Partway through Ossie Davis’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, antagonistic police Captain Bryce sneers that he understands his detectives Gravedigger (Godfrey Cambridge) and Coffin Ed (Raymond St. Jacques) just fine: “Too quick with their fists, too flip with their talk, too fast with their guns. They’re two damn Black maniacs sitting on a powder keg.”
And their names are too awesome! And they get into too many car chases! And their suits are too sharp!
The movie has better lines, but this speech delights me. Bryce’s criticism is a neon sign announcing the film’s attractions. Somebody stop them! They’re doing things the audience wants to see!
And while the gunfights and fisticuffs are solid, it’s the other parts of Bryce’s damn-my-super-cool-employees rant that really pay off. Let’s break those bits down:
Too flip with their talk
Get reprimanded by their red-faced boss, who accuses them of unjustly targeting the one man he thinks is “a credit to their race”? Gravedigger Jones’s answer doesn’t even pretend to truck with servility or go-along-to-get-along appeasement. It’s pure brush-off, acknowledging the futility of engaging with Bryce and his kind at all: “We’ve been trying to teach white folks all our lives. School’s over.” The look on Cambridge’s face in that moment is a masterpiece, too, as an expressive a portrait of being so over this as you can find.
The lead characters’ dialogue is fearless, funny, and often contemptuous—there’s a lot in the movie to invite their contempt, and they get to show it as brazenly as they want without consequences, because it’s a Black movie full of Black victories.
Two damn Black maniacs
Again, it has to be said that Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones are cool. They’re wish fulfillment for smart-mouthed cynics, audiences who don’t trust the idealists and revolutionaries outside the system—the Black Panthers come in for a comic relief kicking that’s one of the rare failed beats—but sure as shit don’t trust the system either.
“What the hell do the attorney general, the State Department, or even the President of the United States know about one goddamn thing that’s going on up here in Harlem?” Coffin Ed seethes. This is their territory, and they’ll manage it as they see fit. Since they can’t always rely on the full support of the law, even though they’re technically a part of it—I don’t think anyone uses the phrase “brother officer” in this, but if they did, both men would laugh them off the screen—they don’t hesitate to work outside it.
And while some of their lawlessness, like smacking witnesses around, is less surprising and badass than making a deal with the mob, all of it is written and performed to the same brief. These guys are rough, effective, and always right. They’re not idealized for the approval of white audiences, they’re blown up larger-than-life for Black cinematic gratification. Their roles aren’t exactly meaty, but they’re dynamic and fun.
Sitting on a powder keg
Best of all, they’re not the only “maniacs” in the film. Cotton Comes to Harlem is an effective, energetic crime film in addition to being a forerunner to blaxploitation. And it’s one of my favorite kinds of crime films: the kind where everybody wants something. This movie’s Harlem is animated by desires and schemes, all of which intersect with what could be a simple hunt for some twice-stolen money. Scorned lovers, enthusiastic hagglers, devious con artists, bludgeoned wives, outraged citizens …. When the inevitable murder frame-up happens, I think my jaw dropped with delight at what a fun, clever complication it was.
And a well-written, well-acted one. With Gravedigger and Coffin Ed providing the movie with its chewy heroic center, the rest of the ensemble can get edgier, funnier, and more tragic. It’s impossible not to like Red Foxx’s open-faced scrounger Uncle Budd, but the real stand-outs for me are two of the antagonists: Deke O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart), a conman reverend selling shares to a “Back to Africa” scheme and pocketing the profits, and his girlfriend Iris (Judy Pace). Gravedigger himself spells out the tragedy of Deke—“Black folks would have followed you anywhere. You could’ve been another Marcus Garvey or even another Malcolm X. But instead you ain’t nothin’ but a pimp with a chickenshit backbone.” He has real charisma, and he can hold a crowd in the palm of his hand, but by the end of the movie, he’s dwindled down a shadow, begging rather than exhorting, futilely pleading with his audience to see him as the man he used to be. Iris, my favorite character in the movie, has more personal aims with more personal resolutions, but that doesn’t mean she’s any less willing to get her hands dirty, or any less inventive in how she does it. You do not want to cross Iris.
This a busy, busy world, and Coffin Ed and Gravedigger take the view that they don’t need to tame it completely, just stop it from getting too out of hand. The situation is a powder keg, but Harlem is a neighborhood, an ecosystem, a home. It’s full of life, and despite their faults, they intend to keep it that way.
