SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
The title of William Wyler’s final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, is as ironic as that of his most famous work, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946): L.B. Jones’s only liberation will be in death.
Many critics were taken aback by this extraordinary film when it was released in 1970. ‘Surprising’, ‘ferocious’ and even ‘sickening’ were among the adjectives most frequently employed. Variety dismissed it as ‘an inter-racial sexploitation film’, whereas Andrew Sarris thought it remarkable. Coming so soon after successful liberal films that close on a note of racial harmony, such as In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), the film’s pessimism must have seemed totally unexpected.
Even more surprising was the fact that this unremittingly grim film was made by Hollywood veteran William Wyler, the most honoured of all American directors, but one whose critical reputation had fallen dramatically during the heyday of auteurism. His films were dismissed as cold and impersonal, but L.B. Jones is hot and impassioned. The late, great Robin Wood uncharitably dismissed Wyler’s work as ‘archetypally bourgeois’, but there’s nothing bourgeois about this film’s rage against white supremacists.
L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne) is a wealthy Black undertaker in a small Tennessee town seeking divorce from his young wife, who is having an affair with a white policeman (Anthony Zerbe). When Brown’s wife contests the divorce, the white lawyer (Lee J. Cobb) representing him begins to get cold feet because it means the name of her lover will come out in court, jeopardising race relations and the policeman’s career. The events that follow uncover a procession of sexual and legal hypocrisies and outrages by which Blacks are oppressed by whites in that community. Everything builds to a violent climax involving two murders and mutilations. In both cases, the guilty perpetrator escapes unpunished.
One would expect a Wyler film to be well acted; he had, after all, guided more actors to Oscar-winning performances than any other director. Roscoe Lee Browne, Lee J. Cobb and Anthony Zerbe are the pick of a fine cast, Zerbe in particular excelling as the wretched cop who has a modicum of conscience writhing uncomfortably beneath his surface bigotry. A scene between Zerbe and Brown across a breakfast table, in which the cop tries to pressure the undertaker into dropping the divorce, is an especially fine example of Wyler’s mise en scène: Brown’s stillness reflects the character’s obstinacy, while Zerbe’s nervous pacing and his inability to command the cinematic space eloquently suggest the policeman’s innate weakness.
The most powerful sequence is the ten-minute chase of Jones across a junkyard by two policemen intent on silencing him before he gets to court. I can think of few more desolate and disturbing images in all cinema than the sequence’s final overhead shot of Jones’s murdered body hanging by a hook next to that of a dead dog, which is being called forlornly in the distance by its blind owner, as the two policemen silently survey the result of their night’s work.
In some ways, the film’s most original aspect is its structure. Wyler sets up genre expectations of the liberal Hollywood movie that he then ruthlessly dismantles. Far from revealing a warm humanity under the gruff exterior, Lee J. Cobb’s lawyer becomes more deeply compromised and contemptible in his selective morality. Lee Majors’s young lawyer, seemingly a character likely to rectify wrongs, walks out of the situation with righteous but impotent anger. L.B. Jones refuses to run and his courage leads directly to his brutal murder. A Black youth (Yaphet Kotto) who renounces violence midway through the film returns at the end to exact a vengeance more sadistic than the one originally planned.
In his last interview before his death, Wyler told his daughter Catherine that he had aimed the film at a white audience who he hoped would be embarrassed and enraged by what he depicted. Perhaps he succeeded too well. In the immortal phrase of Wyler’s former employer Sam Goldwyn, the public stayed away in droves. Its picture of a conflicted America might have struck too many raw nerves in a country still reeling over the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, a divisive war in Vietnam – and the departure from the White House of another LBJ.
The film seemed then to fall off the critical map, being displaced by Black American filmmakers with their own visions of the Black experience. To the best of my recollection, it has not been shown on terrestrial television here for over 20 years and has yet to be given a proper DVD release.
As a huge fan of Wyler’s work, I saw the film on its UK release playing as second feature to Irvin Kershner’s adult comedy Loving (another fine, forgotten film that warrants rediscovery). I was with a friend who was so distressed by it that she never stayed for the main feature and never accompanied me to the cinema again. For me its power remains undiminished. In the era of Obama’s America, it surely deserves reclamation as the fiercest indictment of racial prejudice ever to come out of a major Hollywood studio. For cineastes too it might give a fresh perspective on Wyler who, right to the end of his career, was trying out new things and vigorously denouncing injustice. But be prepared to be shocked: it makes To Kill a Mockingbird look like Mary Poppins.
Neil Sinyard, Sight and Sound, January 2011
The Liberation of L.B. Jones
Director: William Wyler
Production Company: The Liberation Company
Producer: A. Ronald Lubin
Production Manager: Russell Saunders
2nd Unit Director: Robert Swink
Assistant Director: Anthony Ray
Screenplay: Stirling Silliphant, Jesse Hill Ford
Based on the novel by: Jesse Hill Ford
Director of Photography: Robert Surtees
2nd Unit Photographer: Jordan Cronenweth
Supervising Editor: Robert Swink
Editor: Carl Kress
Production Designer: Kenneth A. Reid
Set Decorator: Frank Tuttle
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Sound: Jack Solomon, Arthur Piantadosi
Cast
Lee J. Cobb (Oman Hedgepath)
Anthony Zerbe (Willie Joe Worth)
Roscoe Lee Browne (Lord Byron Jones)
Lola Falana (Emma Jones)
Lee Majors (Steve Mundine)
Barbara Hershey (Nella Mundine)
Yaphet Kotto (Sonny Boy Mosby)
Arch Johnson (Stanley Bumpas)
Chill Wills (Mr Ike)
Zara Cully (Mama Lavorn)
Fayard Nicholas (Benny)
Joe Attles (Henry)
Lauren Jones (Erleen)
Dub Taylor (mayor)
Brenda Sykes (Jelly)
Larry D. Mann (grocer)
Ray Teal (chief of police)
Eve McVeagh (Miss Griggs)
Sonora McKeller (Miss Ponsella)
Robert Van Meter (blind man)
Jack Grinnage (driver)
John S. Jackson (suspect)
USA 1970
102 mins
35mm
The screening on Tue 15 Apr will be introduced by season programmer Karina Longworth
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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