BOOMERANG 1992

Reversal of a Dog

Boomerang is one of my all-time favorite romantic comedies. Time has rendered its already-remarkable cast of Black actors a once-in-a-lifetime assemblage, but the film itself is genuinely hilarious and its premise so irresistible, I’m surprised it hasn't been used before (or perhaps it had, only I've failed to come across it).
A callous, commitment-phobic, career-Casanova named Marcus Graham (dashing ad executive Eddie Murphy, ever on the lookout for perfection) suffers an ironic moment of reckoning when, after finally falling in love, he has the tables turned on him. The woman who sweeps him off his feet is Jacqueline Broyer (the elegant Robin Givens), a confident, flattery-immune executive (his new boss, in fact) possessed of effortless self-assurance and plenty of game of her own. A woman who, when it comes to artfully playing the field and displaying a mastery of the game of love-'em-and-leave-'em, proves in every way to be Marcus' match and “dog” doppelgänger.  

Eddie Murphy as Marcus Graham

Robin Givens as Jacqueline Broyer

Halle Berry as Angela "Agatha" Lewis

Grace Jones as Helen Strange (pronounced Strawn-J)

Eartha Kitt as Lady Eloise

I was instantly reminded of just why Boomerang’s premise so intrigued me when, while prepping this essay, my search for a laudatory, non-judgmental, non-pejorative term for the female equivalent of a Casanova or ladies’ man took me through Thesaurus Hell and back; there really isn't one. The appeal of the so-called charming womanizer has always been lost on be, yet the pop-cultural cult of the loveable lothario has left us with countless variations on admiration-laced labels like Romeo, playboy, and roué. But our culture’s rigid gender double standards have made no such allowances for women.
The only terms I came across for a woman who enjoys playing the sexual field are words reflecting the male gaze (i.e., seductress, temptress), your common vulgar epithets, or words that suggest they evolved out of fear of female sexuality (vamp, siren). I guess that leaves only the second-hand, non-partisan “playgirl.” 

Marcus, a serial girl-watcher, gets a taste of what it's like from the other side
when he becomes the objectified, sexualized subject of Jacqueline's dominant gaze

I was too young for the golden age of the romantic comedy. The days of Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck...back when Hays Code censorship necessitated the emphasis on “romance” and chemistry in lieu of demonstrative expressions of sexual attraction. I did, however, grow up in the ‘60s: the era of The Kinsey Report, the sexual revolution, and the heyday of the noxious "swinging playboy" stereotype (think Pal Joey-era Frank Sinatra and his ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack). Goodbye, witty romantic comedies, hello, crass sex farce. A tiresome formula that presupposed men and women as combatants in formulaic Battle of the Sexes roundelays that all seemed to be about fuck-anything-that-moves bachelors out to trick superannuated virgins into bed before said conquest could trick them into marriage. 

Lela Rochon as Christie, a dog-lover who's also susceptible to dogs of the two-legged variety

Come the '70s, the chase-the-secretary-around-the-desk ‘60s womanizer was reimagined as the free-love hippie hedonist (The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart -1970) or the self-appointed soldier on the frontlines of the sexual revolution (Shampoo - 1975). In the '80s, man-boys replaced grown men in the rom-com landscape (Skin Deep -1989), every story now a variation on the arrested development Peter Pan being chased by a finger-wagging, killjoy Wendy. Mid-decade it became clear that the traditional sexual politics of the romantic comedy would have to change to accommodate women's more progressive, evolved gender status. Hollywood met the challenge by eliminating women from the equation entirely: hello, the Bromantic Comedy. 

Yes, those paying attention at the time recognized that the only real rom-coms being made were male-male romances disguised as buddy pictures: e.g., Eddie Murphy’s 48 Hrs (1982) and Lethal Weapon (1987).

Angela: "She's fantastic!  I mean, if I were a guy, I would probably be interested in Jacqueline"

The Good Girl vs Bad Girl Myth

Gender stereotypes mandate that women must always be perceived to be in competition. Angela and Jacqueline are neither rivals nor embodiments of the "good girl vs. bad girl" trope. (Boomerang ascribes no stronger moral failing to Jacqueline's choices than it's also willing to ascribe to Marcus'.) Like the female friends portrayed by Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie in Shampoo, Angela and Jacqueline's dynamic is simply two friends who are after different things from the same man.

