Uptight

More fascinating as thought experiment than it is satisfying as finished film, Uptight is still a complicated, contradictory experience that’s worth the effort. How often do you come across something that’s an update of classic John Ford movie, this time substituting Irish revolutionaries for a Black Panthers-like group, co-written by Ruby Dee, starring many of the best black artists of the era, and directed by Jules Dassin, of all people, that explored the traumatized psyche of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination? Exactly, this is a once in a lifetime confluence of talents and ideas that’s fascination outweighs its demerits.

The strangeness of Uptight’s existence doesn’t stop at its assembly of talent in front and behind the camera, but at the simple fact that a major studio released something so aggressively political. Paramount financed and produced Uptight right before the onslaught of black cinema known as blacksploitation, and while Uptight has relatively little in common with many of those films, there’s still the rage of the ghetto, the wariness of oppressed, and an unapologetic blackness that draws a straight line between what this film does and what that movement was expressing.

Yet Dassin’s artistic impulses feel at odds with the story he’s trying to tell. There’s a grit and truth in the script that his impressionistic camera can’t pull off. His bold color palette and arty compositions often turn the politics into moot points as if the imagery, at times too melodramatic, is more important than the words and performances from the likes of Dee, Roscoe Lee Brown, Juanita Moore, and Julian Mayfield. This was a film that longed for more cinematic realism and less for filmic poetry.

Same goes for the disparate tones. His informer, Mayfield, is at times played for too clownish and pitiable an alcoholic figure to really register as a tragedy waiting to happen, and his revolutionaries are too cool, smart, and direct to balance out some of the more parodic scenes of the informer. However, there’s one perfect scene in which everything is working in perfect synchronicity. Mayfield wanders into the funeral gathering for the man his informing got killed, and his mixture of confusion and grief is palpable. The various attendees at the wake stare down at him as if vengeful judge and jury perplexed by his erratic behavior.

It is in these tiny moments that Uptight becomes good enough and worthy enough to seek out. I’ll let Roger Ebert have the final say about it: “There’s no backsliding toward a conciliatory moderate conclusion. The passions and beliefs of the black militants are presented head-on, with little in the way of comfort for white liberals. White racists, I guess, will be horrified beyond measure. Good for them.”