At the Metrograph, July Is All About Actor Yaphet Kotto and the 1970s

“You couldn’t make something like that anymore” is a refrain heard among movie buffs when speaking to how thoroughly contemporary mores have inundated popular culture. The observation has been prompted, at least in part, by the tut-tut-tutting surrounding pictures like “Gone With the Wind,” “The Searchers,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and “Blazing Saddles.” There are few works of art that can escape the withering absolutism of the new moral majority. All the same, this tendency has increased the allure of 1970s American cinema for many cinephiles. We’re all familiar, to one extent or another, with the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system, the far-ranging influence of ’60s counterculture, and the subsequent ascendance of (to poach upon the title of Peter Biskind’s history of the era) easy riders and raging bulls. There’s a headlong quality — a vivifying admixture of possibility and recklessness — that marks pictures as varied as “The Conversation,” “Wanda,” “Two Lane Backdrop,” and “THX 1138” that still resonates today.New Yorkers eager to relive those halcyon days or, depending on one’s age and inclinations, dip their toes into ancient and possibly forbidden waters are recommended to get to the Metrograph for its recurring series “Also Starring…” During the month of July, the focus is on Yaphet Kotto (1939-2021), a proud son of New York City, an actor of stoic depth, and a man who claimed that the Judaism fostered by his African father and West Indian mother saved him from a life of “hatred or violence or drugs or alcohol.” While Kotto’s work extended beyond the 1970s — he had a good seven-year run during the 1990s as Lieutenant Ralph Giardello on the NBC television series “Homicide: Life on the Street” — the films he made during that decade are, in significant ways, emblematic. Kotto earlier had some choice supporting roles, most notably in “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “5 Card Stud” (both 1968), but his stature increased in the 1970s. He was a college educated police reformer in “Across 110th Street” (1972), a Bond villain in “Live and Let Die” (1973), and Pam Grier’s co-equal in the star-studded Blaxploitation flick “Friday Foster” (1975).Bless the Metrograph for not including “Bone” (1972), Larry Cohen’s social satire that set out to unveil the true nature of race relations, bourgeois hypocrisy, and generational friction, only to indulge in the coarsest species of liberalism. Also, the curators knew that any retrospective of Kotto’s career would be incomplete without Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979). The actor counted his role as Dennis Parker, the chief engineer of the ill-fated Nostromo, as but one marker of the advances made by the Civil Rights movement and, as such, a signal accomplishment of his life.Yaphet Kotto in ‘Alien.’ Via the MetrographKotto’s performance as Sam “Smokey” Jones in “Blue Collar” (1978) is, if not necessarily definitive, then something to behold, especially because it was an integral component of a rare synergy amongst actors. Although the putative star of the film is Richard Pryor, its story is really about three men: Smokey, Ezekiel “Zeke”Brown (Pryor) and Jerry Bartowski (Harvey Keitel), all of whom work on the assembly line in an unnamed Detroit auto plant. The picture is sometimes funny, often brutal, and, in the end, despairing in its take on the compromises, some righteous and others ill-considered, that are made in order to get by.Director Paul Schrader — whose recent film, “Master Gardener” (2023), is now available as a streamer — claimed that Kotto, Pryor and Mr. Keitel disliked each other. Their enmity was so intense on the set, or so the story goes, that it resulted in verbal abuse, fisticuffs, and gunplay. Mr. Keitel didn’t appreciate Pryor’s tendency toward improvisation and Pryor went ballistic, so to speak, in reaction to Mr. Schrader’s perfectionism. And so it goes.The thing is, there’s no evidence of discord on the screen; not an iota. The camaraderie between Smokey, Zeke, and Jerry is uncanny in its ease and naturalism. As they muddle their way through work, marriage, robbery, and blackmail, the three men bond over their requisite frustrations and not unreasonable ambitions. When their friendship is tested, our hearts break. Acting, it’s called, and the skill is seen to bracing effect in “Blue Collar.” What’s shocking about the film here in 2023 isn’t its abundance of epithets — Kotto takes peculiar pleasure, it seems, in ornate circumlocutions of foul language — or the casualness with which our heroes prove unheroic with women. What’s shocking is its emphasis on class over race. The latter does figure into key plot points, but Mr. Schrader’s picture imagines a world in which the promise of a common cause supersedes the limitations of identity. That the film’s ending is equivocal by no means tarnishes a fairly complex (and fairly harsh) take on human behavior. “Blue Collar” likely couldn’t be made anymore, but we should applaud that it was made in the first place.

At the Metrograph, July Is All About Actor Yaphet Kotto and the 1970s

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