The 1990s represented a boom era in Black Cinema. The start of the decade saw the release of films like To Sleep With Anger, Boyz in the Hood, Mo’ Better Blues, New Jack City, and A Rage In Harlem. Films that had me harkening back to the Black Film Explosion of the ‘70s--when, regardless of content or quality, the press insisted on labeling every single film with a Black cast “Blaxploitation.” The '90s boom produced a wide array of films, and amongst the youth-centric comedies and heavy dramas, Boomerang provided some much-needed old-style sophistication, glamour, romance, and escapism.

Geoffrey Holder as "Nasty" Nelson

Originally (and clumsily) titled Playboy Falls into Love, Boomerang came along at just the right time for me. I’d long ago made peace with rom-coms being “all hetero, all the time” (a treaty I’ve since broken), but such egalitarian magnanimity didn’t extend to rom-coms' “all white couples, all the time” view of love. Black couples in romantic comedies were conspicuous by their absence. When Boomerang came along, For Love of Ivy (1968) and Claudine (1974) were the only rom-coms on my favorites list that were about Black couples. And look at how far back we're talking! 

It’s as though Hollywood’s narrow-end-of-the-telescope insistence on filtering everything through a white narrative lens had reduced the entirety of Black experience to stories about race-based trauma. I imagined industry green-lighters found it inconceivable that Black people could laugh, meet cute, fall in love, break up, reconcile, and live happily ever after.

Marcus has a hard time wrapping his mind around the fact that the "model" he has been hitting on is actually the company's new Chief of Marketing. The very job he thought was assured to him after sleeping with the company's figurehead, Lady Eloise (Eartha Kitt)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’ve always felt the title Boomerang only half refers to the karmic reversal Marcus Graham’s love life undergoes in the course of the film. Boomerang is also a fair description of what lies in store for unsuspecting rom-com audiences confronted with the well-worn clichés of the genre subverted along lines of gender, race, and class.

I respond to Boomerang as I do the ‘70s comedies of Mel Brooks—it’s the ensemble contributions of the talented cast that make the film so funny, rather than any particular performance. (Although I could look at an edit reel of Grace Jones’ scenes exclusively and be in heaven. She’s that terrific.)

Martin Lawrence as Tyler, David Alan Grier as Gerard
Lawrence’s relentlessly “woke” character is essentially Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, who saw antisemitism in everything (“No, not ‘did you eat,’ but ‘Jew eat?’ You get it? Jew eat!” )

Mel Brooks breathed new life into classic film genres like the western (Blazing Saddles) and the horror film (Young Frankenstein) by infusing them with a contemporary, scatological comic sensibility. 

The Black Experience is so rarely depicted in movies that all Boomerang had to do to revitalize the romantic comedy was to de-centralize the white gaze. Suddenly, long-familiar situations, characters, and narrative devices felt fresh because of the simple fact then when you change the storyteller, you change the story. Boomerang presented the Black experience as it's lived by those living it, not by how it's seen and interpreted from the outside. It felt liberating to see Black characters humanized, with all the diverse shades of funny, vulnerable, intelligent, ambitious, sensitive, shallow, sexy, outrageous, glamorous...and yes, raunchy. But in a context lacking in response or reaction to the white gaze.

Bebe Drake and the late John Witherspoon are comedy gold as 
Mrs. & Mr. Jackson, Gerard's country-ass parents 

In trying to think of other "give him a taste of his own medicine" comedies, all I was able to come up with were two. Some Like It Hot (1959), in which two skirt-chasing musicians wear skirts themselves and learn what it's like to be on the receiving end of lecherous male advances. And Goodbye Charlie (1964) has a womanizer being shot by a jealous husband, only to come back reincarnated as a woman and having to fend off men like much like his former self. 
Leaving behind such farcical extremes, Boomerang is essentially a sex comedy of manners that has fun skewering traditional gender roles, double standards, and rom-com conventions.

