How about "What's something a mother should never offer her bare-chested ten-year-old son while she's tucking him in, particularly when there's a bass-heavy funk cue chugging on the soundtrack?"
Thankfully, writer-director Horace Jackson keeps the potentially incestuous action limited to the above-mentioned, which will only come back to haunt the titular character of Johnny Tough when bagging his first piece of ass in, considering the milieu, probably a year or two later and then for the rest of his life. I should add that the proffering of a rubdown actually comes as a relief at the end of a sequence - which might be one continuous shot, though I'm not suggesting Jackson is craftsman enough to pull that off indelibly - that starts with the mother, clad in a slinky bathrobe, playfully chasing her half-naked son out of the bathroom and into his room, where Jackson frames him in the background while having his mother approach him (back to the camera) from the fore as if stalking her lover.
By this point, though, you're pretty certain that Johnny Tough isn't going to veer off the asphault for some harrowing cinematic offroading like other grindhouse movies might, as Jackson's already made it perfectly clear that he's attempting a beat-for-beat, urban... re-staging of The 400 Blows - "attempting" because he doesn't have the filmmaking chops to pull it off, and the ellipses/italic "re-staging" because it's nicer than saying "rip-off", as Jackson fails to cite his inspiration. But let's not be too rough on the guy; judging from his very limited oeuvre, he was a socially conscious producer of message pictures intended to alert African-Americans to the ills afflicting not only the ghetto but the suburbs as well.
And that's one of the more interesting aspects of Johnny Tough: it takes place in Hollywood, not Watts. Granted, Hollywood was considerably more dangerous back in the mid-1970s than it is now, but, despite being more ethnically diverse, it still had plenty in common with the not-exactly-crime-free suburban areas outside of Atlanta, Detroit and Chicago. So we're watching an African-American brood struggle with the kind of filial turmoil seen in such culturally disparate pictures as Rebel Without a Cause, Rocco and His Brothers and... The 400 Blows!
Since Jackson is to Truffaut as a filmmaker as Harmony Korine is to Jack Dempsy as a pugilist, Johnny Tough never leaps up to the level of those classics, but it's not at all disposable either. The children in the film, led by Dion Gossett as Johnny, are unique and completely unpretentious in a way that may not recall the born-performer brilliance of Enzo Staiola in Bicycle Thieves, but nothing that polished has any place in a movie this ragged. It's just nice to see Jackson giving his young actors lots of room to play and just be kids in front of the camera; I especially enjoyed the boy whose every line reading was an excuse to appropriate the kind of laid-back, jive-talking swagger popular on street corners all over the country at the time. I also loved that the white teacher (Rich Holmes, contributing perhaps the seminal portrayal of caucasian stiffness in film history) lets this kid get away with his Jimmy Walker-inspired recitation of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, but shuts down the persecuted, very white, would-be teacher's pet at the first sign of struggle. He doesn't play favorites, this one.
As with The Chinese Mack, the real saving grace of Johnny Tough is its finale, which, in this instance, subverts the iconic freeze-frame last shot of The 400 Blows in a manner that words could never do justice. All I can say is that I want that image on a t-shirt and as the wallpaper on my computer immediately.
I'll get into the other part of last night's L.A. Grindhouse Festival double-feature, Brotherhood of Death (aka Dudley's Dad vs. the Klan), a little later. As a real movie, it's better than Johnny Tough. It also features the funkiest theme music anyone ever scored for the KKK, so you know it's Andrei Rublev good.
He that is of opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.
Posted by: Audrey Amateur | April 28, 2011 at 10:05 AM