A big, solid man, he feels a rough affection for black people, and not just because they are his customers. Sal (Danny Aiello) is a tough patriarch proud of the business he has built up over the decades and unafraid of the black hostility gathering in the neighborhood. The center of Do The Right Thing is a corner store, Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, run by Italians who drive in from Bensonhurst in their old Eldorado. All the same, the movie builds inexorably to its climax. And Spike Lee weaves his anecdotes together in a casual “simultaneous” structure, so that at any one moment we seem to be taking the pulse of the entire neighborhood. Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, whose black-and-white work made She’s Gotta Have It so elegant to look at, shoots this time in bold, bright colors, producing the look of a glaring, reddened summer light. Through a long hot day, the neighborhood regulars come out of the background, make a few jokes, blow off steam, then recede. The single-block setting recalls the tenement plays and studio-bound movies of the thirties and forties, though this movie was actually shot on an actual Bed-Stuy street with brownstones and rubble, and features language never heard in those entertainments. In Do The Right Thing, Lee doesn’t mount musical numbers, but, allowing for a didactic or sentimental line here or there, the first three quarters of the movie has the jumping vitality and buoyant, light touch of a good musical. He wants to become - if such a thing is possible - a lyricist of racial tension. He rejects the stiff earnestness of most politically “engaged” filmmaking. School Daze was disorganized and muddled I found it hard to sit through, yet I admired Lee’s courage and also his determination to find some flexible and open-ended form for what he was trying to say. But instead, two years later he tried something messy and ambitious - School Daze, a sort of race-consciousness musical in which groups of dark- and light-skinned blacks at a southern black college danced and sang out their arguments over assimilation. The response to the movie could get away from him.Īfter making the lovely erotic comedy She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, Lee could have pleased a great many moviegoers by cultivating his charming satirical talent in a series of small, fashionable pictures. But if Spike Lee is a commercial opportunist, he’s also playing with dynamite in an urban playground. Divided himself, Lee may even be foolish enough to dream, alternately, of increasing black militance and of calming it. The explosion at the end of the movie, an outburst intimate in scale but truly frightening, should divide the audience, leaving some moviegoers angry and vengeful, others sorrowful and chastened. But Lee, who both writes and directs, lays the groundwork, in many small, sandpapery confrontations between black and white characters, for disaster. Much of the movie, which is set on a single block in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section, is genial and fond-hearted. Confusing? Do The Right Thing is going to create an uproar - in part because Lee, a middle class black hoping to capture the anger of the underclass, is thoroughly mixed up about what he’s saying. This immensely skillful, humane, and richly detailed movie about racism in New York suffers from trying to satisfy everyone - black, white, middle class, and “street.” It’s a comedy that ends in tragedy a spectacle of black victimization by whites and white victimization by blacks a demonstration of the pointlessness of violence that is also a celebration of violence. In Do The Right Thing (opening on June 30), filmmaker Spike Lee does the right thing, the wrong thing, and finally everything.
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