Now the plot gets thick, Mr. Unplayable’s about to catch the short end of the stick. *

Waiting by the Phone

Taken for Granted

Woman on Top 

Seduced and Abandoned

It’s kinda like a boomerang; what you put out comes back to ya, it’s the same old thing. *

       *song "What Comes Around Goes Around" by Kid Sensation - 1995

PERFORMANCES
To anyone who knows me, it should come as no surprise when I assert that for me, the women are the chief attraction and saving graces of Boomerang...especially Grace Jones. It's also rare to see s many women with significant roles in one film. Best of all, they are all so dynamic, charming, funny, and charismatic, they succeed in smoothing out the rough edges attendant with my mixed feelings about the often problematic Eddie Murphy (who, to his credit, in an almost completely reactive role, is actually quite likable here.)

To have Grace Jones, Robin Givens, Halle Berry, Eartha Kitt, Tisha Campbell, and Lena Rochon all in the same movie is some kind of Essence magazine/Ebony Fashion Fair glam wish come true. They're really the film's most valuable players. So good, in fact,  that I found myself wishing the guys would all fade into the background and that Boomerang would morph into a hip update of Valley of the Dolls with Eartha Kitt as Helen Lawson, Halle Berry as Neely, Robin Givens as Anne, and Lena Rochon as Jennifer. Grace Jones could play any role she wanted.

"My role involved taking off my knickers in public, rubbing them in people's faces, chasing the pants off Eddie, and saying the word 'pussy' a lot with an accent that is from nowhere on Earth. ...I have no idea why they thought of me for the role."
Grace Jones being cheeky in her 2015 memoir I'll Never Write My Memoirs

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

On television recently I saw Oscar-winning screen icon Cicely Tyson relate a story about doing promotion for her 1972 film Sounder and having a white member of the press tell her that the film (about a Black family of sharecroppers in 1933 Louisiana) forced him to confront bigotry within himself because he had a hard time accepting the son in the story (Robert Hooks) calling his father (Paul Winfield) “Daddy.”

Yes, a Black character displaying basic, unremarkable humanity was enough to strain credibility for this man. And while I’m certain this story will leave some people feeling all warm and fuzzy because a Black film led a white man to recognize his prejudices, Tyson recognized it for what it was; a sign of the vast chasm existing between the reality of Black life and white culture’s perception of it. The phenomenon is so common it's been given a name--the Racial Empathy Gap, citing the difficulty white audiences often have in relating to Black characters in films. Cicely Tyson went on to say “That’s when I realized I could not afford the luxury of being an actress. There were some issues that I wanted to address. That I would use my career as my platform.”  

Black film - White Gaze Microaggressions
In 1992 this scene in a men's clothing store where a sales clerk assumes Marcus and his friends are unable to afford the merchandise was criticized for being a burlesque of racism. With the proliferation of cell phones, we now know the broadly-played scene was an exercise in subtlety compared to the reality.

And indeed, it has been the eternal legacy of Black artists in film to take up the mantle and use their artistic careers as platforms to combat Black invisibility and present the world with images of dignity to counter generations of racist dehumanization. But as author Toni Morrison so eloquently wrote and spoke about, the constant need to frame Black life in ways understandable, acceptable, and appeasing to white audiences not only seriously restricts the free, authentic expression of Black experience, but in the end only reinforces the false dominance of the white perspective.

Spike Lee's pioneering films broadened the scope of what Black films looked like, paving the way for the Hudlin Brothers' Black business world setting of Boomerang (which in real-life inspired the creation of the Marcus Graham Project - a nonprofit dedicated to inclusion in the fields of advertising and marketing).

Father of the Black Film explosion of the 1970s, legendary filmmaker
Melvin Van Peebles appears as a film editor

One of the things I don’t think Boomerang gets enough credit for is being a Black film that doesn’t center and prioritize whiteness. Unapologetically uninterested in the white gaze, Boomerang is set in a Black corporate world so alien and underrepresented on the screen that it strained credibility for many white viewers at the time (the only way some could process it at all was to convince themselves it was a fantasy). Boomerang is Black representation that's funny, funky, sexy, loving, and outrageous enough to be comfortable in its own skin. It foregoes the traditional crossover concerns of respectability politics, uplift roadmaps, and cultural identification signposts.

