Uptight!
This week the From Below presents the greatest Cleveland film of all time; a film about an informant that so threatened the FBI that actual informants were shuffled into the film crew to surveil the production on behalf of J. Edgar Hoover. This week we’re showing the magnificent *Uptight! *(1968) on Wednesday, June 18th, at 8pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie at 8:10!
We’re also hosting a backyard BBQ potluck on Sunday, June 22nd at 4pm. You can RSVP here to help give us a rough headcount, but do feel free to just pop by. Bring a dish, bring a friend, or come empty-handed; anyway is great as long as you just show up!
Set four days after the assassination Martin Luther King Jr., and shot in a sweaty lighting won from the glow of Cleveland’s neon signs and steel smelters, Uptight! is a dark night of soul action drama adaptation of John Ford’s The Informer (1935). The story tracks the tribulations of a down-and-out militant–the melancholic, alcoholic Tank (Julien Mayfield, more on him later)–as he ponders turning police informant against his former Black revolutionary organization during their preparations to mobilize in the wake of the assassination. Uptight! is a tightly told thriller, a progenitor of blaxploitation, and just an outright incredible artifact of Civil Rights era popular art and politics. You’ll just have to see, but the funhouse mirror sequence is one of the most memorable, striking scenes of any From Below pick to date.
Uptight! is the result of a one-time collaboration between an incredible ensemble of great American communist and activist artists, many of whom began their careers in stage theater and lived much of their lives in exile from the US or enmeshed in the Civil Rights movement. I want to pause on just two in this email.
The first of our figures is our director, master of noir, Jules Dassin. He spent his early adulthood in Communist theater groups before turning to film direction in the 1940s, pumping out noirs (*Naked City, *notably) and romances until his denouncement for his Communist affiliations ground his American production to a halt. Dassin, blacklisted, left for Europe, where he produced the genre-defining jewel heist classic Rififi (1955) and then carried on making rom-coms in Greece, his adoptive country. He returned to the US but just a few to make a couple more films, Uptight! being one of them.
The second figure is our star and co-writer of the film: stage actor, Pan-African communist, and novelist Julien Mayfield. A major figure of the Black Cultural Left of the mid-twentieth century, Mayfield led a remarkable political life. He visited Cuba with Amiri Baraka under personal invitation from Fidel; fundraised money for Robert Williams’ anti-Klan armed self-defense organization the Black Armed Guard; and was employed by Kwame Nkrumah in the socialist Ghanaian state until the CIA coup. Dodging the coup, Mayfield returned to the US to teach at Cornell and then began working on writing Uptight at Dassin’s invitation shortly thereafter. A few short years later Mayfield would leave the US again to join the Ministry of Culture of the post-colonial government of Guyana as it navigated nascent socialist statecraft.
Uptight! is an incredible dramatic achievement by a fantastic ensemble of actors that is not to be missed!
Off the pigs,
Stefan, Charlie, and Stark