Here's a preview for a heavily-hyped new "prestige" movie coming out for the holidays. Ignoring the usual annoying mannerisms of modern trailers--that annoying "whoosh" with every other cut, the amped-up sound effects, the fact that it's edited so that it looks like every other movie being advertised these days--try to focus, if you can, on the actual content:
Now here's a trailer for an exploitation favorite from 1973:
That's right--they're the same damn movie!
The ad for American Gangster spends a lot of time laying out the number of Oscar-winning talents involved, and tries to suggest it's somehow "about" something--Race? Poverty? Justice?
Black Caesar, on the other hand, has no pretensions, but possesses a down-and-dirty immediacy a big-budget Hollywood movie couldn't touch. Writer-director Larry Cohen clearly shot this on the fly in real New York locations, without bothering to get permits, so the street scenes have a vibrancy you couldn't possibly get with carefully rehearsed extras.
Obviously, I haven't seen American Gangster, and it may well be perfectly good. (Or, more likely, just okay.) My guess is, it will be remembered as yet another example of Hollywood timidity, huge amounts of money and talent spent redoing something that was already done perfectly well, and getting it all wrong.
