The No. 1 movie at the box office the last two weeks has been Lean on Me, a film neither better nor worse than your average Hollywood item. The more-or-less true story of no-nonsense New Jersey principal Joe Clark, it is a watchable, bland entertainment. It is worth commenting, however, that Lean on Me is one box-office winner in which virtually all of the major roles are played by black actors, and not one of them is Eddie Murphy.
Not only that, but there are two other movies playing concurrently that also feature predominantly black casts: Tap and the spoof, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. This entirely healthy movement comes at a time when blacks are scandalously under-represented in executive positions in Hollywood, and films about blacks are unfairly categorized (Murphy and Richard Pryor are special cases, Spike Lee is an independent, The Color Purple was a fluke, etc.).
Add The Mighty Quinn to this short list. As it is set on an unnamed Caribbean island, the principal characters are quite naturally black. For this movie, the black cast is simply a fact of life, not a political statement, although the film doesn’t shy away from the prickly relations between the locals and the wealthy white landowners.
The Mighty Quinn, adapted from the novel Finding Maubee by A.H.Z. Carr, is about a murder and a friendship. But it’s a bit difficult to say exactly what this movie is about, because it keeps throwing in unpredictable elements.
Quinn, played by St. Elsewhere regular and Oscar nominee (for Cry Freedom) Denzel Washington, is the island’s police chief. He is an upright, impeccably uniformed contrast to his old childhood friend, Maubee (Robert Townsend), who has become the raggedy Robin Hood figure on the Island. Maubee is a free-living ne’er-do-well who may be in deeper trouble than usual; he’s implicated in the murder of a powerful businessman.
Quinn, who finds and loses Maubee at various times in the story, has other problems, such as his kind-of estranged wife (Sheryl Lee Ralph), who wants to be a singer, the snooty Englishman (James Fox) who wants to cover up the crime, and a peculiar American businessman (M. Emmett Walsh) who takes an inordinate interest in Quinn.
All of this unfolds in a carefree way that sometimes threatens to become as laid-back as the sunny setting itself. Carl Schenkel, a European director who made the trapped-in-an-elevator movie, Out of Order, would seem to be a strange choice for this material, but Schenkel is adept at capturing the colors and the music of the locale (filmed in Jamaica).
Schenkel is happy to let the story digress at any moment, as with Quinn’s bluesy singing before a club full of revelers, or Quinn’s speculation that he’s playing the unsympathetic Elmer Fudd role to Maubee’s lovable Bugs Bunny. Nice movie.
First published in The Herald, March 17, 1989
I just like this film; it pops into my head at random times, and I did finally watch in again in 2016. It has one of my fave Denzel W. performances, Townsend is very appealing, and Sheryl Lee Ralph sings the Dylan song with lyrics that are re-done to humiliate Quinn in public – a marvelous scene. I have a memory that Bob Dylan writes about seeing this movie, maybe in his memoir, but I’ve lost the specifics. The cast includes Mimi Rogers, Art Evans, Esther Rolle, and Keye Luke! It’s a hang-out movie with an exceedingly pleasant feel. The novel came out in 1971, and its author (an economic advisor to FDR along with being a writer) died the same year; the material feels like it should have been made in the 70s somehow, directed by Hal Ashby or something. Hampton Fancher wrote the screenplay. Carl Schenkel went back into doing non-prominent films (I haven’t seen much of his work) and then died at age 55.
WHAT A FEELING! 