The Liberation of L.B. Jones

Plot synopsis:
Steve and Nella Mundine arrive in Somerton, Tennessee, where Steve is to join the law firm of uncle Oman Hedgepath. Arriving on the same train is Sonny Boy Mosby, a young black man bent on avenging a childhood beating inflicted by white policeman Stanley Bumpas. Hedgepath is persuaded by Steve to accept the divorce suit of Lord Byron Jones, a wealthy black undertaker. Although Jones has named white policeman Willie Joe Worth as corespondent, his wife Emma contest the suit, hoping to receive a settlement sufficent to meet the needs of the child she has pregnant by Worth. Jones wants an uncontested divorce, but Emma won't give it to him; nor will she give up her lover. She likes playing a mistress. Hedgepath would rather not practice what he calls "nigger law", especially since contested divorce involving a white co-respondent would cause an uproar. When he informs the officer of the suit, he is alarmed; he pressures Worth to "fix things"; drop his affair with Jones's wife and get her to agree to an uncontested divorce, otherwise he will face exposure in court. Fearful of scandal, Worth demands that Emma forego the contest and beats her when she refuses. After fruitlessly requesting Jones to drop the suit. Although Jones escapes, he is pursued into a junkyard. Tired of flight, Jones confronts the officers and is prompltly shot and castrated. Notwithstanding Worth confession Hedgepath and the town mayor that he murder Jones and begging them to send him to jail, but Hedgepath and the mayor decline and tell him to take the day off. Sonny Boy Mosby, however, unknowingly avenges Jones's murder by pushing Bumpas into a harvester. Steve discover the southern town racism and corruption, he and Nella leave town, departing on the same train as Sonny Boy Mosby, while the black community attends Lord Byron Jones funeral.

Tags: murder, violence, melodrama, tragedy, revenge, blaxploitation

Review:
William Wyler had such a diverse and non-stereotypical career.
He painted on a grand canvas with "Ben-Hur," "Funny Girl," and "The Big Country," romped about with fluff on "Roman Holiday" and "How To Steal A Million," and reined in on tight dramas like "Jezebel," "Detective Story," and "The Collector", all to name but a few.
"The Liberation of L.B. Jones" was his last film, and its message is still powerful and taut.
Here, Wyler reins in very tightly on a drama, placing his camera stock still in three-walled sets and allows the intensity to grow from the individuals coming undone within its frame.Hollywood was just turning the corner in its presentation of dramatic material around 1970, with the revolutionary "The Graduate," "Bonnie & Clyde", and "Midnight Cowboy" already released, so Wyler's effort appears rooted to an earlier period in its presentation.
The confining studios sets scream of the backlot environment "daring" pictures were then moving away from.
And Wyler's static camera technique is a far cry from the fluid shots used by up 'n coming directors Penn, Nichols, Friedkin, and Wexler.
But the overall tone and downbeat ending of "Jones" foreshadowed the de rigueur hard-edged storytelling that would make '70s pictures so vibrant.Taking place in some jerkwater burg in Tennessee, the title character of L.B. Jones (played with dignified austerity by Roscoe Lee Browne) is a wealthy undertaker whose wife (the smoldering hussy embodied by Lola Falana) is practically rubbing his nose in her affair with a local cop.
Jones wants to divorce her.
The proceedings, if a courtroom action is necessary, would reveal her liaisons with the policeman, played by Anthony Zerbe, and Zerbe truly does not want his own wife to know of his infidelity.
Thus, sets in motion the harrassment and tragedy of L.B.'s situation as only a town full of rednecks can perpetrate towards the threat of an intelligent, self-made African-American man.Lee J.
Cobb as the town's D.A. who always finds a way to help out the white folks, at the expense of blacks, walks a fine line of bigotry and self-discovery.
It may be L.B.'s "liberation", but it's Cobb's character that will ultimately be put to a test.
What's unique about this film is that he fails, miserably.
Most movies made in the '80s and '90s about the racial plight of African-Americans, whether it be "Cry Freedom" or "Amistad" always have that knight in shining "white" armor that studios feel are needed to "help" the black man break the bonds of tyranny.
The black character is never allowed to just gain freedom, discovery or triumph on the merits of his own strengths.
