The Liberation Of L.B. Jones (1970) What a crude, cheap looking little piece of race-ploitation this was to finish out the directing career of William Wyler, one of Hollywood's top-of-the-line, A-list filmmakers of the 40's and 50's.......
Did this really come from the guy who directed "Wuthering Heights", "Roman Holiday", "The Best Years Of Our Lives" and "Ben Hur"?
It's photographed as brightly as a quickie made-for-TV movie, its range of acting goes from overdone ham to barely there and it revels in its horrific depiction of America's racial divide still throbbing like a bleeding wound since the Civil War.
What's even more depressing......the fact that 51 years after this film's release, we've hardly improved, with the ghastly scenes of Trump's January 6th stormtroopers waving confederate flags and hurling the N word at African American Capitol policemen.
Wyler's film plunges into the nightmare landscape of a contemporary Tennessee town where the goon squad police spend all their time tormenting and torturing the black population. (You know something's up when you hear Elmer Bernstein's jazzy score wailing away......)
The most repulsive of these cops, Willie Joe Worth (Anthony Zerbe) has amused himsel carrying on a public affair with the hot-to-trot bombshell wife (Lola Falana) of the black community's gentlemanly beloved funeral director Lord Byron Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne).
Against the strong advice of the town's paterfamilias lawyer Oman Hedgepath (Lee J.Cobb) L.B. makes a courageous, foolhardy stand by suing his wife for divorce.......which would mean publicly exposing Willie Joe to scandal and the end of both his career and marriage.
L.B., refuses to bend to threats and intimidation from Willie Joe and his equally monstrous partner Bumpas (Arch Johnson) which leads to the virtually inevitable consequences (You could consider this movie the darkest flips side of 1967's "In The Heat Of The Night".....in this little Southern hell-on-earth, there's no revelation of mutual respect between the races)
It gets even worse......Cobb's Hedgepath, who throws the N-word around in his casual conversations, arranges a convenient cover-up to spare the town any more embarrassment. And Wyler finishes this depressing, lurid melodrama with one last showstopper......
As precursor to the 'blaxsploitation' genre soon to flourish in the first half of the 1970's, "The Liberation Of L.B. Jones" ushers in that wave with a grisly sequence that features a white man's death at the hands of a revenge fueled black man. (Yaphet Kotto, who a few years later would become the Bond films' one and only black villain in "Live and Let Die").
Anyone looking for traces of William Wyler's distinguished classic filmmaking style won't find it here. The movie looks and sounds like any fast buck journeyman hack could have directed it. As cheapjack and exploitive now as it was in 1970, 'L.B.Jones' remains a grotesque horror movie masquerading as a drama.
And an odd closeout to the filmography of a once revered director. 1 star (*)
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