Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: To kick off Black History Month, we’re looking back on genre films by unsung or underappreciated Black filmmakers.
Deep Cover (1992)
“Money doesn’t know where it came from.” Such noir koans are readily found throughout Deep Cover, Bill Duke’s crime thriller about a Midwestern cop (Laurence Fishburne) recruited by the DEA to infiltrate a West Coast drug ring. A product of the same era that birthed Abel Ferrara’s King Of New York and Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City, the film is partly about the War On Drugs, and partly about a larger American identity crisis. The style is exaggerated and pulpy; the voice-over narration, sonorous and detached. Russell (Fishburne), the son of a drug-addicted stick-up man whose death he witnessed from the getaway car, is someone who blends in. Not for nothing is his undercover name “John Hull.”
His target in Los Angeles is a kingpin whose uncle has considerable political connections someplace unspecified in South America. Of course, he must work his way up from the bottom, earning trust or, better yet, money. Along the way, he starts doing business with Jason (Jeff Goldblum), a Jewish lawyer who slips a little too easily into the role of a cold-blooded gangster. One gets the gut feeling that everything here is a façade: stings, fronts, fake drugs, crooked cops, manipulative feds. As for what’s real, the answer is, naturally, the cash.
The symbolism can be as grotesque as the sadistic violence; one of the more indelible images of the film is a gangster with a heavy-duty gold chain dying in a puddle of his own piss. It is one of the more literary examples of the last pre-Tarantino generation of crime films, influenced by the under-regarded Black masters of the hardboiled, a little Iceberg Slim (whose rhymes are quoted throughout) and a bit of Chester Himes, whose novel A Rage In Harlem was previously adapted by Duke. “John” observes one character as “a crazy, good-natured, desperate asshole with a life expectancy of about half an hour.” Elsewhere he muses, “All my faults were becoming virtues.”
As a depiction of crime, law enforcement, and drug dealing, the film is a cartoon; as an exploration of the Man’s ulterior motives, it’s trenchant and angry. Stylistic and attitudinal cues come by way of Miami Vice, anti-heroic Blaxploitation, and the politicized, independent-minded B-films of Samuel Fuller. Duke, who is known chiefly as a character actor with a long resume of cop roles, has long had a sideline as a director, mostly in TV. The handful of more personally realized works he produced in the ’80s and ’90s, beginning with the made-for-PBS The Killing Floor, make one wish he’d continued in that vein. It really is all about the money: After his Depression-era gangster flick Hoodlum—which has its strong moments—flopped at the box office, his ambitions never recovered.
Availability: Deep Cover is available for rental or purchase on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, and Vudu, and for streaming with a Cinemax subscription on Hulu and Amazon Prime.
46 Comments
Love this movie. Fishburne and Goldblum are great. I need to watch it again.
Great movie. Shame you couldn’t find space to mention the writer, Michael Tolkin.
It baffles me that, to this day, the thing I still associate Bill Duke with the most is Predator.
Then you’ve got to watch this. And then go watch The Limey, where he has one of the best line deliveries in cinematic history. His character doesn’t even get a name, IIRC, he just shows up, has an awesome scene, and leaves.
I saw The Limey in the theater when it came out, but had to go find a clip on YouTube to refresh my memory of that scene. I really should go watch that whole movie again.
“I don’t care who you are back in the world. You flub your lines one more time, I’ll bleed you, real quiet, and leave you here.” (Bill Duke, director)I still can’t believe Shane Black plays the dweeb with the pussy jokes.
I always associate him with directing A Rage In Harlem, a not entirely successful but quite entertaining comedy version of a Chester Himes crime novel with a cracking cast, including Forest Whitaker, Gregory Hines and Danny Glover. It also has a killer soundtrack and I was listening to one of the tracks, Heaven Is In Your Heart by Darryl Pandy, only yesterday.
I liked A Rage In Harlem. IIRC critics complained that the violence was too real for a comedy; Bill Duke didn’t really see it as a comedy, though, but maybe more as a often funny crime drama, and if you look at it that way, it works. Hoodlum is another movie of his worth watching, which also has unusual tone shifts. Mainly, even though it’s a gangster drama, there’s a few shootouts that turn into action scenes straight out of a Schwarzenegger vehicle. I wonder if it was his roles in Predator and Commando that bled through.
Yes, it does keep shifting, from at times almost farce, such as the con trick involving the oven, to some pretty tough violence. I remember how heavily Hoodlum was being marketed, and it was being promoted, at least in the UK, like a period gangster Young Guns. Haven’t seen it for a long while, will have to track it down.
I WANT MY CAKE AND EAT IT TOOMy fav Goldblum performance. So good. (Well maybe the Fly beats it).
“A man has two things in this world: his word and his balls. Or is that three things?”
I liked Hoodlum. And Bill Duke has a great part in High Flying Bird
High Flying Bird. Another underappreciated film. And Bill Duke is so good in it.
