Bolivion

#7 Cornbread, Earl and Me

Update: I renewed bolivion.com earlier, so we should be moving back real soon, and all this will follow...

This is the first of Bolivion's guest reviewers for the Month, so without any futher introduction, I give you Calvin's review of Cornbread, Earl and Me!

I had heard about Cornbread, Earl, and Me. For some reason everytime I heard about it, it was supposed to be a basketball movie. Basketball was so peripheral to this movie, I mean honestly there was very little basketball shown at all. True, Jamaal Wilks of the Golden State Warriors and L.A. Lakers played Cornbread, but to call this a basketball movie is akin to calling Jerry Maguire a football movie, there is so much more to the story.

Anyway, I didn’t see this movie in my childhood, I saw it for the first time about a year ago as a matter of fact. The first time I saw it I sort of happened upon it while flipping channels on digital cable. I heard some music that was familiar (the introduction to Ghostface Killah’s Black Jesus) and I was like, “Man I need to see the rest of this movie”. I happened to catch a replay of it later on that day, and I’m glad I did.

The movie itself is a story of tragic mistaken identity. The police (played by one of those generic “Mr. Big type” White dudes from the films of the time and Bernie Casey, best known to our generation as John Slade in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka!) chase a lanky black man accused of rape through various alleyways and such. Meanwhile Nathaniel “Cornbread” Hamilton is in Charlie’s grocery store hanging out, shooting the breeze with younger kids Earl (Tierre Turner who has grown up to become a stunt coordinator for films like Training Day and Antown Fisher) and Wilford Robinson, played by a young and precocious Lawrence Fishburne. Cornbread is tall and lanky too. They have gone inside to escape a sudden rainstorm. I think you see where this is going.

After awhile they all have to leave the store, after Cornbread buys drinks for himself and the kids. Earl and Wilford begin to argue about how fast Cornbread can run. He’s the quintessential good-guy athlete in the neighborhood, gang members leave him alone and kids look up to him. He tells them that he can probably make it home in 45 seconds or so and takes off running through the rainy street. He passes a loud garbage truck and then the alley where the accused rapist and police had been running. The police hit the corner and see Cornbread, who they think is the rapist and yell for him to put his hands up, but he can’t hear them very well over the noise of the garbage truck. He is also carrying his bottle of orange juice which was given a weird sheen by the director, I guess in an effort to show that it could have been mistaken for a weapon. The police shoot him.

Wilford then runs down the street yelling loudly about the police shooting Cornbread when “he wasn’t even doing anything” and this sets off a mini-riot in the neighborhood. From this point onward the movie changes focus as a corrupt detective begins an “investigation” into Cornbread’s death, hoping to brush it under the rug.

The movie spends a great deal of time dealing fairly accurately with the intimidation practices of many police departments on the Black community, hushing up just about all of the witnesses with fear as the primary tactic. Only one witness seems willing to tell the real story, Wilford.

What follows is a long court scene with a Coroner heading up the proceedings. He can’t exactly be described as racist, but he is definitely “no-nonsense”. Wilford and his mother (played by the late Rosalind Cash….Dean Hughes on A Different World) watch as people in the neighborhood take the stand and blatently lie about what they witnessed. They even make Earl cry on the stand as he remains hush mouthed. Of course Ms. Robinson tells Wilford to “be a man” when he goes up on the stand and he proceeds to tell the truth as it happens. This compels Bernie Casey to get up and say that after hearing the boy’s account they may have in fact shot the wrong guy. Thus the movie ends pretty happily.

Cornbread, Earl, and Me wasn’t the movie I was expecting. I was more surprised to see a young Larry Fishburne than anything else! There were other old standby’s from that period like a brief appearance by Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas as well as Madge Sinclair and Moses Gunn. A lot of “that guy/woman” type actors in bit parts all over the place.

The music however is the big key to this movie. The music is almost overly dramatic at times, but it was a far cry better than the music in most of the blaxploitation films of the period. And as I mentioned at the outset, there was that bit from the Ghosstface album, so those who enjoy finding out where certain artists get the inspiration for their music will enjoy that.

They don’t show Cornbread, Earl, and Me that often on TV which is a shame because it’s a story worth being told over and again. If you happen to catch it you won’t be disappointed.

Posted by maximillian at February 7, 2005 10:09 PM