Monday, April 25, 2016

Top of the Heap (1972)



Top of the Heap represented a big professional leap for actor Christopher St. John, seeing as how he had only four screen credits to his name previously, including a supporting role in Shaft (1971). St. John wrote, produced, directed, and stars in Top of the Heap, but he botches all four of his jobs over the course of the glossy but misguided crime drama. George Lattimore (St. John) is an African-American beat cop in Washington, D.C., who resents that racist superiors prevent him from moving up in the ranks. Meanwhile, civilians and crooks alike regard George as an Uncle Tom, and George’s marriage to Viola (Florence St. Peter) has turned bitter. Had St. John kept things simple with a racially changed character study, he could have made something meaningful. Unfortunately, he overreached. St. John unwisely gave his protagonist a long-suffering mistress, identified only as “Black Chick” (Paula Kelly), and it’s hard to root for a philanderer who abuses both the women in his life. Worse, St. John interspersed the movie with bizarre dream sequences, mostly showcasing two recurring tropes—in one, George imagines that he’s an astronaut, and in the other, George imagines that he’s a naked savage running through a jungle. (The jungle scenes climax with an eroticized vignette of George and a woman slathering each other with pieces of watermelon, after which George inexplicably yells, “Jambalaya!”) The hallucinations give Top of the Heap an incoherent quality, but even the dramatic scenes are confusing, as when George, in uniform, scares a vituperative cab driver (cameo player Allen Garfield) nearly to death. By the time the movie’s pointless bummer ending rolls around, it seems like unreasoning rage, rather than righteous indignation about racism, is the protagonist’s real problem. Not exactly, one presumes, the point the filmmaker wanted to make.

Top of the Heap: LAME

3 comments:

greg6363 said...

Civilians and crooks......as opposed to civilians and cooks.

Tommy Ross said...

"he botches all four of his jobs" - Lmao!

squeak said...

Actually, Top of the Heap is pretty good, and the fact that its narrative shifts to these surreal dreams the main character has which express his frustrations and need to be free of problems in his life made it even more interesting for me to watch. That being said, the main character is clearly frustrated with his life, and is looking for a change, but instead of getting some therapy, or trying to find some actual solutions to his problems, he neglects his marriage and family and act like a complete selfish bastard by taking his frustrations out on anybody around him. He's also a cheater, but even that dosen't seem to make him happy, Actress/dancer Paula Kelly does manage to stand out in what could have been a thankless one-not role as his mistress. The ending is pretty downbeat, but that's typical of most of '70s cinema.

I read that the reason the film didn't go anywhere is that St. John, the writer/director, said that because the film wasn't anything like your usual blaxploitation film at that time, it was hard for him to find a studio that would pick it up for distribution, because of how offbeat and unconventional it was. He pretty much left the film business after that, and only did one other film---a documentary about a cult he and his family lived in for awhile---but it took him over a decade to complete it. His son, Kristoff St. John, started acting as a child, and made a name for himself in TV shows and soap operas. Top of the Heap, despite its flaws, and having a main character who's a selfish dick, is a pretty compelling flick----one of those "it couldn't have been made in any decade but the '70s" kinds of films.