I have been meaning to see this for decades at this point and currently have a digital rental gift card balance in excess of $15 so thank you for the push in the right direction to rent this this weekend.
You can add a recommendation from me, for what that’s worth. A vastly under-recognised film, which makes me really pleased to see Ignatiy raise its profile. You should go into it like you would a B-movie noir from the 1950s — it will have its share of standard tropes and implausibilities, but it’s also a cuttingly cynical view of the politics of the War on Drugs as not just a counter-productive policy designed to pander to antiempathetic conservatism, but actually a deeply corrupt scam for the exclusive benefit of the very people who pushed for it.
Jeff Goldblum as a drug lord was the wildest shit I ever saw. I was like, “Oh shit, Brundel Fly is a bad muthfucka!” Another thing that blew my mind recently was Goldblum was 39 and Fishbourne was 31 in the movie! The next year he was selling synthetic crack to triceratops. LOL!
Another overlooked early Goldblum role with an edge was Slick from Silverado, in ‘85.
Or-or-or as New Jersey in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension which was the first time I remember saying “Who’s this weird looking cat?” Then I realized I saw him in Deathwish but I thought he was just some random Puerto Rican dude. Just because I liked his weird ass energy, I watched Earth Girls Are Easy and followed him ever since.
It is one of the more literary examples of the last pre-Tarantino generation of crime films, influenced by the under-regarded Black masters of the hardboiled…
Very true, but also directly influenced by film noir of the ‘40s like Kiss of Death or Out of the Past. One can see the similarities in Duke’s approach to narrative, characters and dialogue, as well as how he uses deeply saturated hues to translate the genre’s use of black as a visual motif.
Saw the restored version of Out Of The Past at a festival a couple of years ago. Jeez, what a great film, and superb performances from Mitchum and Douglas. Seeing it how it was meant to look, rather than an over-saturated, soft-processed TV print, makes you realise just how important the b/w grading was as a visual cue.
Interested: what do you mean with this? Was that a copy that was not restored or processed? It was not a digital copy but a preserved one? Did it have much noise or broken parts? And don’t take it as an agressive line of questioning: the part where you say that the copies shown on TVs are oversaturated made me think if, for example, the Citizen Kane that is shown, that is kept on blu rays, that is used for so many essays about the use of light, is actually an overprocessed version that has not much to do with the one shown back then.
I saw it at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/It is largely run by the Bologna Cineteca which is an archive and active laboratory, researching film preservation, and many of the restored pics coming out on DVD and blu-ray now will have been worked on in Bologna. They will go back to the original elements, original camera negatives and such, and in many cases assemble the longest possible version from different existing prints and other sources, and then restore it to what the original reference prints would have looked like. The work they do is terrific, and unlike some of these sources which are remastering early cinema in 4K, they very much try not to overprocess or artificially restore. Arrow do most of their work there, among others.What happened with a lot of TV prints for many years was that a telecine for broadcast would be made from an existing, used print, and which was often made with low contrast and higher luminance since it would look acceptable on normal CTR TVs. Older TVs often had problems with blacks, as you will know, a lot of details in any dark scenes would be lost, so the whole print would be lightened. A lot of these broadcast prints are still used by some small, non-network stations. At least with new TVs you have far more ability to fine-tune your own pictures and sound to a remarkable degree. I remember when they had just two knobs, one for volume and one for brightness.
Three — one for “Horizontal Hold” in case your picture started rolling!PS: It’s “CRT” televisions — as in “Cathode-Ray Tube”. Televisions now are “LCD” (“Liquid-Crystal Display”), “LED” (“Light-Emitting Diode” — which is what now provides the backlight for the same LCDs they’ve been all along!), “Plasma” (mostly defunct now, they used ionized gases that responded to electric current to make pictures — had really black blacks for superior contrast, but drew considerably more power than LCDs or LEDs), OLED (“Organic LED” which lights each LED directly in some mix of Red/Blue/Green to provide blacker blacks similar to Plasma and with more accurate colors)…and the various Projection-Screen formats I know too little about to discuss!
Ah! CRT, not CTR…. Those days when your TV was deeper than it was wide! The only advantage of those was that you could put a bowl of fruit on top of them and it would ripen nicely because of the heat coming out of the back. Can’t do that with something 3cm deep.
And they were so heavy you needed two or more people to put them on a stand!I’ll take my UHD 55″ LED with HDR10 & Dolby Vision that can be hung off a single arm, thanks….
I remember going out of my way to watch this on cable in the initial years after this came out. I bought it on DVD then watched it on a recurring basis.
so many good , NSFW quotes. the random poetry. Linc from Mod Squad! Gregory Sierra, recently deceased, was a great mobster. He usually played nice guys, which was a surprise.“Those politically conservative negroes can kiss my a** and the anti-semitic pricks can kiss my a**, but you have the gift of fury.. you’re like a dangerous, magnificent… beast..”