Director Reginald Hudlin (l.) and producer Warrington Hudlin appear as a couple
of street hustlers soliciting Marcus outside of the Apollo Theater. 

Based on a story idea by Eddie Murphy, Boomerang's screenplay is credited to SNL alumni and longtime Murphy collaborators Barry Blaustein & David Sheffield. In the 2003 book Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk About the Magic of Cinema by George Alexander, producer Warrington Hudlin called the duo: "Two white writers who are on Hollywood welfare rolls who just keep getting money with no talent." Labeling the original screenplay for Boomerang "worthless," Hudlin credits the film's Black perspective as emanating from Murphy's original story and the widely-encouraged improvisational skills of the cast. 

It was nothing short of exhilarating for me to see myself and people I recognized in the film’s casual intersection of buppies & homies; hip-hop and R &B; urban sophisticates and “country” relatives; women in charge & sex-positivity feminism; Afrocentrism and Dolemite-level raunch.

I saw Boomerang on opening day July, 1^st, 1992 with a friend of mine (now, ex-friend) who found the film profoundly insulting because she felt the absence of white characters in the film was an act of intentional hostility on the part of the filmmakers. Mind you, this was a white friend with whom I’d watched innumerable classic and contemporary movies with all-white casts with nary a peep out of her. Exposure to just ONE film with a prioritized Black gaze was enough to send her off the rails.

Tisha Campbell as Yvonne

Boomerang is killingly funny and ranks high on my absolute favorites chart, but it’s far from being a perfect film. I love how prominently women feature in the narrative and I’ve not one complaint with how they are characterized or depicted in the film (but I say that with the awareness that the almost 30-year-old film is the collaborative work of men, and that as a male myself, I am hardly the last word on the subject). But I personally could do without Eddie Murphy’s incessant need to assert his well-documented—since apologized for—homophobia (Good Lord…the man can’t even let a Frenchman platonically kiss him on the cheek!), and the scenes between Marcus and his buddies grow more cringe-worthy with each passing year (they trigger a lifetime’s memories of having to suffer the toxic masculinity byplay of barbershop talk).

Chris Rock as corporate gossip, Bony T

What lingers with me and what makes me understand how Boomerang has grown into a classic and cult favorite is that it’s a glimmering time capsule of Black culture, highlighting a vast cross-section of amazing Black artists. As a film, it’s a little piece of comic brilliance that shows its age in some respects but largely reveals how ahead of the curve it was in defining its point of view and depicting a side of Black life rarely seen on movie screens. The rare entertainment that succeeds in actually being entertaining, I champion Boomerang for its humor, its heart, its raunchy outrageousness, and especially for its refreshing vision of romance and Black lives lived in a glossy, stylishly old-fashioned Hollywood landscape.

And I Will Give U My Heart

BONUS MATERIAL

With eight weeks in the #1 spot on the R&B charts, the Boomerang soundtrack was a massive hit, with singles flooding the radio airwaves of 1992. To this day my personal fave track remains Grace Jones' "7 Day Weekend," A song that only appears instrumentally in the movie and for which Jones expressed little fondness in her memoirs, citing minimal creative input.

Boomerang introduced me to the magnificent work of African-American artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988). The above piece "Jammin ' at the Savoy" -1980, is featured in the scene where Angela teaches a children's art class.

Boomerang spawned a 2019 spin-off TV series produced by Halle Berry and written by Lena Waithe that ran for two seasons on BET. The show took place in modern-day Atlanta and had the adult daughter of Eddie Murphy & Halle Berry running her own advertising agency while being romantically pursued by the son of Robin Givens' character. The reversal of the premise had Marcus and Angela's daughter as the one afraid of commitment, while Jacqueline's son is the one looking to settle down.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020

A RAGE IN HARLEM 1991

When the lesbian proprietress of a seedy, by-the-hour hotel in Harlem says to a character: “If anybody can raise the dead and make ‘em pay their rent, it’s you,” you don't doubt it for a minute.

