Uptight Blu-ray Review
Outasight.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 12, 2012
Jules Dassin certainly has one of the most fascinating filmographies in the annals of cinema. After having made his mark
as an actor with a Yiddish troupe in New York City, Dassin matriculated to Hollywood where he found work as an
assistant to Alfred Hitchcock, among others. He then rather quickly started making shorts and B-movies, including
everything from an adaptation of an Edgar Allen Poe story (
The Tell-Tale Heart) to an interesting comedy called
The Affairs of Martha which plays like a kind of white bread precursor to
The Help, when an unidentified maid to some tony
Caucasians on Long Island find out she's writing a tell all book, leading everyone with a maid to panic. Dassin quickly
became an A-lister, working with everyone from Joan Crawford (
Reunion in France) to Charles Laughton (
The
Canterville Ghost), becoming one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most dependable and versatile helmsmen. Dassin was
at the height of his powers in 1948 when his
Naked City was released, a film that helped solidify several
elements in the
noir genre, but his follow up,
Thieves' Highway, was pounded out fairly quickly for Fox
under the threat of imminent blacklisting, something that did in fact happen, bringing Dassin's American film career to a
sudden screeching halt (Bette Davis did manage to get him a little work directing her failed Broadway revue
Two's
Company). One of his best known films, 1950's
Night and the City (also a Fox release), was made in
London, and his hugely influential 1955 opus
Rififi, was a French production. Dassin continued to work,
sporadically at least, in Europe and he managed to have two significant hits starring his future wife Melina Mercouri,
including her Oscar winning turn in
Never on Sunday, and, five years later, the
Rififi-esque
Topkapi, which won co-star Peter Ustinov his second Oscar. But Dassin hadn't made an American film for
decades when he took on the rather unusual property of
Uptight (AKA
Up Tight!), a 1968 film made at
the height of racial unrest in the United States and which must have seemed frighteningly militant to audiences of the
day. One of the most interesting things about
Uptight is the fact that it's a kind of unexpected reworking of the
hoary but still viscerally impactful
The Informer, a novel by Liam O'Flaherty which became an extremely well
regarded 1935 John Ford film which won Academy Awards for Ford, star Victor McLaglen, scenarist Dudley Nichols, and
composer Max Steiner. The rather startling idea of transporting a story about the Irish revolution to the ghettos of
Cleveland is arresting, but that doesn't necessarily mean the transition is smooth or even particularly effective.
Dassin seemed to take the slights fate had dealt him with a fairly sanguine attitude, at least on the surface, but could
there have been a very understandable rage simmering just underneath? And could that rage have been translated
into
the rather presciently political subtext of
Uptight? How else to explain a director, even one as averse to a
stylistic
rut as Dassin, going from something like the frothy comedy of
Topkapi to something like this, a veritable screed
about racial injustice and both the benefits and drawbacks of an undisguised militancy? As "now" as
Uptight
must
have seemed in 1968—and it certainly has a "ripped from the headlines" demeanor, replete with a major plot point
concerning the then recent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—structurally it is still encumbered by the kind of
well
meaning left leaning
ethos that colored not just
The Informer, but a whole movement of theater and film
in
the 1930s especially.
The focus of
Uptight is Tank (Julian Mayfield, who receives an "Introducing" credit in this film despite having one
previous credit on IMDb, but who evidently never made another film after this one). Tank has been part of The
Committee, a rabble rousing militant faction of Cleveland's African American population, led by a natty martinet played
by Raymond St. Jacques. The film opens with some incredible footage taken during the aftermath of Martin Luther King,
Jr.'s assassination, and then segues to Cleveland, where Tank is obviously distraught over the murder. A trio of his
Committee cohorts show up to enlist Tank in their long planned for robbery of some guns and ammo, but Tank is drunk
and doesn't want to participate.
The robbery goes off without Tank's involvement, but in the melée, a guard is shot and killed and ringleader Johnny
(Max Julien) leaves behind his jacket which has a label identifying its owner inside. Meanwhile a slimy informant named
Clarence (Roscoe Lee Browne) is working the angles with the Cleveland police force and thinks he can manipulate Tank
into giving up Johnny's whereabouts. Tank is extremely conflicted over everything and attempts to ingratiate himself
with The Committee to no avail. That sets up the central conflict of
Uptight, where we witness Tank's slow but
steady emotional and mental breakdown as he attempts to fight forces which are clearly beyond his control.
Uptight is a fascinating historical document, one absolutely bristling with "Black Power" anger and a barely
disguised disdain for those who would continue to argue for conciliation in the face of repeated tragedies like the
assassination of Dr. King. Dassin and his co-scenarists Ruby Dee (who has a featured role in the film) and Mayfield
obviously color their framing by giving us several characters who are conflicted about how to respond to the murder of
King and indeed to the continuing oppression of their race, but there's a real and very potent rage in this film that is
incredibly unsettling and must have been downright terrifying to 1968 audiences.
Rather interestingly, I once came across an old
Scholastic magazine from 1968 that was obviously aimed at
middle schoolers and which featured
Uptight as a cover story, replete with talking points and a comparison to
The Informer. This strikes me as absolutely incredible for a couple of reasons. The film is rife with the "n"-word,
which perhaps hadn't yet become the pariah it would, but which is bandied about by the various blacks in the film with
obviously pejorative intent. There's even a brief scene where the guard at the gun warehouse is ogling pinups of
naked women and the distinct implication is that he's pleasuring himself as he focuses his flashlights on the nudes. I
have to wonder how many kids insisted their parents take them to this film after the
Scholastic write up and
who then encountered shocked, even dismayed, reactions from those parents once the film started to unfold.
Jules Dassin's career was a valiant lesson in overcoming adversity and that same subtext informs (no pun intended)
Uptight. The film is amazingly "current" despite its obviously dated setting and in some cases costumes (by
Broadway's legendary Theoni V. Aldredge) and
patois. The film has a couple of sadly ludicrous elements (a
carnival scene with just outlandishly lampooned white people for example) that undercut its overall dramatic intensity,
and some elements of its source novel and film don't translate easily into this new milieu. But
Uptight remains a
startling sociopolitical document of an era when nonviolence was being questioned and the Black Power movement
decided to forcefully take matters into its own hands.