“The same people who taught us morality also enslaved us!”
let’s not forget the soundtrack introduced us to Snoop Dogg:
Being old is weird. Today, Snoop is a worldwide celebrity, a bon vivant able to integrate himself into pretty much any scene. Everyone loves him.But back in the early 90s, a lot of those some same forces and people that treat him like royalty now were busy making him the poster boy for everything that was “wrong” with African-American culture.
FINALLY… HERE HE WAS AT LAST.
A CREEP IN A BLACK CAPE
This was Fishburne’s first lead role, IIRC. He was so good.
Oh what could of been. In Fishburne’s chase to get more and more lead roles, he missed our on the two roles that pushed Sam Jackson into an A lister. Jules in Pulp Fiction and Zeus in Die Hard With a Vengeance. Fishburne got plenty of lead roles in 90s but none of them made any real impact. I think Deep Cover steered him towards that quest. Him and his agents
I honestly think it’s not a matter of roles here. I don’t think Fishburne would have had the same impact as Jackson in Pulp and Die Hard. And I think Jackson would have been more striking (too striking?) in Matrix.I like Fishburne a lot. But Jackson’s intensity is his own, not an effect of his roles. He elevated his roles, I don’t think it worked the other way round.
Yeah, on the other hand, Laurence Fishburne could make a good Nick Fury, maybe even a smidge better than Sam Jackson. Of course, ideally, I’d prefer Sam play a more badass, foul-mouthed Nick Fury of The Ultimates comics, which was based on Sam’s past roles, but they went for a more subdued take on the character, which Laurence does better.
Samuel Jackson’s charisma and personality are even stronger, but I think Fishburne may be a better actor (or at least, a more versatile actor). I can’t imagine Sam in King of New York or Boys N The Hood, either. Sam Jackson veers a bit close to the Jack Nicholson Point where an actor is essentially his own character regardless of what’s he in.
I saw this the same week as Ricochet, an entertaining piece of serial killer jollies with Denzel Washington and John Lithgow. There were a surprising amount of solid, relatively intelligent thrillers during that decade.
Saw Ricochet last year, was pleasantly surprised. It seems like it’s going to be a generic cop thriller at first, but it ends up doing a lot of weird shit under the guise of its mainstream early ‘90s sensibility. Ice-T’s entire character in that movie is just a really off vision of a gang leader, but he ends up being used satisfyingly.
Yes, a lot of people seeing the poster or VHS / DVD sleeve might expect a standard cop / serial killer movie, but it does take some very odd and unexpected turns, and also reminds you how good John Lithgow can be as a villain.
I’ve loved this movie since I was in my late teens’s (I’m 51 now). I even have the fantastic OST on cd. This and King of New York were an outstanding dark double-bill.
One of Charles Martin Smith’s better roles:
Hey, let’s not forget Never Cry Wolf. The only Disney movie ever to show full frontal male nudity, i.e.: Charles Martin Smith’s dong.Song Of The South is on Disney+. Never Cry Wolf? Can’t ever seem to find it.Also, Brian Dennehy is fantastic in it.
What an asshole he was!Charles Martin Smith was perfect there.
SORRY EVERYBODY BUT THIS IS A BAD MOVIE/AND THE ONLY GENRE IT IS A CLASSIC IN IS COMEDY IT IS A BAD BAD BAD MOVIE
One gets the gut feeling that everything here is a façade: stings, fronts, fake drugs, crooked cops, manipulative feds. As for what’s real, the answer is, naturally, the cash.This is Duke’s masterpiece: a very early and very accurate microcosm of Nixon and Reagan’s war on Eurasia/unwinnable war on broad abstracts/War on Drugs. Few other street level narratives would capture the absurd totality so sharply accurately even during a time when half the nation was still trying to deify Reagan. Ignatiy, when you first posted this article, I had one brow raised.In reflection of our nation’s recent and turbulent leadership transition and during BHM, I thank you for posting this review and reminder of a unpolished gem, and I thank you from the bott0om of my heart.
Deep Cover is a great movie — and absolutely people should watch this.Seeing Jeff Goldblum become a icy drug kingpin while being more Jeff Goldblum than ever is part of the acting one-two punch of him and the now-adult Lawrence Fishbourne starting to grow into his fullness as an actor that really makes this movie sing. The best scene between them is at the end, and it really makes you wish Hollywood had teamed them up more.I am shocked that Bill Duke did so little film work — he’s got real style, he’s good with both the camera and actors, and did the best Nero Wolfe movie ever, The Golden Spiders. He even managed to keep a grip on Timothy Hutton’s tendency to ACT! All Over the Place, which is no small feat….
You shouldn’t have done that…But I did, SO GET IN THE FUCKING VAN!