11/18/08: The Final Comedown (1972)Let’s begin by giving away the final comedown at the end of
The Final Comedown: Billy Dee Williams dies. Actually, it’s not the Billy Dee Williams we know and love from
The Empire Strikes Back or
Secret Agent 00 Soul. This is the young serious actor Billy Dee Williams, who’d soon be launching his career with
Lady Sings The Blues and the classic TV-movie
Brian’s Song.
The Final Comedown was filmed amongst those other early performances. That’s kind of baffling. This one’s a particularly inept low-budget production. Williams was enough of a name to wrangle a production credit, but nobody would want to be associated with this fiasco. There’s a good reason that
The Final Comedown is public domain. We’ve never seen a copy that didn’t have serious dubbing problems. A lot of the movie was simply shot without sound—including a seduction scene that attempts to work around the problem by filming Williams and Pamela Jones from the neck down. The director tries to make that look meaningful, but it’s just brilliantly bad.
The Final Comedown still starts with proud pretension, as black militants recite the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. We can appreciate the angry irony there. Then we lose sympathy as the film establishes that young black militant Johnny Johnson (Williams) is dying from some bullet wounds while he hides behind police barricades in a Los Angeles neighborhood. It’s so unfair, too, since all Johnny was doing was leading a bunch of his followers in randomly shooting at police.
And you know what’s even worse? Johnny trusted these rich white militant kids to show up and join in the rioting. See, he’d gotten together with them, and everyone had agreed that what would really wake up America would be for a bunch of white college kids to get killed while joining a riot started by black militants. Then those white kids didn’t show up for the riot, and that left Johnny exposed to some police fire. That’s how Johnny got shot. Who could’ve seen that coming?
That’s all established during the film’s dizzy opening moments. From there, we get a disjointed series of flashbacks telling Johnny’s story while some fellow militants run off to abduct a black doctor. The doctor tries to hide, but he’s forcibly dragged into the battle zone. The sneering militants are happy to make sure that the Uncle Tom experiences some of the real world. We’ll later learn that they were a little too happy, since they didn’t give the doctor a chance to bring along any useful medication. The doctor will try to go back to his office and get something to help Johnny. Unfortunately, he won’t get far before being shot dead by a racist cop. Who couldn’t have seen that coming?
So we’ve got a dying black militant who’s been betrayed by weasely white militants. You know how that can get better? One of the white militants who showed up late for the gunplay—along with his girlfriend, who Johnny has also slept with in a display of unity—will eventually get around to joining Johnny for the fatal final shootout. We’re pretty sure Johnny’s poor mother gets killed, too. It’s hard to tell, and we’ve watched the ending three times now.
Speaking of Mom, we should bring up our favorite part of the movie. We see Johnny expressing a lot of anger toward his parents. He’s upset that his mother is happy to be a housekeeper for wealthy whites, while his father runs a shoeshine stand. Johnny doesn’t like how they believe that a black man can thrive just by working hard. That’s why Johnny gets involved with the local militants, even though they initially dismiss him as a college boy who…hey, wait a minute!
That’s right. This son of a shoeshine man and a maid has gone on to get a college degree. That’s just part of the big conspiracy, though. Johnny can’t get a job. The young man can impress the big corporations on paper, but nobody will hire him once they see the color of his skin. This is illustrated in a terrific scene where a white corporate guy pretty much leans over to his secretary and whispers, “Ixnay on the ackblay.”
Oh, if only Johnny had some kind of role model, like a black man who’d started his own business and managed to—oh, wait. That’d be Johnny’s father, who’s a pathetic sell-out because he believes in the value of hard work. It’s obvious that someone who looks like Billy Dee Williams and has a college degree simply doesn’t stand a chance in this world.
The Final Comedown is full of this kind of brilliance. Here’s the real ending we’re giving away: the movie has no sense of self-awareness. Early on, we see a black cop saying that he hopes Johnny Johnson is already dead. That’s not a tribute to the cops that Johnny’s been firing at without consideration for their race. We’re supposed to pity the black police officer. Or maybe we’re supposed to hate him. Whatever. The point is that he’s a dupe, and Johnny is our tragic hero.
The Final Comedown is still great comedy. Did we mention that two rich white militants die at the end? Bill Ayers would’ve stayed home. That’s tragedy.
Make it your own: We weren’t kidding. You can choose from
numerous cheap DVDs of
The Final Comedown. We can’t vouch for the quality, but we like the one that combines the movie with 1974’s
The Klansman.
We haven’t seen
Blast! That was an attempt to salvage the movie with additional footage shot by director Allan Arkush. He’s the same guy who directed
Rock ’n’ Roll High School, but it’s not likely anyone could’ve made something intelligent out of
The Final Comedown.