Cotton Comes to Harlem is streaming on Tubi, the Criterion Channel, and Amazon Prime.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The X-Files, “Space” and “Fallen Angel”
“Space” is maybe my least favorite episode so far. The only thing I really liked about it was Generoo’s conversations with her fiancé, mediated through Mission Control: there’s a real sense, especially when she’s talking to him about them needing to do some dangerous manual flying, of two people who love each other but are stoics by nature and professionals by training (and surrounded by coworkers, to boot). It means there’s a lot couched in a few words, and Susanna Thompson plays it well.
But aside from that, we’ve got overuse of face-warping special effects, an evocation of a real-life tragedy to lend this bullshit some more weight, an underutilized Scully who seems to leave most of the scientific enthusiasm to Mulder, and adults being shocked, shocked to learn that maybe NASA doesn’t want to advertise every blip and failing. Look, guys, there’s a difference between a complex conspiracy and a press conference saying something went smoothly even though it didn’t. Disapprove of the latter if you want, but you can’t be naive enough to be so aghast about it.
“Fallen Angel” is much better, with Mulder on the hunt for an alien who’s escaped from a crashed UFO, Scully on assignment to bring Mulder back home, and an Air Force colonel corralling everything with an eye towards containment, capture, and destruction of evidence.
Everything here is pretty good–it’s a compelling situation with lots of contrasting agendas–but surprisingly, the highlights for me once again came from the supporting characters. There’s a doctor who has zero patience for all this high-handed interference in his emergency room–even labelling it as fascism–and seconds Scully to work on some badly hurt men; this guy is a badass, and I loved him. Even better is Max Fenig, a ufologist and enthusiastic Mulder fanboy who’s also here to investigate. He could easily have been the butt of the joke, but he has real dignity and presence–I like how quiet and matter-of-fact he is after Mulder finds him having a seizure–and what happens to him is both uncanny (the show always makes good use of eerie white light) and affecting. Episodes have ended with lives as collateral damage before, but losing Max–who’s been through a lot, and who believed in Mulder as a hero–truly hurts.
The last bit with Deep Throat is fantastic, too. Is it a reveal of his true intentions? Is he really just keeping Mulder close for the conspiracy’s own reasons, stringing him along with minor revelations to keep him from getting into–or talking about–anything too damaging? Or is he covering for his own whistleblower status, painting himself as more cynical than he actually is? Right now, it’s hard to say, but Deep Throat potentially playing Mulder wasn’t something I’d considered before, so introducing that idea is great paranoia fuel.
One underrated aspect of X-Files is how it takes its walk-on and episodic characters completely seriously, especially early on before actors thev really caught onto what it means to be on The X-Files. There’s a sense of a big world that Mulder and Scully are passing through, where people have lives and problems outside their utility to Mulder’s paranoia and curiosity.
Yes, this exactly. It’s quickly becoming a standard strength, like the Mulder-Scully rapport, that brightens even in the weaker episodes.
The most interesting thing about Space, which you allude to, is the problem with the space shuttle tiles almost a decade before the real disaster. It’s some spooky foretelling.
Those tiles were always worrisome — I remember news coverage about it as early as Columbia’s very first mission.
Only had time for two early Superman Animated Series episodes, “Fun and Games” with the Toyman and “Stolen Memories” with Brainiac. The former feels like a Batman installment with it’s extremely creepy villain (the show does so much with angles and the mask’s frozen, teethy smile) and creative use of child’s playthings gone horribly wrong, like the Play Doh that’s actually a lethal biogenic agent or the giant rubber ducky. Meanwhile the latter is good sci-fi that also has some horrific implications beyond most standard children’s shows. Fun too to have Luthor less as a villain and more of a neutral badass here. (“Are you standing as a representative of Earth?” “More or less.”) Some interesting beats where the animation under Curt Geda and Jeff Bennett’s performance give Brainiac the tiniest hints of emotion, like the smile that crosses his face or the panic near the end. He’s a robot but one with some agency and ambition. Of course, this makes me think of Musk’s irritation with his AI Grok and how it seemingly sticks to objective facts when people ask it questions. Musk is like a billionaire Toyman, entitled and damaged (“You broke my TOYS!”)
Oh, and Bud Cort rules with the Toyman’s high-key register.
While he his has his own heavy hitters, two of whom you’ve already met, there’s a low key pattern of Batman villains and Batman-style villains like Toyman being colossal threats to Superman on his own show.
Sucks that Brainiac’s never been in a Superman movie, he’s such a good villain too.
Death Valley, episode 4 – the murder this week revolves around a small-town theatre company and inevitably this tempts the Timothy Spall character back into Acting, very definitely with a capital A. This continues to be a solidly likeable good time that I will definitely not think about even once after I’ve finished it.
Justified, Season Two, Episode Three, “I of the Storm”
“I don’t think I ever met a Jew in my life.”
