The rarely screened 1970 movie from legendary director William Wyler encapsulates Hollywood liberalism and guilt.
Film Forum’s four-week series Sidney Poitier & His Trailblazing Contemporaries features Roscoe Lee Browne, Yaphet Kotto, and Lola Falana scorching Hollywood’s landscape in The Liberation of L.B. Jones, the last film by master director William Wyler. It’s a revelatory example of how post-Sixties Hollywood liberalism evolved.
Rarely screened and never critically discussed — because it was an embarrassing box-office flop — The Liberation of L.B. Jones is a Pandora’s box of the industry’s contradictions. Set in Tennessee, typical for Hollywood parables about racism that seldom takes place in the North, the story deliberately sought controversy: Defiant black undertaker Jones (Browne) hires a self-righteous white attorney Oman Hedgepath (Lee J. Cobb) to represent him in a public divorce from his self-hating flibbertigibbet wife (Falana), who cheats on him with a brutal, pathetic white cop (Anthony Zerbe).
Many Hollywood attitudes clash here: The primal setting uses a denigrated marital bedroom as an ideological battlefield. Its terror reverberates concerns over racial protests and urban riots and the shame of the Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy assassinations, none of which were fully assuaged after the success of Sidney Poitier’s In the Heat of the Night. That film’s Oscar-winning screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, wrote the L.B. Jones script (based on Jesse Hill Ford’s novel) as a similar formulaic fable, but he heightened the tense relationship between the black and white protagonists. (“To hell with the white man!” Jones says. “Here’s what comes from practicing n***** law,” Hedgepath laments.) Less optimistic than the Poitier landmark, The Liberation of L.B. Jones anticipates the emotional turbulence that would inevitably define the burgeoning Blaxploitation movement — whether its crime-film allegories or the Melvin Van Peebles and William Gunn art-movie protests.
The Liberation of L.B. Jones was so jolting that even New York Times critic Vincent Canby declared, “When William Wyler makes such a vivid, melodramatic rationale for the collapse of race relations . . . you had better believe that something is happening in this land. Political polarization has, at last, become the kind of reality in which Hollywood can invest several million dollars as a source for popular entertainment.” (Most reviewers at the time lacked the courage to deal with it.) Although shocking, such entertainment was not entirely new. Compare it with Wyler’s The Letter (1940), based on Somerset Maugham’s adulterous melodrama about white colonialism in the tropics — one of the first Hollywood films to confront racism but without the ability to name it.
That we can now name racism measures Hollywood’s changed sensibility from Wyler’s unexpectedly pessimistic old-liberal regret to today’s accusatory, hyper-liberal exploitation. Contrast the difference between Browne and Kotto’s quiet, transformative anger as Poitier’s contemporaries (only partially articulated in Silliphant’s script) and the cheesy self-righteousness of Hollywood’s contemporary black standard-bearers Denzel Washington, David Oyelowo, Daniel Kaluuya, and LaKeith Stanfield, who never display Browne’s dignity, let alone Kotto’s power.
Artifact of a distant political world, The Liberation of L.B. Jones shows a different Hollywood trying to resolve and clean up the prejudices hidden inside liberal guilt. When Zerbe’s bad cop confesses his racialized lust (“I began to see Cassie as a woman, a human being”), the hidden subject is exposed: miscegenation, with all its implications. As in The Letter, Wyler acknowledges how racism reveals itself in society. “Cohabitation between white and colored is dynamite,” Hedgepath warns. The film’s sensationalized set pieces between Zerbe and Falana harken back to the most incendiary moments of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life — the violent mix of sex and sadism is both titillating and appalling yet more conceptually honest than anything in Get Out.
Through scathing sexual allusions, Wyler forces us to look at the ugliness of racism. Though never finding the profound intellectual and spiritual level of the pain-then-forgiveness that climaxes David Lean’s Passage to India, The Liberation of L.B. Jones uses Hollywood irony. “Liberation” refers to the execution of Jones; the black undertaker who prepares clients for death makes his own transition out of misery. It also refers to classical Hollywood’s shamed, half-recognition of lynching, from Fury (1936) and Black Legion (1937) to The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Only the brilliant Richard Fleischer–Norman Wexler Mandingo in 1975 would expiate that consciousness.
Bette Davis once praised three-time Oscar winner Wyler as “the best damn director this town ever had,” referring to the legacy that includes Dodsworth, Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur. Creating evidence of black and white trauma in his swan song, Wyler confessed the guilt-ridden liberal’s self-pitying means of penance. In that sense, Hollywood has not evolved.
*** The Liberation of L.B. Jones plays April 28 at Film Forum, in New York City, as part of its series Sidney Poitier & His Trailblazing Contemporaries.
