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"Boy, you gotta mind how you walk." Sad-sacks and troublemakers in South Central Los Angeles, where as the song goes everyone is either too young or too old. ("Acting your age" is an ongoing concern.) The local worker (Everett Silas) is amiably aimless, brimming with quiet anger yet content to linger in the dry-cleaning family business. Mom (Jessie Holmes) is pious but can stare down a robbery ("If you got something to do, don't keep waiting," she snaps at the jittery ruffians), Pop (Dennis Kemper) is rheumatic but can put his son in a headlock in impromptu tussles. The main event is the brother's (Monte Easter) wedding to the upper-class prig (Gayle-Shannon Burnett), on the other hand is the return of the hell-raising chum (Ronnie Bell). Cain and Abel and It's a Wonderful Life pass through the gentle Charles Burnett impressionism, a mighty yoke lightly carried for the dispelling of "a very romantic view of the have-nots." The neighborhood portrait is pieced patiently, warmly: The little tyke dozing on the counter, the precocious lass already planning prom night, the action sequence curtailed by an uncooperative revolver. An earful of Johnny Ace for the romantic distraction (girlfriend in a blue dress framed in the doorway, dissolve to laundry on a chain-link fence), Psalm 26 for the rascal's fate (leafy road under the sun, ambulance flares in the dark). Communal and generational fissures (the cup from Killer of Sheep is here cracked), Pop's recommendation for the new generation is a day or two in a Mississippi cotton field. "Judge me, O Lord..." Life to Burnett ineffably sad and comic, like the protagonist rushing when not at a standstill, helplessly suspended between best man and pallbearer. With Sally Easter, Angela Burnett, Frances E. Nealy, and Sy Richardson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |