Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films

6 “Cussers Last Stan’”: Black Masculinity in The Cool World

 “Cussers Last Stan’” Black Masculinity in e Cool World Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has insisted that documentary films can be as complex as good novels, and, of course, his telling description of his work as “reality fictions” emphasizes the fictional aspects of their aesthetic construction. “My real interest is in trying to make good movies,” he has stated.1 In interviews Wiseman has often spoken of his wish to make a fiction feature using documentary techniques, citing Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) as a model.2 He explains his interest in using documentary techniques in fiction as motivated largely by his view that a documentary “look” invests fiction with greater credibility and social impact, as in the case of Peter Watkins’s films. Indeed, Pontecorvo’s film has often been mistakenly perceived as a documentary because of its style, even though the film begins with credits and the claim that “not one foot of newsreel has been used in this reenactment of the battle of Algiers.” While Wiseman has dabbled in fiction filmmaking throughout his career,3 in 1960, seven years before directing his first documentary, Titicut Follies (1967),|     | CHAPTER  he was already involved in bringing a documentary sensibility to fiction film as producer of The Cool World, directed by Shirley Clarke. Wiseman purchased the film rights to Warren Miller’s 1959 novel of Harlem gang life, The Cool World, for five hundred dollars.4 He invited Clarke, a New York filmmaker he had met as an investor in her previous film, The Connection (1960), to direct it, thinking that he lacked the necessary experience to do so himself. Clarke not only directed the film but also wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Carl Lee, who played Cowboy in both the film and the stage version of Jack Gelber’s play, The Connection. The Cool World was completed in time to be shown at the 1963 Venice Film Festival (along with the official American entry, Martin Ritt’s Hud), where it received generally favorable response as a powerful socially conscious film. Since then, however, the film has been unfairly neglected in histories of black American film, overshadowed by One Potato, Two Potato, Nothing But a Man, and Black Like Me (all 1964), released the following year, although The Cool World’s depiction of black male youth, and its uneasy collaboration between several artists and its resulting heterogeneous style, in fact anticipates aspects of black aesthetic theory by years. The film maintains an uneasy but fascinating relationship to Hollywood cinema in its mixture of narrative and documentary elements. This is in large part a result of its play with the conventions of popular cinema, a technique Wiseman frequently employs in his documentaries.5 In interviews Wiseman has stated his dislike of Hollywood fantasies and the failure of Hollywood movies to confront real social issues.6 Hollywood’s shameful history of racial representation, while by no means the only subject of avoidance, is a perfect example; the images of, for instance, African Americans in mainstream cinema have been a catalog of demeaning stereotypes. After World War II, a few films such as Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust (all 1949) treated African Americans with a new awareness as, in Donald Bogle’s apt phrase, “the problem people.” In these movies, writes Bogle, black characters “had their color stamped indelibly upon them, and they suffered, struggled, bled, yet endured. But as Hollywood had it, they always won their battles.”7 The Cool World, like Miller’s book, attempts to show without the usual sanctimoniousness and sentimentality characteristic of even Hollywood’s more progressive movies about racial difference, some of the problems of contemporary American urban life, particularly that of young men. “Cussers Last Stan’” |   The story concerns fourteen-year-old black youth Duke Custis (Hampton Clanton) and his struggle to survive in the hostile and violent ghetto environment of Harlem one summer. A member of a street gang named the Royal Pythons, Duke assumes leadership of the gang when the previous president, Blood (Clarence Williams), becomes a junky. He begins to establish a relationship with Luanne (Yolanda Rodriquez), a teenage prostitute who has taken up residence in the Pythons’ apartment. Much of the story concerns Duke’s ongoing attempts to raise fifty dollars to buy a gun from Priest (Lee), a local gangster, so that he can make a “rep” for...