Charles Gordone Movies
The time is the 1950s: seedy Brooklyn private eye Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired by shady Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to locate a pop singer who reneged on a debt. Harry ventures into Harlem, the first step of a Heart of Darkness-inspired odyssey. Each time Harry makes contact with someone who might know the singer's whereabouts, he or she is killed in a horrible, ritualistic fashion; a Satanic cult seems to be at the bottom of all the carnage. Harry solves the mystery, all right. He just didn't know that he had the answer all along -- even before Louis entered his office. Also available in the "unrated" video version, Angel Heart is best known as the film that nearly got an X-rating due to a no-holds-barred sex scene involving Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
- Starring:
- Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, (more)
- 1975
- R
Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic helmer Ralph Bakshi subsequently directed the über-controversial animated feature Coonskin (aka Streetfight, 1975). Bakshi opens and closes the film with a live-action tale that stars Scatman Crothers, Miami Vice's Philip Michael Thomas, Charles Gordone, and Barry White; it recounts the adventures of three African-American men who escape from prison and are later gathered up. In between, an animated tale has animal characters with stereotypically black traits -- Brother Rabbit (voiced by Thomas), Brother Fox (voiced by Gordone), and Brother Bear (voiced by White) -- entering a white-dominated ghetto environment and diverging into different paths; one becomes a crime overlord, the second sells the first out to La Cosa Nostra, and the third establishes himself as a media-exploited sports icon. Completely misread as a racist work upon release, the film actually entails Bakshi's satirical excoriation of bigotry via the tongue-in-cheek use of black urban stereotypes. The director laces the film with profane ghetto dialogue and street slang; though animated, this is not a picture for children. Variety wrote of the work, "Beyond Bakshi's cinematic style, his stories seem haunted by a worldliness that is torn between cynicism and tortured humanism. There is heart in his plots, so superficial putdown is totally absent. What is present [is] the evidently sincere empathy of a social surgeon." The legendary Albert S. Ruddy (The Godfather, Cloud Nine) produced. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Barry White, Charles Gordone, (more)
Heavy Traffic represents a follow-up to animator Ralph Bakshi's first feature film, Fritz the Cat (1972). The central character is Michael, the ingenuous son of an Italian father and Jewish mother. An aspiring cartoonist, Michael leaves home in a huff and outrages his family by conducting an affair with an African-American woman. Heavy Traffic was originally intended to be a cartoon adaptation of Hubert Selby's notorious novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, but negotiations fell through, and Bakshi was obliged to cook up a similar but not identical "mean streets" plotline. (Last Exit to Brooklyn was made as a live-action film in 1989.) ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
