USAdrama1995 color 119 min.
Director: Allen and Albert Hughes
CAV/CLV: $99.95 - available
           2 discs, catalog # CC1453L


What should concern not only film critics and reviewers, but all citizens of the United States in this age of O. J. and Farrakhanıs Million Man March, is the problem of language and race. We have yet to evolve an appropriate vocabulary that neutralizes the fictions and attendant mythologies of racialist thought.
In the case of Dead Presidents, if a white reviewer made note of the fact that one of the film's submotifs involves background imagery of black men eating chicken, some sensibilities would be offended by the observation, and the reviewer would be attacked as a racist. Obviously, Allen and Albert like to get with some KFC. So why shouldn't America in all its ethnic diversity be able to discuss the meaning of a drumstick of fried chicken in a Hughes brothers film? I'll assume you get the point I'm driving at.
The additional problem in discussing Dead Presidents is its marketing. The film is saddled by both the hype generated by the on-point brilliance of Menace II Society and a promotional campaign framing it as an action-crime drama by individuals who have no inkling of African-American aesthetics. The vocabulary of the marketplace often undercuts serious critical dialogue in judging aesthetic value.
The Hughes brothers, hip-hop heads that they are, after turning a three-million-dollar production into a thirty-million-dollar hit, followed their generation's dictum, the Public Enemy call: DONıT BELIEVE THE HYPE! and resisted pressure to produce a calculated commercial production. Instead, with Dead Presidents, the Hughes brothers seized a space for themselves to grow, not only as filmmakers but also as men. Menace II Society examined the meaning of manhood in South Central Los Angeles by combining the urgency of rap with the explosive visual power of graffiti, spinning a visceral tale of ghetto noir: off-the-deep-end Dads squeezing the trigger on welshing poker pardners with licorice-stick crackheads opening their toothless mouths and drooling blood while offering to gum the local dopeboys for a piece o' da rock. It was, as they say, the real shit.
Dead Presidents is based on portions of the book Bloods, a documentary look at African-American G.I.s in 'Nam (Ari Merretazon's story in particular); and events inspired by the attempted 1973 holdup of an armored truck by the Black Liberation Army (the film's character of political conscience is loosely based on exiled revolutionary Assata Shakur -- no relation to Tupac, though his mother is also a former member of the Black Panther Party), as well as Merretazon's own attempted robbery. Its title refers to the worn U.S. currency slated for incineration at the center of the plot.
The story begins in adolescent innocence; but, given as it's the late '60s, that innocence is shattered by the absurd and grotesque cruelties of war (this absurdity is heightened when one realizes it's also a movie simulacrum financed by the Disney corporation, staged on a cattle ranch in Florida). With his humanity numbed and buried by the experience of Vietnam, Dead Presidents' protagonist returns with a value system wholly out of sync with early '70s America. His attempts at readjustment are thwarted at every turn; in the process, he realizes that despite his earnest efforts, the values of a local pimp who has been supporting the mother of his child prove greater than his own. In his final descent into a true moral hell, what's left of his humanity rolls out of his soul in one final roar. Flinging a chair at a black-robed Martin Sheen, seated behind a judge's bench, the protagonist attacks the very system that created what he has become. It is a moment that speaks to the frustrations felt by African-Americans across the generations.
Due to Dead Presidents' Vietnam-era coming-of-age theme, followed by a descent into a world of crime, the film is a very close cousin to John Woo's Bullet in the Head. It hits all the conventional points of Western dramatic structure (one critic, Don Shewey, compared the language of Western drama to sex: foreplay, friction, squirt, snore); it has the trappings of the crime-action genre; and the visual signifiers that scream '70s big-afro funk. But the essence of the film is neither crime action drama nor period protest piece. It is an essay, a cinematic meditation reflecting on the roots of the generation which sired the rag-eared ghetto dogs of the drive-by '90s. It explores the motivations of a generation of African-American men who would eventually give birth to the psycho teens who popped each other off like kernels of Orville Redenbacher's microwaved corn in Menace II Society. In the final analysis, Dead Presidents is the son questioning the experience of the father, to deepen his understanding of self.
-- Darius James

Darius James is the author of Negrophobia and That's Blaxploitation! Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude.

Credits

Produced and directed by: The Hughes Brothers
Screenplay by: Michael Henry Brown
Story by: Allen & Albert Hughes and Michael Henry Brown
Executive producer: Darryl Porter
Director of photography: Lisa Rinzler
Production designer: David Brisbin
Editor: Dan Lebental
Costume designer: Paul A. Simmons
Co-producer: Michael Bennett
Music by: Danny Elfman
Music supervisor: Bonnie Greenberg
Casting: Risa Bramon Garcia & Mary Vernieu

Transfer

about the transfer Dead Presidents is presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1. This digital transfer was created from a 35mm interpositive and the 2 track stereo print master.
Telecine operator: Gregg Garvin/Modern Videofilm, Los Angeles; supervised by the Hughes brothers and director of photography Lisa Rinzler.
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