The Landlord

Certainly one of the Top 10 films of 1970, this ingenious comedy directed by Hal Ashby has never gotten the recognition it so deserves. Beau Bridges in this and Gaily, Gaily showed what a wonderful young actor he was, every bit as good as his brother, but never made that Star leap. Lee Grant (one of the best) is coy and cunning and wonderful as Bridges' mother and Diana Sands is heartbreaking, with excellent work from Lou Gossett and Pearl Bailey.

Great music and a topical plot, you can't help but get involved with this rich young man's "plight". One of Ashby's better films. A high 8 out of 10. Best performance = Lee Grant.

After 33 years things have certainly changed but this film still touches on issues that were very controversial back then and even now some of the events that take place are subject to debate. This story is about a young white entrepreneur named Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) and he buys a New York tenement in a ghetto with plans on having the tenants move out so he can renovate it into his own place to live. He moves in and meets Marge (Pearl Bailey) who tells him about the people that live there and he finds out that many of the tenants owe back rent for several months. Elgar also meets Franny (Diana Sands) and they both seem to like each other but she is in love with Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.) who doesn't like Elgar and is always threatening him. Elgar gets a lot of flack from his parents and his mother Joyce (Lee Grant) who doesn't understand him says she will help him with new curtains. Elgar meets a light skinned black woman named Lanie (Marki Bey) and he falls in love and wants to marry her but Franny shows up at his door one day and tells him that she is pregnant with his child.

This film was directed by the great Hal Ashby who makes his directorial debut after spending many years working as an editor. Ashby had worked on some of Norman Jewison's films and the two had become good friends. Jewison wanted to help Ashby on his first film and he was one of the producers. The script is sharply written and each character is very well detailed so that by the end of the film the viewer has a good understanding of each of them. The script does tackle racism and its look at on both perspectives of whites and blacks. Ashby uses colors to make points like the all white house and white clothing that the Enders have while the run down tenement that is occupied by mainly black residents has mainly gray tones with some of the interior shots having red. Along with the sharp script and direction this film has several very good performances in it. Lee Grant picked up an Oscar Nomination for her funny role as Bridges mother and the scene with her and Pearl Bailey is a classic. Bailey was making a rare film appearance and she would only appear in one more film until her death. Arguably the best performance comes from Sands. She shows so many layers to her character Franny and if a role ever deserved an Oscar Nomination it was this one. She's terrific here and sadly she would pass away from cancer only 4 years later. Bridges was still a very young actor when he was cast and even though he hadn't yet developed into the fine actor that he is today his performance is still sincere. Several up and coming actors appear in small roles like Susan Anspach, Robert Klein, Gloria Hendry, Trish Van Devere and Hector Elizondo. After all the time that has passed this film still comes across as poignant and pertinent.

Gentrification is one of the issues covered in this comedy-drama. The plot also covers post-Civil Rights era feelings, race relations, and class distinctions. Elgar is a clueless 30 year old rich boy who thinks he's going to turn a Harlem tenement into a bachelor pad. The poor and working class African-Americans who live there will not be displaced so easily. There are good performances all around, especially by Lee Grant and the late Diana Sands. Robert Klein has a small role as a party guest at Elgar's parent's house who shows up in blackface.

Hal Ashby's debut film may be somewhat over-directed, but it is one of his best;funny, provocative and pointed. And I prefer it to Bound for Glory,Coming Home,Harold and Maude and Shampoo. The Landlord is Ashby's most audacious film and along with The Last Detail (1973)it's his best. The change in tone is consistent with the main character's developing awareness and involvement with the tenants he had planned to displace in order to convert the building into his private home. Lee Grant is terrific as Bridge's mother and earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actress and no less memorable are Diana Sands, Pearl Bailey, and Louis Gossett Jr. Bridges is winning as the landlord who arrives to make change and winds up being changed and Trish Van Devere is funny in her one scene. The on location shooting, terrific cinematography and surprising dialog keep it real and interesting. Not as well known as it should be.

Movies that deal with race have often been awkward things. One of the biggest problems is they tend to be horribly patronising in tone, many of them looking essentially at how white people can help black people. Most of them were of course written by someone white, which while it doesn't necessarily make it ill-informed, it doesn't tend to help either. The Landlord is one of the few from this era that is based on source material by a black writer (novelist Kristin Hunter). Hunter's novel was adapted by Bill Gunn, who is also black. Of all the pictures I have seen dealing with race in America, it is by far the most confrontational, and really the only of this period that really challenges white social supremacy as well as overt racism.

The late 60s and early 70s was really the age of the odd-looking movie, especially with all the new, young directors that were cropping up. The Landlord was the debut of Hal Ashby, a former editor who had recently won an Oscar for his very fine job on another race-related movie, In the Heat of the Night. Ashby has a somewhat blunt approach, and like most young directors seems to be trying to make his mark with lots of unusual but ultimately pointless camera angles and extremely obvious symbolism. One thing that is very striking is how the scenes at the Enders family home are very white and the scenes at the flat block are very black. This is not done so much with set and costume design, but with lighting, strip-light brightness for the former and gloomy half-light for the latter. In fact the movie might as well be in monochrome for all the actual colour tone there is in it. The black/white metaphor of this is a little heavy-handed but at least it also serves the purpose of highlighting the stark difference in quality of life. What is probably best about Ashby's method here is the distance he puts between camera and subject, often putting a bit of scenery in between us and the action, making us feel like snooping witnesses. He will then suddenly take us by surprise with a close-up as a character delivers some key line of dialogue.

In line with Mr Ashby having been an editor, The Landlord is very much an editor's movie. This was also the age of weird editing pattern, and there is a lot of cutting back-and-forth, mixing various scenes together. Sometimes this is rather effective (for example the powerful montage of schoolchildren towards the end, or the sight-gag inserts of what Lee Grant is imagining when she finds out she will have a black grandchild), but mostly it is just a little distracting, and because it is so mechanical it threatens to alienate the audience from the material. However, shining through the rather ostentatious style are some very fine acting performances (especially from Bridges, Grant and Diana Sands), notable for their realism in spite of the occasionally bizarre situations they are in. And what's more, in amongst this choppy editing is a story which is at turns comical, thought-provoking and gently poignant, which alongside its hard-hitting stance ultimately carries a message of hope and humanity.