The old guard of the "Golden Age of Hollywood" must have clearly read the writing on the wall that a new and different era was looming on Tinseltown because, right at the start of the oncoming decade, both the greatest (Howard Hawks) and the most honored (William Wyler) of American film-makers decided to call it quits; ironically, while Hawks – a former colleague of Wyler's at the Samuel Goldwyn company who kept making his own kind of old-fashioned film (thus being deservedly deemed an auteur) – bowed out with the enjoyable but slight John Wayne Western vehicle RIO LOBO, the 68-year old Wyler – whose penchant for fluidly cinematic adaptations of prestigious literary properties turned him into virtually the antithesis of that label so beloved by the French critics! – made his exit via a hothouse racial drama. Indeed, following his unprecedented Oscar triumph with BEN-HUR (1959), the director seems to have gained the necessary clout to deal with controversial themes head-on – which he did in the lesbian drama THE CHILDREN'S HOUR (1961; previously filmed by Wyler himself in 1936 as the heavily bowdlerized THESE THREE), the abduction thriller THE COLLECTOR (1965) and THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES itself. Even so, he seemed out-of-his-depth portraying the modern forms of dancing and, ultimately, the strength of the film at hand lies primarily in Robert Surtees' luminous cinematography and Elmer Bernstein's vigorous score rather than for any devastating insight into the racial issues!
The box-office and Oscar success of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) spawned not only two further adventures of black policeman Virgil Tibbs in 1969 and 1971 but a couple of other Southern-set racial dramas: these are the film under review and TICK TICK TICK (also dating from 1970). As already intimated and as was his fashion, Wyler deals with a weighty subject matter but one has to wonder, however, whether he was completely sincere here – given that the film depicts at least two blacks (an eccentric old lady intent on securing for herself a cozy coffin from the titular undertaker, played by Roscoe Lee Browne, and the doddering yet 'fresh' manservant of the community's patriarchal figure, eminent lawyer Lee J. Cobb) in the stereotypical, i.e. politically incorrect, manner one usually associates with the old Hollywood (and which now necessitates that it be put into context via disclaimers when not eliminated or withheld outright)!
A measure of the script's confusion in this respect (but also its thematic complexity) lies in the multi-layered title. While liberation originally referred to the character's divorce application (his much-younger wife, played by future nightclub celebrity Lola Falana, is cheating on him), it can also be attributed to Anthony Zerbe (channeling Marlon Brando as a villainous cop and the lover in the affair) who kills Jones, thus being rid of him. However, there is also the fact that the murder creates an uproar which threatens to bring down the white man's supremacy: though it is all quickly and efficiently hushed, the seams definitely start to show when Lee Majors, Cobb's initially naïve and eager-to-please nephew (here engaged to a young Barbara Hershey), leaves in disgust over the latter's hypocritical leadership and corrupt hold over the town! Incidentally, this dishonesty also exists between the whites themselves: Zerbe does not immediately admit to his interracial relationship (during the course of the film, he not only beats up Jones' wife, impregnated by him, when she decides to fight for her husband's wealth rather than give him a quick concession to the divorce but he actually exerts his authority by raping another black girl in exchange for a reduced sentence for her husband). As for Cobb, he takes Zerbe to task over his shameful behavior when, several years back, he had himself been involved with a colored chambermaid (and which had cost him the companionship of the woman he loved)!
