THE LAST PARTY (LIVE, $89.98, rated R) 1993. Directed by Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin; starring Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey Jr. appears to be an unsettled young man searching for a source of his problem in his quasi-documentary, The Last Party. Trouble is, he doesn’t seem to be aware he is flailing aimlessly. It seems he thinks he is making a pro-voc-ative political film that challenges the existing democratic process.
Upon discovery of how easily press credentials to the Republican and Democratic political conventions can be obtained, Downey poses as a journalist and has a camera crew follow him to each confab like a star-struck groupie on spring break. His own star status helps him get at least a brief audience with a few political dignitaries, including then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and former California Gov. Jerry Brown, TV newsman Peter Jennings and other notable politically-involved celebrities such as Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Patti Davis and Oliver North.
But Downey’s naivete is immediately apparent by the shallow nature of his questions. His pride stems more from the act of snaring a high-profile sound bite than the content of the responses to his questions. In fact, he’s just as happy asking the interviewee to direct him to the room where free sandwiches are being served.
At this point the viewer begins to wonder if anything substantive was ever intended; if Downey is just using his celebrity as a lark for his own enjoyment and as amusement for the audience. That notion seems to be fortified by the after-hours scenes, in which Downey – with no event to serve as a pretext for journalistic coverage – turns the cameras on himself, his camera crew and his friends (often-recognizable faces such as Sean Penn, Mary Stuart Masterson) sitting around the hotel room raising what appear to be socially and politically weighty topics and then dispensing with them like so many cheese-puff snacks.
When it’s all over, one feels as if he has inadvertently been a part of a Downey therapy session, which is not exactly something most of us would pay or sit still for.
NOTHING BUT A MAN (New Video, $89.95, not rated) 1964. Directed by Michael Roemer; starring Abbey Lincoln, Ivan Dixon and Gloria Foster.
Thirty years ago Nothing But a Man was released to a limited number of markets to critical praise but small audiences. The same was true during a theatrical re-release last year. But now the movie has been released on video for the first time, where it will be available to the widest possible audience.
The timing couldn’t be better, thanks to acclaimed TV shows such as I’ll Fly Away, that have reawakened public sensitivity and attention to social and racial issues in the South during the early 1960s.
Although it’s a rather common plot line a man and a woman trying to overcome their disparate social class backgrounds to make a harmonious relationship the film is unique in that seldom have we seen such a social class distinction portrayed within the African-American community.
Ivan Dixon (of Hogan’s Heroes) portrays Duff Anderson, a railroad-repair gang laborer from Alabama who has enjoyed a certain sense of freedom and independence while serving in the Army and now as an itinerant worker. But he longs for a relationship, something he never enjoyed with his family. While on a five-week job, he meets an independent-minded daughter of a preacher named Josie (jazz singer Abbey Lincoln), who senses the goodness in Duff that lies just beneath his shell of defensiveness.
Not much new ground is broken, as we see Duff suffer the indignities of trying to make a living in a white world while refusing to sacrifice his pride.
Though the message has lost some of its power in 30 years, the black-and-white production is top-notch and the acting is first-rate, including the supporting performances by a young Yaphet Kotto and others.
— (C)1993 Scott Hettrick. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
