Taglines: When a girl like Lula gets with a man like Clay – she can love him… or kill him – or maybe both!
Dutchman movie storyline. A sinister, neurotic white girl Lula (Shirley Knight), with the provocation of her lovely, half-naked body and of her startlingly lascivious speech, lures to his doom a good-looking young black man Clay, a stranger whom she has picked up in the subway and whom she mocks for wearing the clothes and employing the voice and manners of the conventional white intellectual. The man, who, at first seeing no reason to resist the girl’s advances, perceives too late that he is being used by her, drops his “white” disguise, and launches a wild and bitter counterattack on her and on the entire white race.
Dutchman is a 1967 British drama film directed by Anthony Harvey and starring Shirley Knight and Al Freeman, Jr. It was based on the play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka (aka Le Roi Jones) who wrote the screenplay adaptation. John Barry wrote the score. The movie tells the story of a white woman and a black man riding the subway in New York City. Although not shown widely, the film was critically well-received and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, where Shirley Knight received the Volpi Cup for best actress.
Bosley Crowther in his review for The New York Times complained of padding, “at least five to 10 minutes” are “shots of empty New York subway stations”. The two main performers “do their jobs with gusto and hold the viewer mildly absorbed. But the whole thing boils down to a polemic that is tedious and without consistency or conviction in this form”. Time Out’s review describes the film as a “brilliantly spare, edgy adaptation” containing “superb performances”.
Film Review for Dutchman
“Dutchman” has “been brought to the screen almost entirely within the framework of LeRoi Jones’ original play. It still has the same message, told in the same way. As a result, it’s not as effective as it might have been. What we’re up against here is the collision between the languages of stage and screen.
In the theater, limitations of time and space usually make a production seem more immediate. In the movies, on the other hand, we’re used to time being stretched or compressed, but we rarely find it recorded exactly as it passes. When 70 minutes of action are shown in 70 minutes of screen time, the result is not “realism” but constraint.
I said the message of “Dutchman” remains the same as on the stage, but there’s a certain confusion here too. The action takes place entirely within a subway car. A young Negro (Al Freeman Jr.) is riding alone. A sexy blond (Shirley Knight) boards the train and begins to make painfully rude advances to the Negro.
He is restrained to begin with, but his defenses eventually fall and he joins in the game. Then she withdraws and begins to taunt him. It eventually becomes clear that his is not a seduction but a torture: the white woman is playing a sadistic game with the black man’s psyche.
When he realizes this, he strikes back, both against her and against others who have boarded the car. He seems to have won a temporary victory just as she stabs him to death. The others on the car do nothing. Now then, what is Jones saying? This would seem to be a general attack on white treatment of blacks, in which sexuality is the cruelest weapon. But is it?
The story and dialog bear a resemblance to the familiar themes of several (white) homosexual playwrights, who pit carnivorous women against ethical, helpless men time and again. This impression is reinforced by the performances of Miss Knight, who is very forceful, and Freeman, who is essentially weak, even in his tirade. It is hard to say whether this theme has gotten tangled with white-black conflict in Jones’ play, but the performances and direction seem to suggest it.
A word about Miss Knight’s performance, which won an award at Cannes: It is superb. She plays the bitchy blond with such skill that this becomes one of the best performances by an actress in memory.
Dutchman (1966)
Directed by: Anthony Harvey
Starring: Shirley Knight, Al Freeman Jr., Frank Lieberman, Robert Calvert, Howard Bennett, Sandy McDonald, Dennis Alaba Peters, Keith James, Devon Hall
Screenplay by: Amiri Baraka
Production Design by: John Comfort
Cinematography by: Gerry Turpin
Film Editing by: Anthony Harvey
Art Direction by: Herbert Smith
Makeup Department: Anne Box, Michael Morris
Music by: John Barry
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Continental Distributing (USA), Planet Film Distributors (UK)
Release Date: December 28, 1966 (Los Angeles), February 27, 1967 (New York City)
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