its ‘misogynoir’ credentials.

    As a William Wyler fan, I must admit I found The Liberation of L B Jones startling for the wrong reasons – which are also reasons that I think really are untypical of Wyler.  The film is sometimes technically shaky and the performances are a mixed bag, to put it kindly.  In some early sequences particularly, the editing is awkward.  When he picks himself up after jumping from the train into Somerton, Sonny Boy sees the police car approaching before Wyler and his editor, Carl A Kress, cut to Yaphet Kotto’s face registering sudden alarm.  Once Worth has sent Sonny Boy on his way and returns to the car, there’s another reaction shot, from which it’s unclear if Sonny Boy is shuddering at the encounter with Worth or has spotted and recognised Bumpas inside the car.  After Hedgepath, preoccupied with introducing Steve Mundine to their business premises, has virtually dismissed L B Jones from his office, Mundine, struck by what Jones has said, looks thoughtful:  the camera stays on Lee Majors’ face too long.

    Easily the best performance in the film comes from Roscoe Lee Browne.  He conveys, economically but powerfully, the unspoken strength of Jones’s physical desire for Emma as well as his formidable rectitude (his initials could, in Somerton parlance, stand for law ‘biding).  Lee J Cobb’s playing is well judged, especially when Hedgepath, urgent yet businesslike, takes steps to conceal Worth’s crime.  Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey don’t make much impression because neither gets the chance to.  The real problem is the cast members other than Browne and Cobb with more to do.  Despite the supposedly highly-charged atmosphere of the story, most of the cast seem to be performing in isolation from each other.  Wyler allows most of the Black actors – even actors who would become as good as Yaphet Kotto did – to incarnate righteous anger or compassion so self-consciously that their scenes slow to a halt.  This is especially true of the elderly Zara Cully, as the woman who looked after Sonny Boy as a child.  Emma isn’t righteous or compassionate but Lola Falana also seems to be doing a disconnected turn.  The white cast are worse, though, eager to overdo their characters’ malignity or – in the case of Chill Wills, as another police officer – their comic ineptitude.  Anthony Zerbe acts up a storm; so much so that, when Hedgepath tells him to keep schtum about what really happened to L B Jones, you can’t believe the disintegrating Willie Joe Worth will be remotely capable of the self-control that demands.

    Richard Brody is right that Wyler ‘renders the performances blatantly emblematic’ (or too many of the performances anyway) although this may well, as Brody also implies, reflect Wyler’s own outrage at the events he describes.  If so, perhaps it wasn’t the first time this happened late in his career:  Wyler allowed some bad acting in The Children’s Hour, too.  It’s nevertheless remarkable how long he kept making high quality films of amazing variety.  His third last was The Collector, his second last Funny Girl (1968).  He didn’t sustain the quality to the very end but this last film certainly passes the variety test.  And although The Liberation of L J Jones is an anti-climax to a great career, there is a consolation.  Despite the poor health Wyler was in by the time he made it, the film isn’t listless:  there’s no lack of energy on the part of the ‘Old Man’ behind the camera.

    15 April 2025

  • La Cocina

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alonso Ruizpalacios (2024)

    The Mexican writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios uses lines from Henry David Thoreau as an epigraph to his film – ‘Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives / This world is a place of business / What an infinite bustle …’  Much of what follows in La Cocina comprises high-speed, high-volume action in the kitchen of a Times Square eatery – an upmarket tourist trap called The Grill.  This drama’s inspiration is Arnold Wesker’s 1957 stage play The Kitchen (first adapted for the screen in a 1961 British film directed by James Hill, best known for Born Free (1965)).  Ruizpalacios’s screenplay retains important elements of the Wesker original, which takes place in a London restaurant whose workforce includes Brits and immigrants from continental Europe, and where nearly all the kitchen staff are male, the waiting staff female.  In La Cocina, set in the present day, there’s a similar gendered division of labour, with just a few women in menial kitchen roles, and The Grill’s personnel is certainly international.  Many of the predominantly Latin American and Arab kitchen staff have an important thing in common, though:  they’re illegal immigrants.  Rashid (Odod Fehr), their Arab-American boss, talks plenty about legalising their immigration status, without making it happen.