This film has the guts to show L.B. take his "liberation" into his own hands, albeit with tragic results, and damns the white majority who are a long way from compassion and understanding.The standout performance in the flick comes from Anthony Zerbe.
If all you've seen are his scenery chewing in "Omega Man," his digit-dropping in "Papillon" or his head exploding in "License To Kill," check out his fully-fleshed out character of Willie Joe in this film.
He embodies centuries of redneckdom in one person, portraying the self-inflated, unrepentent coward sheltered in police corruption so effectively that he masterfully overshadows the performances of everyone else onscreen.
Unfortunately, Yaphet Kotto as a vengeful out of town visitor is given very little to do.
And Barbara Hershey and Lee Majors barely have enough motivation to fill in their sketchy roles as Cobb's daughter and her altruistic lawyer husband.If you can stand a little datedness to the narrative (and Elmer Bernstein's horrible score), take a look at this unflinching glimpse at an era of bigotry we thought was eradicated...but it's obviously not.
Sometimes I have to scratch my head and wonder why the hell a film isn't more acclaimed and/or remembered.
William Wyler's last film The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970) is one of these.
A nail biting inferno of racial hate and discomfort.Don't read the tagline and stay away from certain posters, it might spoil it!
But even though I knew part of the outcome parts of this film stopped me from breathing, and I'm still filled with this heavy indescribable feeling.It's essentially the tale of when the people discriminated against stops being afraid.
It's also an exploration of the small towns of a bygone age, and their despicable sentiments.The Liberation of L.B. Jones would fit perfectly in the company of films in In the Heat of the Night.
Perhaps it was just a tad late, or perhaps it was a bit too bleak, but this is surely a film I will remember.
A wonderful way to go out for the legendary Mr. Wyler.
Pretty Powerful stuff.
The "novel" this is based on was according to the author, almost entirely true, only the names were changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.
I must stop to say the plot synopsis has nothing to do with the film.
This is not a mystery with a "who did it" structure and it is not a courtroom justice or injustice movie.
The events play out in sequence and we jump from character to character so that it remains, every bodies story, so to speak.
We aren't allowed to distance ourselves from the story by taking the look from the good lawyer or cops perspective after the fact.
Yaphet Kotto among many, probably gives the best performance.
The photography and the score both seem a bit dated, though each have their strong moments, otherwise this doesn't date at all.
The characters motives, good and bad, are clearly laid out and well performed.
There are a few moments of technical slop, some optical blow ups of shots in the middle of dialog scenes and a couple of lazy zooms that would not have appeared in a Wyler film a few years before that, but in every other way this shows him still at the top of his game.
It's a shame that he stopped making films after this.
He himself considered it a strong film and he seems to have more or less expected that it would anger people (white ones that is) when it was released.
His usual skill with actors is in evidence and there is some interesting use of sound to help tell the story at crucial moments.
Very powerful stuff all around..
Black acting power.
This is a sad film about personal weaknesses.
The storyline has several weak points too, but on the whole I should think the movie does a great director like William Wyler justice and is still watchable today.
There is a certain similarity with the Oscar winning In the Heat of the Night.
The screenplay is by the same author, Stirling Silliphant.The Liberation of L.
B. Jones really belongs to the African American cast, the whites' performances do pale in comparison.
Roscoe Lee Browne plays the well-to-do undertaker who is cheated by his wife with a white policeman.
He gives his character a quiet dignity that lasts throughout the story, up to the bitter and sad end.
Yaphet Kotto's portrayal of an angry young man who comes to town with a score to settle is equally intense and convincing.
Both Browne and Kotto have a few very good scenes in which they act by themselves.
They both seize the chance to give their characters real depth.
Lola Falana is convincing as the amoral undertaker's wife and there is a good supporting cast.
I fondly remember a small, well acted scene at the beginning with an elderly lady who regularly visits the undertaker's show room to have a look at the coffin for which she pays instalments.The white population is, it seems to me, much more stereotypical.
The only really interesting figure here is the town's most important lawyer, played somewhat stiffly by Lee J.
His unlawful actions to protect white criminals seem like a reflex, not coming from the brain but rather from the spinal cord..
