Now on Netflix, the invigorating documentary “Is That Black Enough for You?!?” borrows its title from a line in the 1970 caper “Cotton Comes to Harlem.” That movie was no highlight of the cultural revolution afoot. But for one especially rich decade, 1968-1978, Black representation finally got a foot in the door of a mighty white film industry. Stories of more than one kind of Black image and experience, independently made and then, because there was money in it, mainstream and studio-financed, found their way into theaters. This is critic-writer-director-host Elvis Mitchell’s love letter to that decade.
It tells a collective tale of long-frustrated and marginalized talent finally getting some breaks. Many of the key players were well-established (Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte), others younger and less polished. Many, too, were dazzling and unique, gone far too soon (Diana Sands at 39, Rupert Crosse at 45).
The Netflix project, produced by, among others, Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, finds Mitchell speaking directly to films that helped shape his childhood, adulthood and vocations. He’s especially good on the subject of the deathless, peerless theme songs and soundtracks associated with everything from “Shaft” to “Superfly.”
Mitchell doesn’t even try to stick within his chosen 10 years. In “Is That Black Enough For You?!?,” Samuel L. Jackson, among others, speaks of growing up watching old movies featuring bit players and occasional sidekicks like Willie Best, doing their caricatured, subservient, humiliating thing in Bob Hope movies. Yet those actors got Jackson thinking about acting for a living. And perhaps dreaming of better opportunities.
Shrewdly edited and built for speed, the documentary glances on the legacy of the pioneering silent and sound filmmaker Oscar Micheaux; the mid-20th-century breakthroughs for Poitier and Belafonte; and on seminal early ‘60s indies such as “Nothing But a Man.” By 1968, as Mitchell points out, white singer Petula Clark, on her TV special, touched the arm of Black guest Belafonte. The resulting outcry was not small. Meantime, the streets were on fire and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy set the needle for America’s political future.
Hollywood responded with more of the usual, but also with a risk or two that opened the door a little wider. Low-budget, high-return hits such as “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” “Shaft,” “Superfly” (all hail the Curtis Mayfield score) and so many more meant the times were changing. All the same, says Mitchell in voice-over, the white-run industry meant that “Black success in media was often treated as the equivalent of finding a $100 bill on the subway — a non-repeatable phenomenon.”
Later, Mitchell crystallizes a perspective I find both succinct and provocative, a new way to look at ‘70s filmmaking in all its downbeat, post-Watergate rumination. While white males (Gene Hackman chief among them) reveled in moody, bittersweet studies in stasis and despair, Mitchell argues that “Black films redeemed the ideal of heroic protagonists” in “Shaft,” “Coffy” and so many more. Then came “The Sting” and “Jaws,” among others, to reclaim happy endings for the white guys. Also, “Rocky.” Peculiarly, Mitchell doesn’t even bother to deal with “Star Wars,” which changed everything in the industry a year later. And not for the better. Well, that’s for another project, preferably an unauthorized one.
If nothing else, Mitchell’s fluid, conversational doc should get a few more eyeballs on historical markers eternally in need of new champions, such as the one-of-a-kind freak-out “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” (1968). Or Charles Burnett’s delicate 1977 classic, “Killer of Sheep,” filmed on the Los Angeles streets of Burnett’s Watts landscape. “A poet finding beauty in his own neighborhood” is how Mitchell phrases it, just so. His celebration of these films is seriously entertaining.
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'IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!?'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for nudity, some sexual content, language, violence and drug material)
Running time: 2:15
How to watch: Netflix
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