This is a fairly light one with probably the simplest story yet – Dewey Crowe witnesses a drug robbery and everything happens because of that, probably the most Shieldian story so far – but it ends up slightly deeper than it appears. Both Boyd and Raylan are faced with unusual consequences for their actions in that both find people acting on their reputations; Raylan literally in that Dewey imitates what he thinks Raylan would do and Boyd more metaphysically in that someone makes assumptions about the kind of guy he is.
The thing about conflict is that you really do become whatever you’re fighting against in this life; it’s my consistent observation in both the world (‘every accusation is a confession’ would be trite if it didn’t keep being true) and in my own life (in a lot of ways, I’ve become like my mother). But you also transform whoever you’re fighting, and in this case, Dewey is an enemy of Raylan who has tried taking on his tactics and qualities; because he’s dumb, he’s significantly fucked up the execution, though one cannot argue with his immediate results (although it absolutely slays me that it takes Raylan precisely one scene to figure out what happened, and he’s only delayed because of some needless roundabout criminal-speak).
People will, obviously, look to replicate success, and nobody is more likely to replicate the actions that got you there than your enemies simply because nobody is more intimate with them (see all those terrible straight men who keep trying to co-opt progressive language). There’s no better sign that they’ve been owned, but it’s also, you know, incredibly messy and impractical. This is partly what they mean by police creating crime on a systemic level; most people, upon getting humiliated, will try and turn it on somebody and be a cop without having to be a cop.
Dewey is great as this as well, because he sits somewhere between ‘sympathetic’ and ‘pathetic’, where it’s impossible not to see where he’s coming from in spite of his actions being violently stupid and shortsighted; Raylan and Boyd both straight up tell him not to do exactly what he’s planning on doing and he not only thinks he has total control over what he’s doing, but he’s also suspicious of their motives (rightly so) and finds their attempts to control him humiliating and considers disobeying them a moral victory either way. Art once observed the only choices are smart and not smart; which is another way of saying, make a decision based on emotion or make one based on logic, but you can’t have both. Both men immediately recognise they can’t actually control Dewey; Boyd seems to accept it more.
Biggest Laugh: Very close call between Winona spotting Tim at the bar and the shot of him just staring morosely into the distance, and Art’s chain of logic trying tow ork out who Raylan was in a bar with that climaxes in “Did you roofie me, Raylan?”
Top Ownage: I spent the whole episode thinking the best ownage we were gonna see would be Raylan chewing out Dewie – which, come on, fish in a barrel – but then it ends with Boyd dragging his fanboy along in his car, which is fucking brutal.
I think this is also the episode that has one of my favorite “the show pauses to implicitly acknowledge that Timothy Olyphant is incredibly good-looking” moments, right? Where a woman is asked if Raylan is actually the man who robbed her–when it was Dewey pretending to be Raylan–and she takes one incredulous, turned-on look at him: “Lord, no.”
Two things that make that even funnier: it’s Raylan who asks her that, and he’s completely indifferent to her.
I was readying myself to comment about exactly that scene – and then found you got there first! Such a funny bit – there’s also an amused incredulity in her response that tickles me.
Materialists – A slight sophomore slump from Song, the movie shares that film’s earnestness and pauses between lines. Problem is, it isn’t funny. Not just a problem because the movie’s being marketed as a romantic comedy but because it does try and tell jokes on occasion and threatens to turn an occasionally successful romantic drama into a failed comedy. Pedro Pascal can do no wrong these days – he’s the only one able to wring a wry feeling out of his scenes. The other two prongs of the pitchfork, Johnson and Evans, have their charms but neither is superheroic enough to overcome the material that comes at a drip-drip pace. The movie can’t be accused of having too little on its mind though, and for that I’d categorize it as a worthy swing and miss for the summer.
Worthy swing and miss is a good description. Two great little Pascal moments are how he tosses the wedding card placement (the camera neatly following his movement) and his hunch near the end. (I love when characters in movies try to be funny as it’s all too rare whereas people irl often do.) He’s playing a type – bored, frustrated, intrigued rich guy – but he’s never monstrous.
The Brothers Bloom – Con man brothers Mark Ruffalo and Adrian Brody reach a crossroads when Brody wants to quit. Ruffalo has one last con: wealthy recluse Rachel Weisz, who Brody can works his charms on. Naturally, Adrian and Rachel fall in love, and Rachel comes out of her shell a bit more than the brothers wanted. Rian Johnson’s second movie – like all his others written as well as directed by – and while it looks amazing and boasts good performances by Brody, Weisz, and Rinko Kikuchi as the brothers’ nearly silent demolitions expert – Ruffalo is just okay – the story runs out of steam about 2/3rds of the way in, and Johnson trips over himself to be clevel with the schemes, by the end putting a hat on a hat (a metaphor that comes to me because for some reason everyone is wearing hats). Music by Nathan Johnson, cousin Rian’s usual collaborator, with a score that veers from perfect to precious.
