written by Ernest Kinoy
Marlin Texas 1976
It’s not a film that has been widely seen, though more attention has been called to it of late and I’ve seen it a couple of times on television. It was the last of Gordon Parks’ movies to receive theatrical distribution (not wide distribution but distribution none the less.) Roger E Mosley portrays the ill fortuned Blues musician. The story is episodic, concentrating on his early adulthood and times in prison. It doesn’t make excuses for the real man’s violent temper and bad choices, but it doesn’t fall into the usual clichés found in biopics of great black musicians with their redemptive story lines and unbelievably helpful white folk. Parks didn’t go out of his way to demonize the whites. He didn’t have to, he just had to be honest, which he was. Parks understood as well as anyone that in the USA the mass imprisonment of blacks is slavery by other means.
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