Terrible bit of blaxploitation based on troubling book..
It should be noted that the author of the book this movie was based on, Jesse Hill Ford, shot a 19 yr old black soldier a year after this film was made.
Ford claim the black man, George Doakes was threatening Ford's son.
It should also be noted that Ford claimed that the woman parked in the car with the black soldier was a relative of the black woman that Ford based the slutty, cheating black wife in The Liberation......on.
The author was a strange ,contradictory white southern man who wrote and equally odd and twisted book.
The book won awards from the elite in the north and in New York/LA- but both black and white southerners hated it.
The movie was doomed to be loved by those who were clueless to the reality of this era , but excited by the sorted racial takes and easy stereotyping.
After the boom and the movie, I mam struck by the gross, racist stereotyping of black women (old and pathetic or young and whorey).
Like today's Quentin Tarantino films, old blaxploitation film like The Liberation .....were about romanticizing and making black men seem more noble and fiercely strong than in real life.
White men are evil, perverted Buffoon's, and black women are wenches .
Lola Falana seems to only be there to prove both black and white men right in their assessment and spurning of black women.
Nothing about the black women in the book or movie was real or even thought out.
Too bad that people looking for information and answers about race in America will look to this and other blaxploitation films for edification and truth..
Liberated From Life.
Unless the author of the original novel Jesse Hill Ford who also contributed to the screenplay meant the liberation from life with death for the title character, I'm not sure what The Liberation Of L.B. Jones is all about.
Certainly Roscoe Lee Browne comes closer to sainthood than Sidney Poitier ever did in his work which is the usual criticism directed toward Poiter films.Browne is L.B. Jones, town undertaker who is married to a young slut of a wife in Lola Falana.
She's openly carrying on with white deputy Anthony Zerbe and she's even been knocked up by Zerbe.
The problem for Browne is that if he goes for a divorce and he's finally had enough to do that, the relationship comes out in the open and Zerbe does have a wife and kids.
She's obviously not the one giving him a spring in his step however.Enter Yaphett Kotto who's come back to town on a mission of his own, he wants to kill Zerbe's partner Arch Johnson for the murder of a 13 year old kid some years back that Kotto witnessed.
He's taking a Hamlet like approach to doing the deed until Jones is killed by Zerbe.The Liberation Of L.B. Jones was done in those transitional days when the new civil rights law and voting rights act were making radical changes in the South.
Helping to adapt the screenplay is Stirling Silliphant who did the same for the much better In The Heat Of The Night.
The fault lies I think in that Roscoe Lee Browne for what he put up with ought to be listed in the Book of Martyrs.
The heavy handed symbolism in the end with Browne being hung in the junkyard like a crucifiction was over the top.The whites in this story, especially those in the establishment fail miserably.
Cobb they all are far more concerned with order than law.
And order translates keeping the black population in their place.Lola Falana really makes the film work in her scenes though.
She was more interested in the nightclub scene than films however, had her priorities been the other way she could easily have been promoted as a black Rita Hayworth.The Liberation of L.B. Jones is a downbeat film both in content and the way it's presented.
Not a bad film, but William Wyler the director should have had Funny Girl as his swansong..
THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES (William Wyler, 1970) ***.
The old guard of the "Golden Age of Hollywood" must have clearly read the writing on the wall that a new and different era was looming on Tinseltown because, right at the start of the oncoming decade, both the greatest (Howard Hawks) and the most honored (William Wyler) of American film-makers decided to call it quits; ironically, while Hawks – a former colleague of Wyler's at the Samuel Goldwyn company who kept making his own kind of old-fashioned film (thus being deservedly deemed an auteur) – bowed out with the enjoyable but slight John Wayne Western vehicle RIO LOBO, the 68-year old Wyler – whose penchant for fluidly cinematic adaptations of prestigious literary properties turned him into virtually the antithesis of that label so beloved by the French critics!
– made his exit via a hothouse racial drama.
Indeed, following his unprecedented Oscar triumph with BEN-HUR (1959), the director seems to have gained the necessary clout to deal with controversial themes head-on – which he did in the lesbian drama THE CHILDREN'S HOUR (1961; previously filmed by Wyler himself in 1936 as the heavily bowdlerized THESE THREE), the abduction thriller THE COLLECTOR (1965) and THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES itself.
