If I could have my wish for the Museum of Fine Arts film program, it would be for curator Bo Smith to schedule a few more revivals of classic American films and filmmakers. Boston is indebted to the MFA for its current Frederick Wiseman retrospective (which goes back to 1967); and I remember with fondness a showing several years ago of director Max Ophuls’s films from 1940s Hollywood. Such programs have been the exception; but the MFA takes an adventurous step this Saturday and Sunday, offering a quartet of rarely screened black features from the 1960s and 1970s — Mandingo, Uptown Saturday Night, Dutchman, Cotton Comes to Harlem — for the Boston edition of "The First Annual African American Film Festival."
This mini film fest (www.bostonblackfilm.com) is being brought to the MFA by Boston’s DNA Entertainment, which, spokesperson Sahaul Lord explains, is responding to a local absence of African-American films "with underlying issues — violence, sexuality, etc. — that help us understand historically how we got to today." And though the previously announced Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez will not be present, Saul Williams, the star and co-writer of the Sundance prizewinner Slam, will be at the MFA to talk about why as an actor he’s faced with the same stereotypical roles as ever.
The four films:
Mandingo (1975; Saturday at 5:30 p.m.). An intense guilty pleasure for both black and Caucasian audiences, who swarmed to it at its release, this torrid tale of slaves and slavers in the 1840s South let it all spill out like no movie since 1915’s The Birth of a Nation. However, D.W. Griffith would puke in his sepulcher at seeing what has befallen his stalwart Confederates.
The father-and-son plantation owners of Falconhurst (James Mason, Perry King) are crude, mean, loopy, fornicating, tobacco-road trash. Remember The Birth of a Nation’s virginal sparrow, Lillian Gish, her honor threatened by a rampaging negro? In Mandingo, it’s the white folks who drip with randiness, especially hot-to-trot belle Blanche (Susan George), who, having bedded her brother before her marriage, goes post-ceremony after the plantation’s buffest black man, the "Mandingo" (former heavyweight champ Ken Norton).
Brace yourself for the movie’s notorious miscegenation scene, with the white gal yanking at the slave’s hot pants and peeking . . . there. This is prime softcore stuff: male and female climax individually before the camera climbs high above the bed, revealing his black buttocks between her swan-white legs. A 1975 celebration of interracial coupling? More likely, black audiences took vicarious enjoyment from seeing this decadent white woman brought down, and racist white males got off on the debasement of a pretty blonde slut.
Uptown Saturday Night (1974; Saturday at 8 p.m.). Directed by and starring Sidney Poitier, this PG comedy features little violence and no cursing — even the black criminals (Harry Belafonte is a mob boss) are benign and charming. The story has two regular Joes (Poitier and an oddly bearded Bill Cosby) running around New York City chasing a lost wallet that contains a winning lottery ticket. There are two scenes in a black church; there’s also a middle-class black church picnic. Everyone is nice in this breezy, positive, African-American family flick.
Dutchman (1966; Sunday at 5:30 p.m.). The indie movie from Amiri Baraka’s play in which a polite, suit-wearing black man (Al Freeman, Jr.) is confronted by a flirtatious, mini-skirted white vixen (a fabulous Shirley Knight) in the subway still sizzles. It’s sexy and dangerous, and Baraka’s dialogue is as superb as any on the American stage. The civil-rights movement withers and dies and Black Power arrives fist up in the transition of Baraka’s black man from repression to "kiss my ass, whitey" murderous anger. A great play and a discovery indie movie that, it turns out, was filmed in England by a white director, Anthony Harvey.
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970; Sunday at 7:15 p.m.). A cartoonish, almost amateur film directed awkwardly by Ossie Davis from a lightweight Chester Himes cop novel. The best things are the Harlem settings and the plot’s focus on a charlatan minister who pretends to be the new "Back to Africa" Marcus Garvey. Among the late great African-American cast members: Godfrey Cambridge and Redd Foxx.
