Movie Details
| Title: | Black Caesar | |
| Director: | Larry Cohen | |
| Year: | 1973 | |
| Genre: | Blaxploitation | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 02.03.10 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (4)
- Bone
- Full Moon High
- Hell Up In Harlem
- It's Alive!
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 02.03.10 | Home DVD | This Screening is part of event: Weird Wednesday I could have sworn that I'd seen this movie before, but I guess I hadn't. Fred Williamson is impossibly cool here... I had the same "I'll Never Be Remotely As Cool As This" feeling when watching Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Magnifique and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. There are just certain performances that are crystallized distillations of Masculine Confidence. This is one of those performances. The plot itself has a lot of thematic similarities to Scarface. We see Williamson as a young boy. He gets caught up in a crime he wasn't really involved with, gets shafted by the Man, and spends his formative years in jail. When he comes out, he grabs a small piece of land from the Mob, slowly builds his own empire, and ultimately challenges the Man in retribution for not only his stolen childhood, but the stolen identity of his entire culture. Unfortunately I was long-blinking through certain sequences of the film, and lost track to some degree of exactly what was going on. Part of that is obviously my fault, but I also think there were some significant temporal gaps in the film where we were just expected to fill in certain information ourselves. Which is an approach that can (and probably did) work, but as @themarc pointed out... it would have been so great if this had been created as an epic multi-part mini-series. Truly could have been a masterpiece. As it was, still a very good film, and one that I need to revisit at some point when I'm better rested. |