Even so, he seemed out-of-his-depth portraying the modern forms of dancing and, ultimately, the strength of the film at hand lies primarily in Robert Surtees' luminous cinematography and Elmer Bernstein's vigorous score rather than for any devastating insight into the racial issues!
The box-office and Oscar success of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) spawned not only two further adventures of black policeman Virgil Tibbs in 1969 and 1971 but a couple of other Southern-set racial dramas: these are the film under review and TICKTICKTICK (also dating from 1970).
As already intimated and as was his fashion, Wyler deals with a weighty subject matter but one has to wonder, however, whether he was completely sincere here – given that the film depicts at least two blacks (an eccentric old lady intent on securing for herself a cozy coffin from the titular undertaker, played by Roscoe Lee Browne, and the doddering yet 'fresh' manservant of the community's patriarchal figure, eminent lawyer Lee J.
Cobb) in the stereotypical, i.e. politically incorrect, manner one usually associates with the old Hollywood (and which now necessitates that it be put into context via disclaimers when not eliminated or withheld outright)!
While liberation originally referred to the character's divorce application (his much-younger wife, played by future nightclub celebrity Lola Falana, is cheating on him), it can also be attributed to Anthony Zerbe (channeling Marlon Brando as a villainous cop and the lover in the affair) who kills Jones, thus being rid of him.
However, there is also the fact that the murder creates an uproar which threatens to bring down the white man's supremacy: though it is all quickly and efficiently hushed, the seams definitely start to show when Lee Majors, Cobb's initially naïve and eager-to-please nephew (here engaged to a young Barbara Hershey), leaves in disgust over the latter's hypocritical leadership and corrupt hold over the town!
Incidentally, this dishonesty also exists between the whites themselves: Zerbe does not immediately admit to his interracial relationship (during the course of the film, he not only beats up Jones' wife, impregnated by him, when she decides to fight for her husband's wealth rather than give him a quick concession to the divorce but he actually exerts his authority by raping another black girl in exchange for a reduced sentence for her husband).
As for Cobb, he takes Zerbe to task over his shameful behavior when, several years back, he had himself been involved with a colored chambermaid (and which had cost him the companionship of the woman he loved)!
Another subplot concerns Yaphet Kotto, who returns home armed with a gun hidden in a cigar box (an irrelevant but funny scene early on has him quarrelling over the weapon with the blackmailing shopkeeper he had given it for safe-keeping, where the latter ends up buried under various items stirred off the shelves in the hubbub!) in order to exact revenge on the cop – Zerbe's equally seedy partner – who had mistreated him in his youth.
Interestingly, he is made to relent when eventually given the opportunity to shoot him but, following his target's involvement in Jones' brutal slaying in a junkyard, he approaches his original plan with even more harshness (the policeman now getting his just desserts – in unintentionally amusing, and surprisingly bloodless, fashion – by way of his own wheat-cropping tractor!).
Tellingly, Kotto has recently revealed how Wyler had asked him to cry at this point but the actor refused and stormed off the set1 Other ineffectual authority figures here include warden Chill Wills (yet another comic scene has the latter becoming the brunt of the Chief Of Police's ire, the latter played by Ray Teal, when the black man accused of Jones' murder, forced into signing a confession by being fed repeated charges of electricity, turns out to have been a 'jailbird' already at the time the crime was committed!) and mayor Dub Taylor.
For the record, Wyler had earlier depicted the hectic (read: heightened) goings-on inside a police station in one of his best films, namely DETECTIVE STORY (1951)..
SPOILER- I've only seen the shock ending.
I caught the tail end of this movie at a drive in.
It involves Yaphet Kotto and probably Anthony Zerbe.
Kotto forces Zerbe into a hay bailing machine and a very realistic looking dummy is shown being broken and mashed around in the machine.
I've always wanted to see the rest of the movie to see what lead to this grisly comeuppance.
I also wonder if like a lot of under respected movies, horribly shocking scenes get cut out and forgotten.
Here the body keeping its integrity while being horribly bent is what shocks.