Everything, of course, for the heist always goes wrong. However, the trouble isn’t just with Jones’s plan, and the following interest of the police, but also with the little fact that the project’s money man, Mercer (Raymond St. Jacques) has plans of acquiring all the pretty loot for himself. Things probably won’t end too well for anyone involved.
This Gene Corman blaxploitation film directed by Barry Pollack (who didn’t exactly have much of a movie career before or afterwards, it seems) is based on the same novel as John Huston’s flawed classic The Asphalt Jungle but never really plays in the same league. The jury’s out if it’s even trying to, if it just goes for the exploitative thrill of being a blaxploitation version of a revered Old Hollywood classic (which I’d approve of quite a bit, actually), or if somebody involved just thought the novel’s plot the archetypal heist movie story and structure, so why not use it.
In fact, to my eyes, the film’s main problem is that it doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind which of these three things it wants to be, and instead meanders back and forth between these approaches, while adding some comedy cops. Even though I think adding comically stupid white people to an exploitation movie is a time-honoured way to pay back some of the indignities people of colour had to suffer through in the movies, it doesn’t exactly help an already imbalanced film. Lincoln Kilpatrick’s (black) Lt. Knowles is a lot more convincing but the film muddles up his role and character too by only mentioning his corrupt ways in an off-side manner late in the movie when he’s putting pressure on Finian, which to my mind is just sloppy writing.
It’s this sloppiness that is the script’s main problem more often than not, leading to a film that just blithely wanders around the best bits of the movie it remakes (or of the novel it adapts), only from time to time stepping into the right spots, making changes seemingly at random and in spaces where there just isn’t any other way to go about things a few decades later. It would, for example, be too awkward even for Cool Breeze to cast James Watkins as a cowboy, so they go with the in itself rather clever “poor farming country boy with football talent he never truly managed to live up to” variant; too bad the film doesn’t know where to take this, nor how to fit it in with its various other elements.
Despite these major problems, Cool Breeze does have some recommendable aspects, too. The 70s atmosphere is as strong as in any blaxploitation flick, with some choice, naturalistically real feeling locations and the kind of period detail these films generally achieved by just going out and shooting, and don’t mind if you’re allowed to or not. Taken singly, and if you just pretend a movie’s single scenes don’t have to make a whole together, there are also some fine moments in the film. The scene between Knowles and Finian I already mentioned is, for example, tough and unpleasant, suggesting a lot of history between these two men, and telling no friendly lies about what kind of people the men involved are.
It would of course be much better if that scene and others of similar quality would ever add up to a movie with a coherent personality (or you know, a coherent mood, tone, theme, or plot), but then, those movies don’t give us a theme song where Solomon Burke declares someone is looking “like a cool dude”, so there’s something to be said for Cool Breeze’s approach.
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