    In short introductory sequences, Ruizpalacios follows Estela (Anna Diaz), a young Mexican, from her arrival in the US to her entry to the restaurant, by which point it’s clear that she speaks only two words of English – ‘The Grill’.  She nonetheless gets a job there, as one of the kitchen skivvies, and starts immediately:  La Cocina‘s timeframe is Estela’s first working day.  She knew where to head thanks to her cousin Pedro (Raúl Briones), who’s been working as one of The Grill’s cooks for the past couple of years.  The narrative’s main focus soon switches to Pedro and his relationship with Julia (Rooney Mara), one of the waitresses, who is pregnant with Pedro’s child.  She’s not keen to have the baby though Pedro wants her to.  The film’s key plotline is an investigation by HR manager Luis (Edoardo Olmos) into the theft of $823, reported by Mark (James Waterston), the restaurant cashier.  It emerges that this is exactly the sum Julia needs for an abortion.

    Cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez and editor Yibran Asuad ensure that preparations for lunch service at The Grill, hit by repeated crises, are visually dynamic, to say the least.  The frenetic kitchen activity is familiar from Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point (2021), its 2023 TV spin-off series (which I gave up on after one episode) and perhaps also The Bear (which I’ve not seen).  The visual style of the original Boiling Point was strongly aligned with the hectic, desperate state of mind of the protagonist.  Raúl Briones’s Pedro is certainly volatile – a young man described by colleagues as ‘a fun guy’, ‘a bastard’, ‘a time bomb’, and so on – but La Cocina doesn’t fuse his personality and the kitchen tempo quite as Boiling Point did.  Fair enough, to the extent that The Grill’s a big place with a huge staff:  Pedro can’t dictate its rhythms as Stephen Graham’s Andy did the cramped restaurant prep area in Boiling Point.  Yet the turmoil in La Cocina starts to seem as much imposed on the situation as integral to it.  This is because of Ruizpalacios’s occasional changes of pace, striking as these always are.  La Cocina often feels choreographed – and one of the most effective shifts in tempo comes in a short sequence that’s almost explicitly choreographed:  just before the restaurant opens to customers, the waitresses move around the dining area in time to background music playing there.  Also effective is a scene in a freezer room, where Pedro and Julia have sex:  the scene is shot in a blue light – one of only two colour sequences in this black-and-white film.  The changing of tempo seems more artificial, though, when action gives way to static talk.

    This is presumably a legacy of the Wesker play and it’s interesting to see from Wikipedia that the 1961 film of The Kitchen has been criticised (by The Radio Times Guide to Films) for ‘long, philosophical conversations [that] do not adapt well to the screen’.  The extraordinary speed of the kitchen sequences in La Cocina makes such chunks of dialogue – or, in the most conspicuous instance, monologue – awkwardly salient interruptions to the main narrative.  When African-American pastry chef Nonzo (Motell Foster) tells Pedro and others the mysterious story of a disabled immigrant saved from deportation by the intervention of an alien green light, his audience is silent and spellbound throughout.  This scene takes place in the street outside The Grill, during an afternoon break.  Before the start of dinner service, there are also sequences in Central Park, where Pedro heads to meet Julia, as they’d agreed, but she doesn’t show; and at the abortion clinic that she visits instead of meeting Pedro.  These temporary changes of scene are a relief from the kitchen mania yet they’re also, as a result, somehow anti-climactic; when Ruizpalacios switches to these other locations, the narrative is certainly less distinctive.

    Perhaps another inheritance from Wesker but the resolution of the missing restaurant takings is unsatisfying.  The theft turns out not to be a theft at all:  cashier Mark finds the money underneath his desk, in another till bag.  It’s hard to accept he didn’t spot it earlier, when supposedly searching high and low for the cash.  The explanation for this – and for the amount of money being identical, to the dollar, to Julia’s abortion costs – is probably that the alleged theft and its aftermath are essentially symbolic, a means of illustrating La Cocina‘s racial themes:  it’s immigrant Pedro rather than US native Julia who’s suspected of the theft.  (I didn’t understand either how come Pedro, as it transpires, gave Julia the money from his own savings if he didn’t want her to get the abortion.)  The film’s excessive length (139 minutes) is a bit of a problem, too.  I saw it at a midday-ish show in Curzon Soho’s largest screen, which drew attention to how few other people were there – barely double figures, and two of them left before halfway.  I never thought of joining the exodus but I had some sympathy:  La Cocina‘s relentless quality makes it seem repetitive.

