Directed by Krishna Shah and written by Joseph A. Walker, this has an incredible soundtrack by the band War. It's based on Walker's 1972 play.
Johnny Williams (James Earl Jones) is a house painter and poet who has raised his family in Watts. His son Jeff (Glynn Turman) is home after failing out of the U. S. Air Force flight school and his wife wife Mattie (Cicely Tyson) is dying, but Johnny tries to remain positive. Yet when Jeff kills a rival gang member and a police officer gets killed, there's a standoff with the cops that doesn't end well for anyone.
The cast also includes Roger E. Mosley as Big Moe Hayes and Louis Gossett Jr. As Dr. Dudley Stanton.
This is shot in an all over the place style, somethimes in striking POV shots, other times in your face African masks dominating the entire shot. There seems to be so much crammed into this movie - Vietnam, alcoholism, racism, dealing with loss, Afrocentrism, the militarism of the Black Panthers - that it doesn't have a solid focus, but these are the kinds of movies that had to be made and stories that had to be told.
Johnny Williams (James Earl Jones) is a house painter and poet who has raised his family in Watts. His son Jeff (Glynn Turman) is home after failing out of the U. S. Air Force flight school and his wife wife Mattie (Cicely Tyson) is dying, but Johnny tries to remain positive. Yet when Jeff kills a rival gang member and a police officer gets killed, there's a standoff with the cops that doesn't end well for anyone.
The cast also includes Roger E. Mosley as Big Moe Hayes and Louis Gossett Jr. As Dr. Dudley Stanton.
This is shot in an all over the place style, somethimes in striking POV shots, other times in your face African masks dominating the entire shot. There seems to be so much crammed into this movie - Vietnam, alcoholism, racism, dealing with loss, Afrocentrism, the militarism of the Black Panthers - that it doesn't have a solid focus, but these are the kinds of movies that had to be made and stories that had to be told.