One of the reasons B-movie
auteur Larry Cohen’s career is so unique is that he often invested his work
with more social significance than was necessary. After all, the easy path when
making exploitation flicks is simply to concentrate on girls, gore, and
guns—all of which were elements of Cohen’s movies. Yet Cohen regularly
delivered something extra, namely satirical commentary about culture, politics,
and race. Therefore, even if Cohen’s handling of lightning-rod material is
occasionally clumsy or even crude, he deserves lots of credit for endeavoring
to imbue his drive-in pictures with meaning. Cohen’s 1972 movie Bone, for instance, fuses comedic and
dramatic aspects in an offbeat manner. Originally subtitled A Bad Day in Beverly Hills, the movie
begins with a bizarre sequence of a car dealer named Bill (Andrew Duggan)
hallucinating about auto wrecks while acting in a cheesy TV ad. This sets the
tone for Cohen’s exploration of how fantasy and reality collide when the
fairy-tale existence of rich Beverly Hills whites is disrupted by the intrusion
of a black criminal scarred by racism.
Specifically, Bill and his unhappy wife,
Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten), lounge around the pool one afternoon until Bill
discovers a rat stuck in the pool’s drain. Then Bone (Yaphet Kotto), a towering
African-American dressed in ragged clothes, appears from nowhere. Mistaking him
for an exterminator, Bill asks Bone to remove the rat—which he does, by hand.
Turns out the invader was casing the joint for a robbery, so Bill is sent away
from the house to collect cash while Bone holds Bernadette hostage under threat
of rape and murder. After this intense setup, Cohen takes the story in
unexpected directions, presenting not only Bernadette’s Stockholm
Syndrome-style fascination with her tormentor but also Bill’s craven attempts
at maneuvering the situation for maximum advantage. Cohen’s goal, of course, is
to skewer myths: the black man as savage; the suburban white man as heartless
opportunist; the unsatisfied white woman as easy prey for a virile African-American;
and so on.
None of this quite works, simply because Cohen’s attempts at dark
humor result in arch characterizations that are hard to believe, but Bone boldly engages a number of
controversial issues. (Cohen even riffs on horny hippies by way of an odd
sexual interlude between Bill and an eccentric girl played by Jeannie Berlin, known
for her role in the 1972 comedy The
Heartbreak Kid.) And even though Bone
eventually loses narrative focus, it hangs together on a performance level.
Duggan and Van Patten capably incarnate different shades of self-loathing, and
Kotto plays a huge range of qualities—at various times, his character is
cunning, funny, philosophical, and sadistic. FYI, Cohen fans should pay close
attention to the scenes set in Bill’s mansion, since Cohen used his own
palatial Beverly Hills home as a location.
Bone:
FUNKY
Viewed this for the first time last year based on a review elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteCertainly not perfect, quite rough around the edges, but it has a definite something. I think its one of those films that for me sticks in the back of my mind for some time, almost like a vivid dream.
I always enjoy Kotto in his films. He's one of those actors who seems to defy typecasting, whilst still retaining a very strong character. My favourite kotto role is not a movie one 'tho. It was 'Lt. Al Giardello' in Homicide: life on the street. A series I followed from the first episode to last (no mean feat here in the UK where it was screened on a rollercoaster schedule, often in the early hours of the morning) and still consider it perhaps the best TV series ever made in the US cop show format.
Larry cohen I have a love hate relationship with. I would really have loved a Cohen big budget movie. Just the one. Just to see which way it would have gone.