    There’s plenty to admire, though.  Raúl Briones’ powerfully varied portrait of Pedro is admirable.  Rooney Mara, a much better-known performer (outside Mexico at least) than anyone else in the cast, fits in remarkably easily.  Ruizpalacios makes the main couple’s affair representative of the central immigrant theme and convincingly individual.  A character who emerges only in the closing stages – Julia’s ten-year-old daughter (Leo James Davis), whom she raised alone and whose existence comes as news to Pedro – explains in part why Julia doesn’t want a second child.  In any case, she feels less for Pedro than he does for her – never mind the scepticism of his co-workers:  as Luis explains, when a Hispanic immigrant tells a US citizen ‘Eres el amor de mi vida’ (‘You’re the love of my life’), they probably mean ‘visa’ rather than ‘vida’.  (The film’s dialogue alternates rapidly between English and Spanish.)  Ruizpalacios does well echoing details from earlier in the story for subsequent, more dramatic effect.  The live lobsters in the restaurant tank that testify to The Grill’s high-end menu anticipate a vagrant’s visit to the kitchens later in the day, begging for food:  Pedro, to the fury of his immediate boss (Lee Sellars), serves lobster to the vagrant.  Nonzo’s long story mentions two instances of the green light; when asked about the second of these, he says he doesn’t know what happened.  The film’s closing scene – after Pedro has gone crazy, trashing equipment and bringing kitchen and restaurant to a shocked standstill – provides La Cocina‘s second moment of colour:  a tiny green light, still blinking on and off on a receipts machine that Pedro wrecked, gradually suffuses him and his young cousin.  Estela’s face wears an enigmatic, Mona Lisa-ish smile.

    Pedro’s loss of control is precipitated by a waitress – like Estela on her first day at The Grill, unlike most of the waitresses not a white American:  Samira (Soundos Mosbah), working flat out during dinner service, commits the cardinal sin of taking a plate of food from Pedro rather than waiting for him to pass it out to her.  In doing so, she invades his territory; the spectacular mayhem Pedro causes in the kitchen then spills over into the restaurant, where he heads next.  The film’s climax, in other words, crystallises its immigration theme (that concluding green light is limelight).  Surveying the wreckage of the kitchen and his employees’ faces, Rashid angrily asks what more they want than paid work and food – though he knows the answer:  it’s what he keeps promising them.  La Cocina premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival – some seven months before Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist was unveiled at Venice.   Ruizpalacios’s film contains an odd anticipation of one of Corbet’s most attention-getting images.  During Nonzo’s telling of his lengthy tale, there are paired shots of the Statue of Liberty and of a restaurant cleaner’s upside-down reflection in water.

    Plenty of critics’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes see the film as a straightforward indictment of American capitalism – of how it ‘dehumanises and exploits immigrant workers’ (Tom Dawson, Radio Times).  It goes without saying that Armond White is different but it’s important to discuss him (again!) because, far from excoriating La Cocina as liberal propaganda, White hailed it as ‘the film of the year … an inspiration … a dazzling day-in-the-life exploration of the immigrant crisis that globalists have unleashed on the West’.  His review is dated 30 October 2024 – the week before last year’s US presidential election:  some of White’s  remarks – ‘the idea of ethnic diversity not only defines [New York City’s] history but now has become a political weapon created by a government-sponsored invasion’ – might seem to have been overtaken by events.  But, as noted a few weeks ago (see The Substance), Trump’s return to power hasn’t cheered up Armond White:  he’s still using films made by directors who are surely not his political soulmates as sticks to beat Hollywood with.  The latest is Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia with which, according to White, it’s essential for the new Disney Snow White to be compared (even though most US reviewers, whatever their politics, seem agreed that the Disney movie is a dud)!

    Unless a European film-maker decides to address head-on issues central to US culture wars – Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is a case in point – White is much less bothered about their political outlook.  He can, for example, acknowledge ‘a socialist tendency’ in Mike Leigh’s cinema while warmly praising Hard Truths.  This is a weird kind of ‘America First’ thinking:  Mike Leigh and Alain Guiraudie are an ocean away, and there’s no risk of their films being dangerously influential in the US.  White’s attitude is expressed in a particularly curious way in his review of Alonso Ruizpalacios’s film.  At times, he wilfully misinterprets things in La Cocina.  Pedro says more than once, ‘You keep calling it America but America is not a country’.  White contrives to link this remark to what he calls the ‘Millennial Babel’ of bad language heard in The Grill’s kitchen, as if Pedro were condemning multiculturalism:  it’s more likely that Pedro means to say that America, as distinct from the USA, is not a country but a continent (or two).   At other times, White is niggled by Ruizpalacios’s liberalism – and, as a Mexican, he’s a liberal too close to home for comfort.  Whenever this happens, White invokes Arnold Wesker, left-leaning throughout his life but non-American (and also now dead), as the spirit of all that’s best in this new version of The Kitchen, concluding that ‘The genius of Wesker’s play rescues the liberalism of La Cocina’.  Armond White’s political prejudices have turned his perspective on contemporary cinema into an inevitable distorting lens.

    8 April 2025

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