Director: Hal Ashby/Starring: Beau Bridges, Pearl Bailey, Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett, Jr., Marki Bey, Susan Anspach and Robert Klein
Director Hal Ashby (1929-1988) had a career so brief yet so rich. The main body and best of his work book-ended the 1970s'. An astonishing oeuvre that included films like Shampoo and Coming Home showed us Ashby's brand of biting social commentary while other films like Harold and Maude and Being There reminded us of his sublime, off-the-wall sense of humor. The Landlord, his directorial debut, was a generous serving of both.
The film is significant for its willingness to confront issues of racism the country was only beginning to acknowledge. To give the film historical context, it was released a mere two years after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.
Based on the novel by African-American writer Kristin Hunter, The Landlord has two settings; both crucial to the story it tells. It begins on a sprawling estate in Connecticut, where we see a young man named Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) reclining on a chair on a vast lawn. A black butler approaches to serve him lemonade. The scene, mostly in long shot, effectively communicates everything we need to know about Elgar's life and his unabashed acceptance of its privileges.
In subsequent scenes, we see Elgar driving his VW convertible; overflowing with flowers, en route to the Park Slope tenement area of Brooklyn. When Elgar arrives, he sees the building in which he is to serve as landlord. He is quite naturally greeted, in a mix of hostility and mockery, by the mostly black residents of the building and the neighborhood. In a mildly amusing moment, he runs down the street with flowerpot in hand as a tenement resident gives chase. On his return to the building, he finds neighborhood kids looting his car of sundry items. Upon entering his building, he finds it dark, cavernous, run-down and full of suspicious tenants, who find his presence disconcerting and puzzling.
Elgar meets the matriarchal Marge (Pearl Bailey), who is informed she owes months of back-rent. He meets the sexy Fanny (Diana Sands); who wastes little time flirting him and makes the acquaintance of her kid, who subjects Elgar to various forms of mischief while also coaxing cigarettes out of him. He also meets Fanny's husband Copee (Louis Gossett, Jr.), who forcefully ejects Elgar from their apartment by threatening him with violence.
It doesn't take long for Elgar to make it known he intends to clear the tenement of the residents. He even asks Marge, uncaringly, how long the process might take. In spite of his callous agenda, the tenants remain unintimidated and regard Elgar with a weary patience they've probably reserved for most landlords.
As the film progresses, we see Elgar contend not only with defiant tenants who all owe him back-rent, but his parents, who see his landlording venture as frivolous.
Mingling with his disdain for his parent's anti-tenement attitude is Elgar's shame for living under his parent's roof. During a meal with his family, we see his bigoted father (Walter Brooke); whose intolerance for anyone black is undisguised. We see that his mother (Lee Grant) acts as a diplomatic intermediary between Elgar and her husband but harbors a few bigoted ideas of her own. His dizzy sister Susan (Susan Anspach) is to marry Peter (Robert Klein), who is easily intimidated by his father-in-law-to-be while his brother, William Jr., is little more than the elder Enders' doppelganger in all matters relating to race.
Ashby contrasts Elgar's family's life sharply with life in the tenement. The legendary Gordon Willis, who would become Coppola's cinematographer on The Godfather trilogy and some of Woody Allen's films, assigns light and shade to the respective interiors of the tenements and the Enders' lush home. Nearly every visible space in the tenements are shot in a murky gloom while the Enders' estate and home are never wanting of sunny effulgence.
As time passes, Elgar becomes more sensitive to the culture that surrounds his tenement and neighborhood. He falls in love with a dancer he meets in a Brooklyn night club named Lanie (the lovely Marki Bey); a black woman whose light-skinned complexion enables her to move among the white and black cultures with relative ease but invites resentment among her dancing peers and the Park Slope inhabitants. It is particularly amusing to see Lanie attend Elgar's mother's costume fund-raiser while her blackness goes undetected by his parents.
Elgar's life becomes complicated when he can no longer resist Fanny's coquettish advances. A lovemaking interlude results in a pregnancy that nearly costs him his life when Copee discovers his transgression. Left with a baby Fanny can't and won't raise, Elgar agrees to put him up for adoption until the final shot of the film suggests he will do otherwise. Elgar's impregnation of Fanny serves as a metaphor for the systematic white exploitation of blacks.
Elgar Enders is quite at home as the kind of anti-hero that was to become commonplace in 70s' American cinema. Though he becomes sympathetic to the culture he chooses to live among, leaving Fanny with child shows a less-appealing side to his otherwise reasonable nature. He does atone for his sins in a magnanimous way but his gesture comes at a price; he becomes persona non grata in his building and the community, which prompts his inevitable departure.
I couldn't help but think about how the film makes an unintended statement about the paucity of blacks in cinema. Then, as now, a film featuring black actors that wasn't Black Exploitation Cinema must have seemed rather unusual. It is sad to think how little progress has been made.
As intriguing as Ashby's film is, I don't know that I would include it among his best. But the film is fascinating as a time capsule and shows an emerging, more progressive perspective in cinema.
Ashby's debut was the beginning of a career that was anything but predictable. And it was hardly the last time Ashby would make a film with a sociopolitical statement. Shampoo would be another example of Ashby's ability to address political issues in a highly entertaining way.
I was lucky enough to be able to see The Landlord in a theater recently and am glad I did. To see a film by a director whose career was relatively short and incandescent is quite a treat.
Note: The film isn't available on Netflix but if one is curios enough, a copy can be had via Amazon.
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