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PREVIOUSLY AT FILM FORUM |
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“THE LANDLORD DESERVES ATTENTION, AND NOT JUST BECAUSE IT’S A TERRIFIC FILM. |
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| "LIKE A MARX BROTHERS MOVIE CHARGED UP ON LSD AND LEFT-WING POLITICS! A compelling and adventurous spectacle, which feels simultaneously like a time capsule and a crucial influence on such recent films as The Royal Tenenbaums and Half Nelson." – Andrew O'Hehir, Salon “RECOMMENDED! An endlessly fascinating entry in the 'Loosen up, whitey' genre of seventies American filmmaking.” – New York magazine “FULL OF SHARP ABSURDIST HUMOR. Hal Ashby’s debut is one of his best. Diana Sands gives probably her finest screen performance... The dialogue is crisp and often quite startling, the picture has originality and depth.” – Pauline Kael “LIKE A BLAXPLOITATION MOVIE MADE BY BUNUEL! An outrageous debut, a film that, 34 years later, still feels daring, both stylistically and politically.” – Darren Hughes, Senses of Cinema “To put it plainly and succinctly as the rent bill, The Landlord is a honey, a wondrously wise, sad and hilarious comedy. Leaves an almost eerie tonic effect of truth and laughter, with some of the sharpest, funniest dialogue in a long time.” – The New York Times “Vibrant! Delightful comic touches combined with perceptive sidelights on black experience.” – Leonard Maltin |
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(1970) “You know what NAACP means, don’t you?” Whiter
than white, richer than rich, callower than callow (“I’m 29!”) Beau
Bridges tells the camera, on the impeccable lawn of his family
compound as the black butler delivers him a drink, that he needs a
home of his own — except his dream house is a tenement in the
way-before-gentrification Park Slope! Think he’ll get the African-American tenants to move out? Think he can even get them to start
paying rent? And bring back those hubcaps! First feature by Hal
Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Being There, Coming Home)
is both a time capsule of 70s cinema — direct-to-the-camera
dialogue, jagged editing, jarring bursts of music on the soundtrack,
echoey on-location sound... and those bellbottoms! — as well as
an edgy (before the term was coined), rope-dancing-on-the-razor’s-edge
dramedy on race in America, with Bridges’ mom, Oscar-nominated
Lee Grant, taking abreak from nurse-maiding the Spinal
Meningitis Ball to get down on pot likker with Pearl Bailey;Diana
Sands painfully making a shocking admission to “Sioux
Indian” hubbie Lou Gossett; Robert Klein’s turn inblackface; and the ‘N’ word, but not said by whom, and
to whom, you might think. With camerawork by the great
Gordon Willis (Klute, All the President’s Men, Annie Hall and all three Godfathers); screenplay by black
actor/writer Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess); and, as the
good-natured jerk rich boy (“I’m a bastard!”), a could-pass-for-18 Beau Bridges, who surprisingly was 29 at
the time. “There’s something really great about it, and it’s a
film that I’d kind of fallen in love with. There’s something unique about the
softness of the colors, about the way you can light things well but they’re
not overly sharp and vivid. There’s just something more human about
them, a more poetic way of capturing reality.” – Alexander Payne.