Kojak, “Photo Must Credit Joe Paxton” – Kojak is along the edges of this story of a somewhat washed up movie star and the paparazzo whose endless photos of her keep both in the spotlight. Turns out that their seemingly parasitic relationship is really much more symbiotic that either admitted. Too bad that her future brother in law (Andrew Robinson) doesn’t realize her paste jewels aren’t actually worth anything, and his attempt to steal them ruins everything. A weird but enjoyable story that didn’t actually need Kojak much.
I need to revisit Bloom, which I liked quite a bit (Kikuchi essentially being Buster Keaton is great) but is definitely precious, I wonder how it fits into Johnson’s increasingly-not-my-thing vibe now.
I would say in some ways an antecedent to Glass Onion, equally sunny in setting and close to as frothy. (Looper is ever more an outlier.)
Rolling into the current season of Rick and Morty – sublime first ep as Rick puts Morty and Summer in a matrix to teach them a lesson about borrowing phone chargers without permission, and then forgets about them and leaves them in there for the equivalent of 17 years. Both subsequent threads are fantastic, classic Rick and Morty:
1) they come back as teens with the experiences of a lifetime still inside and are both traumatised and refuse to have their memories wiped – emotional and physical fallout ensues
2) the world building of the matrix during flashbacks gets funnier and funnier as the ‘lesson’ of don’t borrow phone chargers is hammered home in dialogue, background design, in-matrix legislation and more (things culminate in a war against ‘Osama Bin Charging’ who hides out in a bunker designed like a power point)
28 Weeks Later — a depiction of Brits and Americans making the dumbest decisions possible, this was written and directed by a Spaniard you say. Extremely stupid people, particularly the awful children Imogen Poots and *checks notes* “Mackintosh Muggleton”? You have to be fucking joking. And the weight toward the kids being important is all the more obnoxious considering how 1. how they fuck everything up and 2. how brutal everything else in the movie is. Lots of pretty great carnage (helicopter!) that can be offset by the shakycam but also enhanced by it. On the other hand, it is insulting how many crocodile tears the movie sheds in its middle section — oh no, they’re shooting civilians! Bloo bloo bloo, they shouldn’t be the in the first place. Also, two women get their faces beaten in and if this is meant to be thematic it is mostly just two women getting their faces beaten in. The movie is most convincing as an argument for the point of view of the great Rhodes in Day of the Dead, and I liked it on that level when it isn’t being dumb as dirt.
Reply button’s up there, man.
I’ve made a real Mackenzie Muggleton of myself here.
Mackintosh Muggleton, man. Somebody lock up his parents.
This is one of those movies that doesn’t show the credits until the end, presumably because the audience would immediately walk out after being informed they’d paid to see “Mackintosh Muggleton” for two hours. I yelled at the screen.
“Mackintosh Muggleton” and “Imogen Gay Poots.”
I love Davis’s direction here. The car chase is dynamic, and he really captures Harlem for the ages.
I don’t know for sure if I read this book – I think I did – or another in the series, but the movie smooths some of the edges. The guys in the book are incredibly violent, and Coffin Ed is ugly as sin thanks to a face scarred by acid. As much as the movie has no trust in The Man, the book is utterly caustic, as it should be.
Agreed, I loved getting the tour of 1970 Harlem.
And I really need to read more Himes. I’ve listened to A Rage in Harlem on audiobook, and it was great, but I should check out more.
Himes is fascinating, his Harlem books were written in Paris by a guy who had spent very little time in the neighborhood in real life – that ecosystem you describe is a big part of the books’ appeal but Himes is largely winging it I believe. And from what I’ve read of the series, while Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones are still badasses there is a harsher sense of limitation in their role as cops and what they can and can’t go after — I think the movie coming a decade or so later gives them more power.
The movie is of course great but even so, that car chase caught me off guard with how energetic it is.
Himes is great, seconding the recommend though I haven’t read this specific one.
I am here for any movie ono both Criterion and Tubi. This sounds like a blast, too!
It’s the perfect streaming service combo.
This was kind of an impulsive pick the night I watched it, and it turned out to be exactly the kind of grabby I needed at the moment, so I feel especially fond of it right now.
That opening shot going through the streets of Harlem is a beautiful time capsule, too.
Yes, I love that!