Another subplot concerns Yaphet Kotto, who returns home armed with a gun hidden in a cigar box (an irrelevant but funny scene early on has him quarrelling over the weapon with the blackmailing shopkeeper he had given it for safe-keeping, where the latter ends up buried under various items stirred off the shelves in the hubbub!) in order to exact revenge on the cop – Zerbe's equally seedy partner – who had mistreated him in his youth. Interestingly, he is made to relent when eventually given the opportunity to shoot him but, following his target's involvement in Jones' brutal slaying in a junkyard, he approaches his original plan with even more harshness (the policeman now getting his just desserts – in unintentionally amusing, and surprisingly bloodless, fashion – by way of his own wheat-cropping tractor!). Tellingly, Kotto has recently revealed how Wyler had asked him to cry at this point but the actor refused and stormed off the set1 Other ineffectual authority figures here include warden Chill Wills (yet another comic scene has the latter becoming the brunt of the Chief Of Police's ire, the latter played by Ray Teal, when the black man accused of Jones' murder, forced into signing a confession by being fed repeated charges of electricity, turns out to have been a 'jailbird' already at the time the crime was committed!) and mayor Dub Taylor. For the record, Wyler had earlier depicted the hectic (read: heightened) goings-on inside a police station in one of his best films, namely DETECTIVE STORY (1951).
The box-office and Oscar success of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) spawned not only two further adventures of black policeman Virgil Tibbs in 1969 and 1971 but a couple of other Southern-set racial dramas: these are the film under review and TICK TICK TICK (also dating from 1970). As already intimated and as was his fashion, Wyler deals with a weighty subject matter but one has to wonder, however, whether he was completely sincere here – given that the film depicts at least two blacks (an eccentric old lady intent on securing for herself a cozy coffin from the titular undertaker, played by Roscoe Lee Browne, and the doddering yet 'fresh' manservant of the community's patriarchal figure, eminent lawyer Lee J. Cobb) in the stereotypical, i.e. politically incorrect, manner one usually associates with the old Hollywood (and which now necessitates that it be put into context via disclaimers when not eliminated or withheld outright)!
A measure of the script's confusion in this respect (but also its thematic complexity) lies in the multi-layered title. While liberation originally referred to the character's divorce application (his much-younger wife, played by future nightclub celebrity Lola Falana, is cheating on him), it can also be attributed to Anthony Zerbe (channeling Marlon Brando as a villainous cop and the lover in the affair) who kills Jones, thus being rid of him. However, there is also the fact that the murder creates an uproar which threatens to bring down the white man's supremacy: though it is all quickly and efficiently hushed, the seams definitely start to show when Lee Majors, Cobb's initially naïve and eager-to-please nephew (here engaged to a young Barbara Hershey), leaves in disgust over the latter's hypocritical leadership and corrupt hold over the town! Incidentally, this dishonesty also exists between the whites themselves: Zerbe does not immediately admit to his interracial relationship (during the course of the film, he not only beats up Jones' wife, impregnated by him, when she decides to fight for her husband's wealth rather than give him a quick concession to the divorce but he actually exerts his authority by raping another black girl in exchange for a reduced sentence for her husband). As for Cobb, he takes Zerbe to task over his shameful behavior when, several years back, he had himself been involved with a colored chambermaid (and which had cost him the companionship of the woman he loved)!
Another subplot concerns Yaphet Kotto, who returns home armed with a gun hidden in a cigar box (an irrelevant but funny scene early on has him quarrelling over the weapon with the blackmailing shopkeeper he had given it for safe-keeping, where the latter ends up buried under various items stirred off the shelves in the hubbub!) in order to exact revenge on the cop – Zerbe's equally seedy partner – who had mistreated him in his youth. Interestingly, he is made to relent when eventually given the opportunity to shoot him but, following his target's involvement in Jones' brutal slaying in a junkyard, he approaches his original plan with even more harshness (the policeman now getting his just desserts – in unintentionally amusing, and surprisingly bloodless, fashion – by way of his own wheat-cropping tractor!). Tellingly, Kotto has recently revealed how Wyler had asked him to cry at this point but the actor refused and stormed off the set1 Other ineffectual authority figures here include warden Chill Wills (yet another comic scene has the latter becoming the brunt of the Chief Of Police's ire, the latter played by Ray Teal, when the black man accused of Jones' murder, forced into signing a confession by being fed repeated charges of electricity, turns out to have been a 'jailbird' already at the time the crime was committed!) and mayor Dub Taylor. For the record, Wyler had earlier depicted the hectic (read: heightened) goings-on inside a police station in one of his best films, namely DETECTIVE STORY (1951).