Liberation of L.B. Jones, The (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Apr 24, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
William WylerRelease Date(s)
1970 (February 26, 2025)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Imprint Films/Via Vision Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: B
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: F
Review
[Editor's Note: This is a Region-Free Australian Blu-ray import.]
Longtime director William Wyler’s final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970) faintly echoes Norman Jewison’s earlier In the Heat of the Night (1967) done not as well. The cast is good, and the film offers a handful of interesting scenes; the pacing is a little pokey until the final half-hour, but interest is maintained throughout. Yet, it plays like Wyler’s heart wasn’t in it, or maybe he was just too old and too tired. Though at $3.5 million it was moderately expensive for what it was, Wyler shot it in just five weeks and it looks it. It’s not a good sign when the work of the second unit director is superior to footage by the primary director.
Unusual for a Hollywood studio picture, there’s no protagonist: it’s an ensemble film. The film opens with young lawyer Steve Mundine (Lee Majors) and his new wife, Nella (Barbara Hershey), arriving in Somerton, Tennessee, by train, he to go to work for his respected lawyer uncle, Oman Hedgepath (Lee J. Cobb). Also aboard the train is “Sonny Boy” Mosby (Yaphet Kotto), returning home after many years, carrying a loaded pistol around in a cigar box; gradually the audience learns he intends to kill policeman Stanley Bumpus (Arch Johnson) who, in a racist attack, viciously beat Sonny Boy when he was a teenager.
Bumpus’s partner, Willie Joe Worth (Anthony Zerbe), has been having an extramarital affair with Emma Jones (Lola Falana), the much younger wife of the town’s wealthy undertaker, L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne). Painfully aware of his wife’s infidelity, Jones asks Hedgepath to represent him in divorce proceedings, but the old attorney wants to avoid trouble. Years before, his own impending marriage was canceled when his fiancée learned of his earlier affair with a black woman. In other words, through open court testimony, Worth would certainly lose both his job and family, so Hedgepath quietly urges him to work something out with Jones, no easy task as the funeral director is determined to stand his ground.
Variety called it “not much more than an interracial sexploitation film,” but that’s not remotely true. The best qualities of The Liberation of L.B. Jones are its credible scenes of casual racism by Hedgepath, the mayor (Dub Taylor), but most especially by everyone on the local police force. Worth beats Emma even after she claims to be pregnant, and later he forces the wife of an arrested black man into sex in the back seat of his patrol car, she pleading for his release so he won’t lose his job. After the execution-style murder of one black character by Worth, and mutilation of the body by Bumpus (to make it looks like a black revenge killing, supposedly), they casually report their heinous act to their desk sergeant (Chill Wills) and together plot arresting black “suspects,” one of whom (dancer Fayard Nicholas) was locked-up in jail at the time.
Steve and Nella, Northerners, presumably, are uncomfortable with their uncle’s use of racial epitaphs. He’s not hateful or sadistic as Worth and Bumpus are, yet likewise regards his African-American neighbors as inferior. In nostalgically revealing to Steve the story of his long-ago affair with that black woman, he confesses he began to think of her as “human.”
Unfortunately, the narrative is mostly on a slow boil until the last act, when things finally heat up, too little and too late, including a particularly grisly, satisfying death at the end. The performances are all good or better than good, particularly Kotto, Cobb, and Zerbe, but Wyler’s direction of the film’s visual elements is flaccid. Most scenes are over-lit in a very late-‘60s Hollywood studio manner, and though shot on location in Tennessee, there’s little local flavor beyond the opening and closing scenes aboard the train, that likely shot by second unit director-editor Robert Swink.
Australian label Imprint’s Region-Free Blu-ray is also a little disappointing. It appears Sony provided them with an older 1080p master, which is not significantly sharper than a good-looking DVD. The film element sourced is free of dirt and damage and the color seems accurate, but it’s rather soft and bland throughout. Released theatrically in 1.85:1 widescreen, the presentation is 1.78:1 full screen, though that’s splitting hairs. The LPCM 2.0 mono is better, and optional English subtitles are provided.
Surprisingly, there are no extra features at all, not even a trailer.
William Wyler never made another film. A strange, dispirited end-of-career work from the man who directed Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday, The Big Country, and Ben-Hur.
- Stuart Galbraith IV