9: The Cool World

            (Single Digits!) Having scoured the net for years, I was beginning to think that Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1964) was out of my reach.  Then the YouTube gods delivered cinemanna from heaven.  Clarke’s stark portrayal of Harlem street life and the youth culture of gangs in the ghetto is a remarkably entertaining landmark film, and it deserves to be rescued from obscurity.  Not only is it enjoyable, it has snob credit to boot.  As the first independently financed film to be screened at the Venice Film Festival, and the first screen credit for noted documentarian Frederick Wiseman, this movie should be available on DVD at every library in America.  Sadly though, Wiseman (who served as producer on the picture three years before his directorial debut) holds the rights to the film under his Zipporah Films label, and has announced no plans to release it in any home video format (An “educational” VHS copy is available for purchase for $400).  What a pity.

            What viewers are missing is nothing short of the bridge between the French New Wave and Mean Streets (1973).  Duke (Rony Clayton) is a young tuff who’s eager to get his gang, the Pythons, back in the game of running the streets in Harlem.  Their chief rivals for territory are the Wolves, who are mostly anonymous figures in printed jackets.  Duke is sure that he can bring the Pythons back to days of past glory, if only he can acquire a “piece.”  Monologues set to the haunting jazz score of Mal Waldon betray his single-minded obsession as he walks beneath the elevated train and through the basketball courts on every other block.  He’s sure he can get the gun from a smalltime hustler, Priest (Carl lee), who used to run with the Pythons, but he needs fifty dollars to make the purchase.    

            Meanwhile, another member of the gang, Blood (Clarence Williams III, later of Mod Squad fame), secures an apartment, by essentially kicking his father out, for the Pythons to use as their clubhouse.  Shortly after the takeover, Priest pimps out a prostitute for exclusive use by the gang and proposes a system of installments in order for the fifty dollars to be raised.  Tensions with the wolves always seem to be on the rise, as is Duke’s obsession with organizing a rumble where he can employ the gun, but onscreen encounters are few and far between.  Clearly Clarke is implying that it is the boys’ preoccupation with violence, rather than a spirit of retaliation for legitimate territorial offenses, that leads to aggressive criminal acts.

            The decision to focus on Duke, giving the audience access to both his inner monologue and his private conversations with the prostitute (Yolanda Rodríguez), Priest’s lonely alcoholic girlfriend, and a number of other friends, makes the experience of The Cool World not a sweeping statement about gangs or crime, but a deeply personal look at a young man for whom such a lifestyle does not seem out of the ordinary.  His world is full of Priests, as well as guys with names like Angel, Warrior, and Savage.  Is it strange that the gang nicknames seem to balance the religious and the deadly?  In an environment where no earthly authority persists, God and crime seem like the only reality.  Teachers and cops don’t mean a damn thing.  What do they know of the world?

            The film however does not resort to the cliché default that these boys are trapped in an environment beyond their control.  The subway is right there.  A ticket to Brooklyn, to Coney Island and the ocean, where Duke takes the prostitute on a sort of date, isn’t out of reach.  They make the choice to stay in the slums because the challenge of becoming something there, by violent means when necessary, is more appealing than taking the strait way out.  They don’t want to escape the streets, they want to rule them. 

            In a way Shirley Clarke made a similar decision.  She was a talented filmmaker who it is my understanding was courted by Hollywood (a rarity for a woman in the 1960s).  She decided instead to remain true to her independent principles.  Having signed the "Statement for a New American Cinema" in 1961, she went on to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1963 for a portrait of poet Robert Frost.  Though not a documentary, The Cool World feels like a slice of reality, even if you’ve never been to Harlem (which I haven’t).  Clarke wanted to make her films on location and use naturalistic actors and dialogue, something Hollywood wasn’t yet fully embracing in the early 60s.  The Cool World encountered trouble with the New York film censorship authorities, and was never released to a wide audience, but it’s clear that its influence was a ripple effect in filmmaking on the whole.  Within a decade of its release a number of commercially successful films about New York street life would surface.  Unfortunately, this influential film remains largely unseen.

Language: English

Runtime: 105 Minutes

Available @YouTube.com

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off