jonathan-577 Review of The Bus Is Coming

The Bus Is Coming (1971)

Sympathetic but compromised take on Compton militantcy

[6/10 · 9 November 2008]

I just got caught waay off guard when I looked up Mr. Franklin on IMDb, and learned that he was also assistant camera on "Medium Cool". This suggests a political commitment that shows through here, even if the finer details of analysis and artistry don't fly. This is part of what I take was a wave of 'black panther' movies bridging the 60s underground and "Shaft". Melvin Van Peebles, out in front of this pack, obscures how tentative, even meliorist, the politics of many of these movies could be. The Panthers here, while sympathetic, are also juvenile and deluded. Meanwhile the text talks up 'one racist cop' but he's no scuzzier than his partner, and the brouhaha with the virtuous chief foiling his underling does not read like a transcript from real life! In fact the chat is about as gripping as Mike Albert in full platonic dialogue mode; there are holes in the exposition (buddy recovers from getting shot in the foot very, very fast); and complicating things wildly on the ideology front is a dicty black schoolteacher who is the 'bad cop's' girlfriend and is portrayed as even more loathsome that the bad cop himself...perhaps only because Morgan Jones does work hard to give the cop some nuance. Can I please mention as well that this film has in its inner circle three very beautiful women who also have very visible and unconcealed imperfections - bad cop's gf has a complexion problem, Good Guy's gf has a large and unconcealed scar on her neck, and a third can't act a lick. For some reason, that stuff stayed with me, not the politics - unadorned, like Dreyer's Joan of Arc!