Not when the character in question is Imabelle, a voluptuous gangster’s moll from Mississippi with brains, resilience, and a gift for self-preservation. She's also the possessor of $200,000 in stolen gold ore stashed in a trunk at the train station, and, as embodied (accent on body) by the luminous Robin Givens, we know from first sight that Imabelle is a woman who, with very little effort, could and would re-resurrect Jesus for the sole purpose of paying her hotel tab.

Forest Whitaker as Jackson

Robin Givens as Imabelle

Gregory Hines as Goldy /Sherman

Danny Glover as Easy Money

A Rage in Harlem is a Black film noir set in the 1950s. A smolderingly romantic, double-cross crime caper of mortuary-black comedy rich in period detail, vividly-realized off-beat characters, colorful dialogue, and an unnerving propensity to erupt into swift and sudden outbursts of violence. Although I was a bit late in happening upon this gem (a radiant rough diamond) and missed out during its original release, it has become a lasting favorite of mine and is a film I rank as one of the most stylishly entertaining unsung greats of ‘90s cinema.

"If Christ knew what kind of Christians he had up here in Harlem, he'd climb back up on the cross and start over."
Helen Martin as Mrs. Canfield

The feature film directing debut of actor Bill Duke (Car Wash, American Gigolo), A Rage in Harlem is a pitch-perfect, very loose adaptation of the gritty 1957 novel by African-American author Chester Himes. Originally and more aptly titled For Love of Imabelle, A Rage in Harlem is Himes’ first entry in his nine-volume “Harlem Detective” series highlighting the blood-soaked exploits of detectives “Coffin” Ed Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones. Of the three Chester Himes "Harlem Cycle" books adapted to the screen, A Rage in Harlem is the only one to retain the novel’s late-‘50s period setting. In their first screen incarnations, Himes’ hardboiled and consistently brutal detectives were updated as tough-talking defenders of Harlem justice during the Black Power ‘70s in the films Cotton Comes to Harlem - 1970 and Come Back Charleston Blue – 1972, both starring Raymond St. Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge.

Raymond St. Jacques as Coffin Ed Johnson and Godfrey Cambridge as Grave Digger Jones
in Cotton Comes to Harlem 

Stack Pierce as Coffin Ed Johnson and George Wallace as Grave Digger Jones
in A Rage in Harlem

A Rage in Harlem, which could easily be subtitled Gold Comes to Harlem, is set in 1956 and begins in a dilapidated shack in Natchez, Mississippi where a ragtag band of swindlers has pulled off the formidable feat of robbing a gold mine and netting some $200,000 in gold ore…at the cost of a few dead bodies. That the robbers are all Black (Slim, Imabelle, Jodie and Tony) and the victims were white is of no small consequence in the nasty way things play out when a local redneck and his goons decide to renege on their deal to fence the goods for their market value.

But after the smoke clears from the ensuing bloody melee, Imabelle and the gold are nowhere to be found. Managing to escape without learning the fate of her fellow gang members—and not losing any sleep over it—Imabelle hightails it to New York in search of Easy Money. Easy Money being the Harlem crime boss (Danny Glover) capable of turning her trunkful of difficult-to-transport gold into infinitely more cartable cash.

Three Cons and a Pro
Slim (Badja Djola), Imabelle (Givens), Jodie (John Toles-Bey), and Tony (Ron Taylor)

When circumstances beyond her control (namely, Easy Money’s arrest) oblige Imabelle to stick around Harlem longer than anticipated, the penniless purloiner seizes on a plan to nab herself an easy mark who’ll put her up while awaiting Easy Money’s release. Luckily for Imabelle, nowhere in all of Harlem is there to be found a mark easier than Jackson (Forest Whittaker); a roly-poly, devoutly religious mortuary employee so sincere and unsophisticated, he even gets heckled by little old ladies. Imabelle's seduction of the guileless Jackson confirms her as the story's irresistible force (she puts the moves on him at the Annual Undertaker’s Ball while Screamin’ Jay Hawkins performs--appropriately enough--his 1956 hit “I Put a Spell on You”). But it’s Jackson’s unwavering decency and gentle heart that proves to be the immovable object that ultimately comes to melt Imabelle’s implacable heart, if not necessarily her larcenous soul. Something’s gotta give. 

