Spike Lee’s first feature is quick, funny and made on next to nothing, with a Brooklyn and a heroine the cinema had not shown before. It is also roughly acted, thin around its lead, and it turns ugly late on in a way it never earns.
Spike Lee’s first feature is 84 minutes long, shot in black and white, and set almost entirely in Brooklyn, where a young woman called Nola Darling has three lovers and no intention of giving any of them up. The men sit in front of the camera and explain her to us. So does she. It is a small, brisk, frequently funny film, and it shows a place and a kind of woman that American cinema had not bothered with before it. It is also unevenly acted, thinly written around the person it is about, and it contains one late scene that spoiled it for us. We would still send the curious to it.
Lee wrote it, directed it, produced it and cut it, and the cutting is where his instincts show first. People talk straight into the lens, the film freezes on a face when a point has been made, and a row of men deliver their worst chat-up lines one after another like witnesses at a trial. Ernest Dickerson shoots the brownstones and the loft in clean, high-contrast black and white, so that the candles round Nola’s bed read as points of hard light and the sheets look like paper. Wynn Thomas dresses that loft as a stage: the bed in the centre, the candles, little else. Bill Lee, the director’s father, wrote the jazz score and appears as Nola’s father Sonny Darling, sitting at a piano.
There is one sequence in colour, a dance in a park for Nola’s birthday, and it is the film’s one lapse into prettiness. Everywhere else the roughness suits it. The camera is handheld when it needs to be and still when it can afford to be, and John Michael Reefer’s costumes tell us who each man is before he opens his mouth: Greer in tailored white, Jamie in a plain shirt, Mars in a gold chain, a cycling cap and glasses he refuses to take off in bed.
Mars is the reason the film is remembered, and Lee knows it. He plays him as a small man made entirely of nerve, repeating the word please until it becomes a percussion track, and every one of his scenes is a comedy sketch that happens to have a plot attached. We laughed out loud when he explained his shoes. John Canada Terrell’s Greer folds his clothes before he gets into bed, garment by garment, while Nola waits, and the scene is a whole character in a minute. Tommy Redmond Hicks is the strongest of the three; his Jamie is decent, dull and wounded, and the film’s scenes of ordinary tenderness belong to him.
The trouble is at the centre. Tracy Camilla Johns has presence and a fine, level way of looking at a man who is lecturing her, but the script gives Nola desire and refusal and not much else. The men get the jokes and the arguments; she gets to say she is not a freak, and to say it again. Around her the acting drops away. Raye Dowell’s Opal and Joie Lee’s Clorinda have scenes that play like first readings, the sound is muddy, and lines that should land as wit arrive as statements. S. Epatha Merkerson, as the doctor Nola visits to be told she is normal, is on screen for a few minutes and is the only person in the film who seems entirely at ease.
Then there is the scene late on that we will not describe. The film treats it as a turning point in a love story. We watched it and were angry, and angrier at what followed, because Lee cuts away from it and the next scenes carry on as if a quarrel had happened and not something worse. Nothing in the rest of the film reckons with it. It is the one place where a young director’s carelessness costs more than a flat line reading, and it is why the score below is not higher.
Three years later Lee and Dickerson made Do the Right Thing (1989), and everything tried here is there in finished form: the direct address, the colour, the block full of people who each get a say. This is the sketchbook. Watch it in that spirit, for Mars and for Dickerson’s Brooklyn, and be ready for the last twenty minutes to test your goodwill. It carries an 18 certificate and it earns it.
