Review: The Great White Hope

James Earl Jones plays the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion (called Jack Jefferson here, but it’s basically the real-life Jack Johnson), who nonetheless finds himself largely hated and vilified by a great many white people, and not just because his romantic companion is a white woman (played by Jane Alexander). His detractors (including Hal Holbrook, Robert Webber, and an especially racist R.G. Armstrong) are meanwhile determined to find the ‘Great White Hope’ who can finally defeat Jefferson and restore ‘order’. When Jefferson keeps knocking ‘em down, they decide to use even lowlier methods to bring him down. Moses Gunn plays an African-American who basically calls Jefferson out for being a traitor to his race, during a big celebration among his people.

Directed by Martin Ritt (The excellent “Hud”, “Edge of the City”, and “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”, the awful misfire “The Outrage”), and scripted by Howard Sackler (who worked on the scripts for the first two “Jaws” films), this 1970 screen version of Sackler’s stage play is an interesting, if not always successful experience. A fictionalised account of America’s first African-American heavyweight boxing champ, the film seems to have its own struggle between the somewhat straightforward, even clichéd account and James Earl Jones’ dynamic yet clearly very theatrical performance. Either the story seems too small or Jones’ performance is too big for cinema (it was his first major film role, perhaps tellingly), and it makes the film occasionally a bit awkward and lumpy. That said, you can never take your eyes off Jones, and his voice, as always, commands attention too. As does his somewhat intimidating bald head. Seriously, it’s almost as if they wanted Johnson (or Jack Jefferson, as he is called here) to come off as far from a Sidney Poitier-type as possible, to heighten the tensions on screen between the character and the white (mostly bigoted) characters. The fact that Jones (or Jefferson) also rarely stops smiling, even in the face of hardship and persecution, also likely gets under their skin, intentional on his part no doubt. Jones (who earned an Oscar nomination) does really well in capturing the mixture between the smiling exterior and the simmering rage beneath.

As memorable as Jones is, however, I think it’s the highly underrated Jane Alexander (like Jones, repeating her stage performance) who quietly steals the show in her Academy Award nominated debut performance. It’s a tricky role, but Alexander is brilliant, and it’s a shame that she’s not as well-known as several of the other actresses who emerged out of the late 60s and early 70s (Faye Dunaway, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda, etc) .

The film seems to lose its way once Jefferson is forced to flee the US (and things get bogged down for too long), and truth be told, it might just be that Jefferson/Johnson’s story is not one especially needed to be told in cinema. That is, it’s pretty clichéd and predictable. To be fair, though, most of the similar stories probably came out after this one (“The Hurricane” and “Ali”, for instance), but I still felt like I had seen all of this before. I also have to disagree with critic Leonard Maltin in regards to the ending, which I found quite powerful.

It’s a lumpy film, probably not an especially successful one, but it’s memorable, interesting, a must for fans of the two leads. Rock-solid smaller turns by Hal Holbrook, Robert Webber, Beah Richards (as Jefferson’s worried mother), R.G. Armstrong, and Moses Gunn, too. Worth a look, whatever you might make of it.

 

Rating: B-