This film is book-ended by compelling black and white shots of the subway and this gives enhanced context to the main event coming up as soon as our train is seen roaring into the station. Here cinematographer Gerry Turpin makes a good call with the photography because it endows the film DUTCHMAN with an eerie TWILIGHT ZONE quality for its exposition and its resolution. Because of this, I was expecting something not quite real to happen down here in the underground away from the light. It therefore set me up for the encounter between two characters struggling to emerge out of their two-dimensionality into a three dimensional relationship that, like daylight, never dawns upon them.
I cannot stress enough how much this film looks like an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, sort of a companion piece to an episode entitled THE BIG TALL WISH, and on that basis it works for me. I was not expecting Lula as played by Shirley Knight, to be an actual real person, and when she gradually reveals herself as a nightmare version of the American Dream Girl, it seems to befit this dark underground space and sensibility. Al Freeman Jr. also comes across as an African American everyman wearing his suit and tie with a veneer of respectability, while harboring the same fantasies of enjoying a high life free from the restrictions of social conventions as every one else.
The symbolism is heavy handed but delicious fun. Here we have in one corner the White Goddess playing Eve offering the Original Black Man Adam, now newly assimilated into Western society, the forbidden fruit. Yes, it is all quite sophomoric and the sort of thing that makes teenagers giggle, but nobody has to tell me why Clay gives Lula so much free rein before he finally at length gives her the bitch slap she so lustily deserves. She is such an appealing piece of eye candy that when Clay does his little jazz riff as an angry young black man, it all too little too late and not enough to keep him from being a victim of the predatory Lula.
Comparisons between this and David Mamet's OLEANNA eventually come to mind. This, which is little more than an experimental film, reeks with the heat that Spike Lee's film JUNGLE FEVER promised, but to my mind never fully delivered, while OLEANNA, also a play converted into a film, reeks with the kind of sexual repression that ultimately must explode upon itself.
Shirley Knight's Lula is beautiful to look at in a Sports Illustrated sort of way; and as she batters at the decorum of Al Freeman Jr.'s Clay, we sympathize as she takes greater and greater license with him. Al Freeman does not want to lose her company, but one wonders how she would have responded to him had he delivered his tirade at the beginning of the drama rather than the end.
One could almost say this was BASIC INSTINCT all wrapped up and basted in subway racial politics were the characters slightly more than the walking stereotypes they keep taunting each other they are. That probably is the film's basic weakness as was that of the play. The characters tend to revel in their stereotypical dramatizations in a very ritualized way that holds the ideas the writer is trying to express over and above the evolution of the characters themselves.
This is what contributes to that eerie TWILIGHT ZONE feel to the film. This is not a true story between real people, but rather a confrontation between Ideological Representatives riding the same subway train through Hell. Their relationship simmers with the same racist and sexist fever that beckons to us all in the wee dark hours of our mind.
I cannot stress enough how much this film looks like an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, sort of a companion piece to an episode entitled THE BIG TALL WISH, and on that basis it works for me. I was not expecting Lula as played by Shirley Knight, to be an actual real person, and when she gradually reveals herself as a nightmare version of the American Dream Girl, it seems to befit this dark underground space and sensibility. Al Freeman Jr. also comes across as an African American everyman wearing his suit and tie with a veneer of respectability, while harboring the same fantasies of enjoying a high life free from the restrictions of social conventions as every one else.
The symbolism is heavy handed but delicious fun. Here we have in one corner the White Goddess playing Eve offering the Original Black Man Adam, now newly assimilated into Western society, the forbidden fruit. Yes, it is all quite sophomoric and the sort of thing that makes teenagers giggle, but nobody has to tell me why Clay gives Lula so much free rein before he finally at length gives her the bitch slap she so lustily deserves. She is such an appealing piece of eye candy that when Clay does his little jazz riff as an angry young black man, it all too little too late and not enough to keep him from being a victim of the predatory Lula.
Comparisons between this and David Mamet's OLEANNA eventually come to mind. This, which is little more than an experimental film, reeks with the heat that Spike Lee's film JUNGLE FEVER promised, but to my mind never fully delivered, while OLEANNA, also a play converted into a film, reeks with the kind of sexual repression that ultimately must explode upon itself.
Shirley Knight's Lula is beautiful to look at in a Sports Illustrated sort of way; and as she batters at the decorum of Al Freeman Jr.'s Clay, we sympathize as she takes greater and greater license with him. Al Freeman does not want to lose her company, but one wonders how she would have responded to him had he delivered his tirade at the beginning of the drama rather than the end.
One could almost say this was BASIC INSTINCT all wrapped up and basted in subway racial politics were the characters slightly more than the walking stereotypes they keep taunting each other they are. That probably is the film's basic weakness as was that of the play. The characters tend to revel in their stereotypical dramatizations in a very ritualized way that holds the ideas the writer is trying to express over and above the evolution of the characters themselves.
This is what contributes to that eerie TWILIGHT ZONE feel to the film. This is not a true story between real people, but rather a confrontation between Ideological Representatives riding the same subway train through Hell. Their relationship simmers with the same racist and sexist fever that beckons to us all in the wee dark hours of our mind.