Pious Jackson takes the worldly Imabelle to Church 

And give it does. Almost immediately. Imabelle is haunted by the fear that her former partners in crime are still alive and out for revenge; Easy Money is intent on procuring for himself both the gold and the girl; and the naïve Jackson is stung in a get-rich-quick swindle whose outcome has him resorting to theft and having to secure the assistance of his estranged stepbrother Goldy (Gregory Hines), a Harlem numbers runner and petty con man whose best friend is a street-savvy transgender bordello madam named Big Kathy (Zakes Mokae).

Goldy and Big Kathy watch as Jackson proceeds to make a shambles of their well-plotted sting

Matters aren’t helped by the fact that throughout, Imabelle’s motives and loyalties remain exasperatingly abstruse, or that the law enforcement efforts of detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger have a tendency of making already bad situations much, much worse. This combustible mixture of head-over-heels romance crossed with the passionate impulses inspired by gold, greed, and guns may seem like the traditional stuff of noir and crime fiction; but in a place like Harlem and in the form of a felonious femme fatale like Imabelle, bad has never looked so good.

Devil in a Blue Dress

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

I’m a big fan of film noir, but my fondness for crime fiction and sagas about hardboiled detectives hasn’t exactly extended to the printed page. I’ve read very few detective novels in my time, so I’m certain there are exceptions, but my personal experience of these books has been that while I admire the writing, I tend to be less enthusiastic about the genre-mandated machismo, sadism, and misogyny. Sure, these same elements are present in the film noirs I love, but their severity is softened considerably by Hays Code interference, expressionism, and Linda Darnell. 

Beatrice Winde as the Hotel Clerk 

My aversion to the kind of unfiltered, in-your-face kind of violence I associate with crime novels is why—save for a childhood memory of thumbing through my father’s paperback copy of “Blind Man With a Pistol” to see if there were any dirty parts (published 1969, it’s the last complete book in Himes’ Harlem Detective series)—the sole Chester Himes novel I’ve read to date is “A Rage in Harlem.”  I got a copy of Himes’ book back sometime in the mid-‘90s not long after seeing A Rage in Harlem for the first time on cable TV. Then my mind was still reeling from the film’s snazzy, humorously stylized vision of mid-century Harlem and its Runyonesque denizens, and my curiosity high to find out if the novel pleasures could any way live up to the delights I found in the film. 

Rock and Roll Legend Screamin' Jay Hawkins

What first struck me while reading “A Rage in Harlem” is that it would be difficult to overstate Chester Himes’ brilliance as an author and a storyteller. Even as I found myself dreading turning the page for fear of some graphically-described act of brutality catching me off guard, there was no mistaking that Himes’ characters and way with words (his descriptive dialogue, much of it laugh-out-loud funny, fairly leaps out at you) makes NOT turning the page a complete impossibility.

The second was discovering to what degree the movie adaptation had expanded upon and deviated from the source novel. I was surprised to find that Imabelle doesn’t figure nearly as much in the book as she does in the film. She’s discussed, fetishized, and obsessed about to the point that her presence is felt throughout, but she’s barely a main player in a narrative largely set into motion by her actions. 

Then there was the surprising discovery that the entirety of the novel’s storyline only accounts for about a third of the plot of the film... the middle of it, yet! First-time screenwriters John Toles-Bey & Bobby Crawford (the former appearing in the film as the pocketknife-wielding Jodie) do a seamless job of concocting a more elaborate network of schemes and double-crosses for the film version, embellishing the novel’s plotline to accommodate additional opportunities for action, and (happily) granting Imabelle more agency and prominence in her own story. 

PERFORMANCES 

At the risk of seeming to give short shrift to the uniformly superb performances given by each and every member of A Rage in Harlem’s distinguished, absolutely flawless ensemble cast, my mania for tough women in tight clothes require I rave a bit about Robin Givens. In this her film debut, Robin Givens is both a force of nature and a force to be reckoned with. Giving an assured and witty performance that really should have made her bigger star, Givens makes the most out of every moment she’s onscreen, imbuing her Imabelle (a non-tragic Carmen Jones by way of Lena Horne’s Georgia Brown from Cabin in the Sky) with all the danger and radiance of a bonafide film noir siren.

