Released in 1972 and now rediscovered, the movie is as ambitious as “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and even weirder.
The tale of a tightly wound Black police officer whose identity crisis leads to an action-packed nervous breakdown, “Top of the Heap” makes a statement — not least in that its writer-director, Christopher St. John, is also the star.
Hardly seen since its initial 1972 release, “Top of the Heap” was rediscovered about a decade ago by the determined programmer of Chicago’s Black Cinema House. Now restored, it’s getting a theatrical run at BAM in Brooklyn.
The movie, which appeared a year after Melvin Van Peebles’s one-man show “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” rocked the world, is nearly as confrontational and no less ambitious. Uptight and disagreeable, St. John’s George Lattimer isn’t a conventional hero; nor, as The Amsterdam News dryly noted in a generally favorable review, “the stuff of which positive images are made.”
George has every problem a white cop would have and many more. Universally suspicious, he is subject to racial epithets by Black drug dealers and roughed up by a white cop only too eager to mistake him for a criminal. His crisis begins when he learns that, after 12 years on the Washington, D.C., police force, he has been passed over for sergeant and his mother in Alabama has died.
“Top of the Heap” devotes considerable time to George’s compensatory fantasies, mainly daydreams of being the first Black astronaut. The New York Times critic Roger Greenspun, who found the movie uneven, wrote that these excesses allowed it to “develop a measure of genuine interest.” If it were an avant-garde film, “Top of the Heap” would be considered a psychodrama, with the artist turning the camera on himself.
As replete with zappy flashbacks as an Alain Resnais production, “Top of the Heap” is stabilized by its fiercely alienated central performance. St. John, an Actors Studio member who had recently played a Black militant onscreen (“Shaft”) and onstage (“No Place to Be Somebody”), intentionally makes no effort to woo the spectator. Consequently the film is stolen by the singer-dancer Paula Kelly.
Identified in the credits as only the Black Chick, Kelly has a comic scene in which she confounds George by setting his complaints to music, and another in which, sheathed in gold lamé, she parodies Tina Turner with the cyclonic spin she puts on the plodding country-western gospel song “Put Your Hand in the Hand.”
Very much of its moment, “Top of the Heap” begins with a hippie-hardhat mud-wrestling riot and ends with a sniper assassination; it was topical enough to snag J.J. Johnson’s first score after “Shaft” and provide a popular Nixon impersonator his movie debut. At one point, George and his nerdy white partner (Leonard Kuras) discuss the possibility of U.F.O.s. George says he would caution the aliens to stay away: “We got Richard Nixon here.”
George’s dreams of escaping Earth are almost a metaphor for the movie — the only commercial feature that St. John would ever make. If this intimation of Afrofuturism suggests that the “Top of the Heap” was a bit ahead of its time, so, too, was its critique of blaxploitation, delivered even before the clichés had hardened.
Top of the Heap
Feb. 18-24 at BAM in Brooklyn; bam.org.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
