Film Review: Drum (1976)

Django Unchained, which I reviewed back in January, is a bad film. Drum, which I caught on Netflix last night, is also a bad film. Both films are about slavery in the Old South but in some significant ways Django stands out as much the worse film. Drum has no pretensions to being anything other than a middling budget exploitation picture. The story revolves around slavery, but what's on sale here are copious amounts of violence and female nudity. The title character, played by boxer Ken Norton with a woodenness that sends splinters shooting off the screen, is a slave raised in a New Orleans whorehouse. His mother Mariana, who is white, owns the bordello, but has never told Drum that he's her son. Drum thinks his mother is Mariana's faithful maid. Drum catches the attention of DeMarigny, a Frenchman who's, well, let's just say he's a triple-coated villain, a man so low he stole his French accent from Pepe Le Pew. DeMarigny wants to use Drum as a fighter against other slaves, but Drum is a reluctant scrapper. After a variety of brawls and murders, Drum must flee New Orleans. Mariana sells him to Hammond, a slave owner who has a plantation on which he does nothing but breed slaves. More nudity and violence ensues, climaxing with a slave rebellion that leaves almost everyone, white and black, dead. Roll credits.

As mentioned, Drum is an exploitation picture and on that basis it earns a blue ribbon. There's nary a scene that doesn't feature sex, violence or nudity. What's rather amazing is that the script manages to pull in all the exploitation elements without interrupting the narrative flow. Everything about Drum is lurid and over-the-top, but the script is a solid, logical piece of writing. The scriptwriter also earns points for the dialogue, which is pulpy to the max and not afraid to sound ridiculous. Some credit also has to go to the cast. Pros like Warren Oates, John Colicos, Yaphet Kotto and Royal Dano tackle their lurid characters with gusto and almost manage to compensate for "actors" like Ken Norton. Lastly, the film deserves credit for an ending that adheres to reality (the blacks are wiped out) and also allows for some ambiguity. Hammond (Warren Oates) is in most respects a thorough villain, but a brief scene earlier in the film involving the beating of a slave shows us that a part of him (a very small part) is conflicted about treating humans as chattel. In the last scene in the film Hammond chooses to let Drum escape rather than gun him down as he would have every reason to do as white slave owner. It's a surprising ending for what's otherwise a pretty conventional film.

The strengths, relatively speaking, of Drum do a good job of highlighting even further the deficiencies of Django Unchaned. Tarantino's script is a mess: uneven in tone, overlong, and stuffed with gratuitous scenes and dialogue. Drum's script isn't going to win any awards, but it's model of efficient storytelling, and when the word "nigger" is used it's done in a natural, honest way. When Tarantino writes "nigger" in his scripts I always get the feeling he does it to prove how naughty he is. An odd thing about Tarantino is that as much as he's a devotee of genre/exploitation pictures, he's also a prude. Quentin is happy to show people being riddled with bullets or saying "nigger" with every breath, but nudity? sex? God forbid! Miscegenation was the primal fear and fantasy of Southern society, but it doesn't exist for Tarantino. The ending of Django stands in stark contrast to that of Drum. In Tarantino's wish-fulfillment fantasy world (see Inglourious Basterds for further evidence) the black hero rides off into the sunset with his white enemies all slain, his girl by his side, and a horse that can dance. Drum runs off into the night with nothing but a look of terror on his face. No prizes for guessing which film is more historically accurate.

I'm not going to say that Drum is a good film, but for the demographic it was intended for it succeeds brilliantly. And if it reminds you in any way of Django Unchained that's because Tarantino seems to have stolen been heavily influenced by elements of Drum. And for optimum viewing pleasure both films should be seen at a drive-in accompanied by your favourite legal/illegal stimulant.

Film Review: Across 110th Street (1972)

I've written about what I call "cop noir" in a previous post on The Seven-Ups, but it's worth repeating in the context of this film: Cop noir begins with The French Connection (1971). If film noir was all about doomed lovers, laconic private detectives, and moody cinematography, cop noir was about documenting the decline and fall of American cities and the institutions that make them function as seen through cop eyes. Cop noir looks raw, sounds raw, and shows big American cities torn apart by street crime, organized crime, drug addiction, poverty, and corruption. Hard on the heels of The French Connection came Dirty Harry, Across 110th Street, Busting, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham 123, Badge 373, The Seven-Ups and a number of similar films.

 Across 110th Street is one of the highlights of the genre. All cop noir films are aggressive in showing just how rotten their urban environments are, but this film does it with real ferocity. One way it does this is by showing the racial fear and hatred that was one of the causes of the decline of American cities in the 1970s. The film begins with three black robbers knocking over a cash counting house run by the Mafia and a black Harlem gangster. They make off with 300k after killing five mobsters and two cops, and within hours the Mafia and the Harlem hoods have joined forces to track down the culprits. They join forces despite the fact that they can't stand each other. Nick, the Mafia lieutenant given the task of finding the thieves, gleefully uses the N-word every chance he gets, and Doc, the Harlem boss, happily responds in kind. The detectives in charge of the case (played by Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn) are almost equally at odds because of race. All in all, this had to be an exceedingly uncomfortable film for both black and white audiences to sit through.

Across also gets marks for being non-judgmental about its villains. The three thieves are shown to be acting out of desperation and fear, and the leader of the gang, Jim, gets a compelling speech in which he describes just what's led him to taking such an enormous risk. Paul Benjamin plays Jim, and it's a wonder his performance didn't lead to bigger and better roles. Not surprisingly, it was Sidney Lumet, a director with an amazing ability to spot new talent, who gave him one of his first roles in The Anderson Tapes (1971). All the cast performs well, and even Anthony Quinn manages to tone down his hamminess a wee bit. The look of the film is another of its strengths; it's almost entirely shot with handheld cameras, and the slums and cop shops most of the action takes place in are so gritty you may need to wipe down your TV screen after viewing. The documentary look in cop noir was pioneered in The French Connection, but Across takes it to the next level.

Cop noir took a dystopian view of American society, and it's a perspective that didn't last out the decade. Through the '80s and '90s cops became one-dimensional superheroes played by Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis and Eddie Murphy. These cops were wisecracking killers, and their enemies were cartoon villains or demonized proles interfering with the safe running of the American Dream. The cops in cop noir movies are sometimes corrupt, and when they solve a case it usually produces a lot of collateral damage, both physical and emotional. This harsh view of American life reflected the reality of the nation's cities, but, as it turned out, the public had a limited appetite for it. In the last decade TV shows like The Wire have partially resurrected cop noir, so here's hoping we get a film revival of the genre sometime soon. Are you listening, Quentin Tarantino?