The City Slicker is the Rube / The Country Bumpkin is the Smoothie
If Robin Givens is the main reason why I watch A Rage in Harlem,
Forest Whitaker is the main reason A Rage in Harlem works at all. 

One of the subtly amusing things about Imabelle is her self-possessed, exaggerated sexiness. I say self-possessed because while she is keenly aware of the effect she has on men, she’s mostly aware that she has that effect on EVERYBODY. She dresses in clothes so tight and confining, they should inhibit her, but she looks so comfortable and relaxed in them, they become a kind of snakeskin armor. Like in that old episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle in which Pottsylvanian villainess Natasha Fatale complains of discomfort and aching feet after briefly having to endure loose clothing and comfortable shoes, Imabelle and her impossibly tight clothes are one and the same. You can’t imagine her wearing anything else.

The versatile Gregory Hines gives a winning comic performance that flows effortlessly into affecting drama

As their roles function in the narrative, Robin Givens is the heat and Forest Whitaker is the heart. His Jackson is almost childishly naive, but Whitaker never plays him as dumb. Jackson's Baby Huey innocence contrasts appealingly with Imabelle's worldliness in a way that recalls the pairing of Stanwyck and Cooper in Ball of Fire (1941). Whitaker's scenes with Givens are dynamic and disarmingly moving. Whitaker somehow is able to convey the depth of Jackson's devotion to Imabelle. It's as though when he looks at her, he's not simply thunderstruck (as we are) by her physical beauty, he sees the dormant goodness in her heart.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS 
In a world that uses the spectacle of Black suffering—via news, social media, and motion pictures—for the dual purpose of tacitly reinforcing a toxic power myth while simultaneously providing Anglo viewers with the most accessible, least authentic means of countering the broader culture of Black dehumanization (pity requires less effort than respect); the depiction of Black death in action and crime films presents a unique dilemma.
American film history gives us an onslaught of images of Black pain that have yet to be offset and counterbalanced by an equal representation of Black joy and triumph (or survival, for that matter). Every violent death of a Black character onscreen, whether it's the filmmaker's intent or not, carries with it a historical, socio-political weight which extends far beyond the film’s aspect ratio.

All racism is violence, and the world Chester Himes depicts in A Rage in Harlem is reflective of and responsive to the harsh, Jim Crow world he inhabited. A world, not all that different from today, where police brutality was the norm and authorities didn’t even consider the killing of a Black man to be murder. When the film version of A Rage in Harlem was released, it received criticism for what was perceived by some to be the softening of the raw intensity of the violence in Himes’ book.

Perhaps this is true (plenty brutal enough for my tastes, the film extracts tension more from the ever-present threat of violence than showing us the real thing), but to take issue with it is to ignore something I’m glad Duke and his artistic collaborators appear to understand very well: that images of Black brutality are far more familiar to Black movie audiences than images of Black romance, humanity, and lovingly-recreated nostalgia for a place that was a home and cultural mecca of art, music, and literature.
Descriptive passages devoted to the destruction of Black lives are powerful enough in a book, but it feels like it would be irresponsible (or require an uncommonly deft hand) to have those violent actions depicted faithfully in the hyperrealist medium of film. Especially in a movie that is essentially comedic in tone.

I love film noir, but classic examples of the genre only offered invisibility for people who looked like me…that, or the opportunity to portray maids, porters, and piano players.
Black life is at the forefront of A Rage in Harlem, with all its absurdity, danger, and spiritedness. It features just enough violence and action to justify its qualification as a crime thriller, but it likes its characters too much to make their suffering just another exhibit added to the ongoing spectacle of Black suffering and death by which so many would have us defined.

Rage: An intense feeling of anger.

To seethe with desire or appetite.

To blow off steam.

A Rage in Harlem

The credit sequence illustrations are attributed to Joe Bachelor.

Copyright © Ken Anderson