Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970) doesn’t become what you think it will. It begins with a silver spoon-fed 29-year-old, Elgar (Beau Bridges), still living in his parents’ sprawling mansion, deciding that he’s ready to strike out on his own. Uninterested in anything like work, he prefers to start his delayed adultification by buying a home to call his own. Not just any place, but, with an obliviousness bespeaking the extent of his swaddling, an inner-city tenement building in Brooklyn’s ever-gentrifying Park Slope neighborhood. He plans to first take over the slot of the property’s late landlord, then evict everyone living there so that he can live in the gilded house for one he dreams of.
When he first meets his tenants, all Black and working class, Elgar realizes — though not powerfully enough to get him to decisively change his aims — that it’s going to be a lot more difficult to give everyone the boot than he’d thought. That doesn’t come from the way he gets chased out of the neighborhood the first time he sets foot in it, dressed obnoxiously in a white suit and carrying around a decorative pink houseplant. It comes from him liking too many of his tenants too much.
The Landlord puts a particular emphasis on a few of them. There’s Marge (Pearl Bailey), a palm reader who first greets Elgar distrustfully with a cocked gun, then receives him warmly with dinner and a welcoming party she hosts where he’s the guest of honor. There’s hot-tempered Copee (Louis Gossett, Jr.), who’s turned recently to Black nationalism as the animating force of his life after a stint leaning into his Sioux heritage; his onetime Miss Sepia girlfriend, Fanny (Diana Sands), who before becoming a common-law wife dreamed of Hollywood stardom; and their son, who’s humorously first introduced in the movie by successfully getting Elgar to both hand him over $2 and give him a ride home.
Fanny takes on the most central role among her neighbors because, after a little hostility at first, she and Elgar decide that they like each other enough to begin an affair. It will be a disastrous one, though. Fanny gets pregnant, though doesn’t like Elgar enough to start a new life with him. It also complicates the relationship Elgar has been carrying on with a mixed-race dancer who performs at a nearby nightclub (Marki Bey).
Movies with conceits like The Landlord’s have been bastardized enough with time to make us expect trite racial-difference comedy, then redemption for ignorant white characters who had walked into the movie at worst explicitly hostile to the characters of color with whom they’ll spend the rest of the movie and at best thoroughly unconscious of their pains. Elgar is the latter, his family — especially his mother, hilariously played with loudmouth prudishness by a dependably scene-stealing Lee Grant — the former.
But though Elgar will develop some good feelings for the people he’s planning to undermine, there will be no redemption for him. The Landlord’s first few acts make for a perceptive, round-the-clock-funny skewering of the white upper class and how their horrid narcissism and power games bounce off people unable to practice either with the same lack of impunity. Then the movie sobers up a little. Not kindling the consequences we’d been led to believe they would, Elgar’s myopia proves destructive in different ways. The ending, superficially repurposing the hallmarks of a happy one, is a great kiss-off.
When talking about the people behind The Landlord’s making, it’s director Hal Ashby, making a feature debut that would lead to sundry humanist — and influential — dramedies across the next decade, who tends to get brought up first. His work is great; he makes the more farcical and more markedly outré elements of the movie seem not like heightened bursts but like scenes from life no one might otherwise be watching. (A favorite: Grant trying over and over to hit a high note on a song she’s singing for some reason, and badly, while herself visiting Marge, who services her hoity-toity guest with hospitality and ham-hock.) But the real force of the movie is Bill Gunn, whose screenplay dexterously straddles the line between comedy that reaps big laughs and drama that can bring about emotional devastations the big laughs preceding them make more gutting.
Among the most gutting things about The Landlord is the fate befalling Fanny. She might be the film’s best-realized character: a smart, capable woman so used to never getting what she wants that her concluding resignation comes to feel not like her giving her up but, for once, looking out for herself before someone else. Sands is radiant in the part; nothing in The Landlord, a great movie, will as much stay with you as what she says when she describes how she wants her baby raised.
Diana Sands in Georgia, Georgia.
Georgia, Georgia (1972) begins with Sands, resplendent in red, fielding questions from reporters. She plays Georgia, said to be the most popular American singer in Europe, and she’s in an airport in Stockholm, where she’ll be spending the next three days for shows and press. She’s asked about everything from interracial marriage to apparent rival Aretha Franklin. Georgia’s curt responses suggest someone so hardened by celebrity that she’s reached the point where her music and fame seem to bring her nothing but misery.
We will come to understand that that hardening’s genesis is in a long-chronic feeling of needing to pander to white audiences, which has come to make her practically retch at the thought of ever enlarging her Blackness in any sense. Other people in the movie put into stark relief the extent to which Georgia has come to shun her racial identity: the Black expat and Vietnam War veteran (Terry Whitmore) who keeps approaching her naïvely hoping she’ll use her voice to uplift the American Black people who have found sanctuary in Europe; the traveling companion and mother figure, Alberta (Minnie Gentry), who is in contrast proud of her Blackness and increasingly dismayed by Georgia’s snubbing of her own. It will be a bridge too far, to Alberta’s eye, when Georgia falls in love with a white, American photographer and war resister (Dirk Benedict). It’s an embarrassment to Black people from which Georgia will never professionally recover, she thinks.
Georgia, Georgia was written by Maya Angelou — who also provided the movie with its score — and it’s often said to be the first example of a production greenlit based on a script penned by a Black woman. Sands’ sandpapery performance elevates the material: her Georgia’s furor is so ingrained that she hardly needs to say anything to get us to feel it. But Angelou doesn’t explore as much as we’d like the provocations embodied by Georgia and Alberta: the tolls it can take on Black women to, respectively, attempt to assimilate completely into white society and so militantly act in service of what they believe is authentic Blackness that any deviation from it by others ought to be unproductively punished. (The ending of Georgia, Georgia is so shocking that we have barely a moment to process it before the closing credits have started their promenade.)
The thinness of the tricky material is exacerbated by the artlessness of Stig Björkman’s direction. Björkman’s career has been more defined by his film criticism and his documentaries; watching Georgia, Georgia, you can tell how out of his element he is, not just technically — his cameras seem about as interested in what’s going on as indifferent surveillance equipment — but also thematically. This is a movie radiating the sense that the person commissioned to direct had no real understanding of what his movie is about, which may also be why the material comes across as attenuated and stilted as it does. It goes without saying that a stronger director — even Angelou herself, who was allowed no input during production and who would later prove herself a sturdy director in her own right — could transform this movie into something weightier.
Sands’ work is so good that Georgia, Georgia’s ineffectiveness hurts more, not merely because it’s put to use in a movie that doesn’t quite know how to service it properly, but also because she would be dead, in a little more than year, from a rare form of cancer. Sands was such a wonderful actress that you’re left with the sense, watching her movies, of how tragic it was that she was never able to see her full potential through — a feeling Georgia, Georgia also evokes.
Peterson Reviews 