Rant #2,718: Ain't No Sunshine

This past Sunday, there was absolutely nothing to watch on TV during the day.

The New York Yankees, who have since won 10 games in a row, had their Sunday game against the Minnesota Twins “hurricaned-out,” in preparation for the coming of Hurricane Henri, so I had no baseball game to watch.
 
The barbecue we had planned to celebrate my son’s 26th birthday was also postponed with the impending hurricane on its way, and we pushed it forward to Saturday.
 
This on paper seemed to be a good move, as Saturday was supposed to be better than Sunday, but it ended up backfiring in a way, because while I was cooking outside, the rains came early, and we had to eat our hot dogs and hamburgers and everything else indoors.
 
So on Sunday, with my area fully prepared tor Henri, he took some type of detour and never fully came to Long Island, although we did get lots of rain—but absolutely no winds—at least where I was.
 
Good for Henri, good for Long Island, and bad for the weather forecasters, who said that the eastern part of the Island would get a direct hit, but these supposed experts completely struck out on their prediction.
 
Anyway, with nothing to watch on TV, I again went to YouTube to find something out of left field to watch, and lo and behold, I found just such a film, a movie that was a relic of a different time and place in our lives and our country’s history.

 
I can only describe the 1970 film “Halls of Anger” as an R-rated “Room 222,” although the movie stands on its own as a time piece of what was going on in our country during the late 1960s and early 1970s … which wasn’t that much different than what is going on right now.
 
The movie, directed by Paul Bogart, stars future “blaxploitation” mainstay Calvin Lockhart as Quincy Davis, a former high-profile Olympics-level basketball player who is a teacher at a mainly white high school.
 
There are problems at another high school in town—a predominantly black school where a group of white kids are being bused in due to some legal wrangling which is never fully explained—and the school board decides that Davis is just the right person they need to make sure that everything goes fine between the black majority and the white minority at the school, so after a lot of coaxing, he takes the job as assistant principal/English teacher.

 
As he makes his entrance, the black kids gravitate towards him at first, as the “conquering hero” in a way, but they later find out that he is as no-nonsense as any teacher should be, and he is here to teach.
 
What he finds is that the black kids can’t read, the white kids excel in academics but can’t compete in sports, and that the black kids take advantage of the white kids at every drop of a hat.
 
There is tremendous tension between the black kids and the white kids, and Davis and some of the other teachers try to diffuse this anger at every turn—the thinking of some of the main perpetrators is that since society treats blacks bad, and with so few white kids in the school, the black kids return the favor and treat the white kids bad.

 
There are fights, one cringe-worthy scene of a couple of black girls raping a white girl to see if she is “blond all over,” and liberal use of the “N-word” by some of the characters, including one white student who I will tell you about later, but it all foments into a riot, and the only person who can quell the anger is Davis, who makes a speech at the end of the film that you could easily be made today to characterize race relations in 2021.
 
Without giving everything away to you, well, you just have to see this movie when you have a chance, for a variety of reasons.
 
First, as a relic of its time … Hollywood was looking for more “real” storylines in its productions, and this one could have been ripped out of the pages of any newspaper back then, although it does borrow liberally from both “To Sir With Love” and, in particular, “Room 222” for its storyline, even featuring several actors who appeared on the latter TV show, including Ta-Tanisha and Janet McLachlan in two of the main female roles.
 
Another reason to watch this film is to see a couple of actors do their business just before they broke through to super-stardom.
 
Among those are Lockhart, who went onto a long career that was fueled by the “blaxploitation” phase that hit big screens from the early to late 1970s; Ed Asner, already a strong character actor, who played one of the apathetic teachers in this film, who just a few months later, would cement himself as “Lou Grant” on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”; Jeff Bridges, son of actor Lloyd Bridges, whose youthful appearance as one of the white students bussed to this school was the stepping stone to a very long Hollywood career; and Rob Reiner, who plays the loudmouth white kid in the film, who just months later would turn “Michael ‘Meathead’ Stivic” into America’s favorite lazy, liberal son-in-law in the groundbreaking “All In the Family” TV series.
 
And when you hear Reiner’s character spout the N-word one time after another in this film, you just know that this young guy was a fine actor, one who could be both a racist in one role and a pacifist in another without blinking an eye.
 
Anyway, when I found the film and started to watch it, I immediately found that the version that I was watching was cut by about 10 minutes from its actual running time, so I tried to find the full film, without much luck.
 
But I went back to YouTube, and I found the film broken up into seven parts of about 15 minutes each, and it was the full film, so I watched the film from those parts one after another.
 
I also learned the back-story of the movie, which was often even more fascinating than the movie itself.
 
Evidently, there was a lot of racial tension on the set, as some of the lead black performers found out that black extras in the film were being paid less than the white extras on the film, and that some of the other actors in the movie had better dressing rooms than they did.
 
There was an internal strike that some of the black performers went on, doing the film and performing their roles, but with much indifference.
 
The unfortunate rape scene that I told you about earlier was not done as intended, and the white actress who was stripped by the black actresses took them to task, for their mishandling of the scene.
 
The white actress stated something to the effect that the way the scene played out made her “look at black people in a different way,” because the scene was not played out as it had been scripted, and it made her even more uncomfortable than she already was doing a rape scene, or something to that effect.
 
All the off-screen tension led this film to pretty much get buried, and when it was shown, it received pretty bad reviews, sans Lockhart, who as an R-rated Pete Dixon, shined through in spite of the tension in the background and the limitations of the film itself.
 
This film is a must-see if you are interested in this time period—during some scenes, it almost transported me back to I.S. 72, the junior high school I went to when I lived in South Jamaica, Queens, during this period of time—and I would highly recommend it.
 
But see it in the seven parts I saw it in, and the first part is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBQZQlCnzaw&t=752s. Just watch this, and the other six parts will be easily accessed.
 
So that is what I did on a boring Sunday afternoon, basically go back 50 years in time and place and discover a movie what I didn’t even know existed.
 
The wonders of the Internet!