THE LANDLORD (1970)

The name Hal Ashby isn’t heard much these days. Perhaps this is because his career fizzled out as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, or perhaps it’s because the celebrated films of the ’70s tend to be the darker, more paranoid kind, rather than the frothier crowd-pleasers. So it may be easy to forget that Ashby was a big name in the ’70s, most notably for Shampoo (1975) as well as other once-well-known films like Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Coming Home (1978), and Being There (1979).

The Landlord, his first feature film as director, hints at the path Ashby would take over the coming decade—making films that were frequently humorous but never lost sight of a more serious meaning. It also introduces several ideas that would recur in his work. In The Landlord, we see a young man trying to escape a domineering mother (as in Harold and Maude), a doomed romance between a man and a woman whose husband is away (as in Coming Home), an innocent whose natural goodness and wisdom sustain him when plunged into a world he understands nothing of (as in Being There), and so on.

The film may differ from Ashby’s other works in being so overtly about race—the premise (though not its development) is practically a direct inversion of Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope (1969) from the previous year. However, the characters’ situations share some similarities. Beau Bridges romancing a black woman in The Landlord directly connects to young Bud Cort falling for a woman nearing 80 in Harold and Maude, for example. Bridges’ character often seems as lost in the real world as Peter Sellers does in Being There.

Based on a 1966 novel by Kristin Hunter, adapted for the screen by Bill Gunn (both Black, unlike Ashby), The Landlord was originally slated to be directed by Norman Jewison. However, he handed it over to his protégé, Ashby—who had worked for Jewison as an editor on several films. The result was an impressively accomplished debut, a film that has certainly dated a good deal in its style and subject matter, but which remains lively and engaging thanks to Ashby’s direction, Gunn’s screenplay, and several of the performances. The editing by William A. Sawyer and Edward Warschilka also does much to maintain the film’s energy, as do the several songs written for it by Al Kooper.

We meet Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders (Bridges) almost as soon as The Landlord begins. He lounges in the garden of a huge house, being served by a Black manservant (Stanley Greene). Before long, he speaks directly to the camera, intercut with brief shots of Black people living far less privileged lives elsewhere. Soon after, he’s playing squash in a dazzlingly white court.

The film constantly emphasises Elgar’s whiteness. He wears white, the camera lingers on the “White” marque on the front of a truck, his mother’s cat is white, and even the cold soup the manservant serves to Elgar’s family later is white. This hammering home of Elgar’s whiteness could easily become annoyingly heavy-handed, and viewers might soon start to imagine deliberate references to the colour white that are actually coincidental. However, Ashby and Gunn manage to pull it off precisely because it’s so excessive and, at times (like the soup), inventive. While they certainly have serious things to say about race and the racial tensions in America at the time, they also seem to be mocking the solemn “Racial Issue Drama.”

The rather different comedy standards of the early 1970s are also on display. Elgar drives to a run-down area of Brooklyn where he has bought a house. He is almost immediately blackmailed by young Walter Gee (wonderfully played by Doug Grant), a boy of about 10. Walter hides in his car and then threatens to accuse him of sexual molestation if he doesn’t pay up. Shortly afterwards, the boy lights up a cigarette, too, and all this is played for laughs…

Finally entering his new property, Elgar encounters some of the residents. Marge (Pearl Bailey) has a truly awful painting of Martin Luther King on her wall and gives him the lowdown on the building—its inhabitants, all Black, are allergic to paying their rent.

Walter Gee’s mother, Franny (Diana Sands), is flirtatious, but her husband, Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.), seems to suffer from serious confusion about his racial identity. He “was Sioux Indian for two years,” Elgar is told, then “turned Black.” Most are friendly, although Professor Duboise (Melvin Stewart) is hostile.

In due course, Elgar will have a brief fling with Franny and a more serious romance with Lanie (Markie Bey), a mixed-race woman who dances at a local club. He will be pursued by an axe-wielding Copee and witness Black pride in action when he finally attends one of Professor Duboise’s classes for local children. This mixture of semi-serious personal story, sheer slapstick, and social commentary is typical of The Landlord as a whole, and often all facets of the film are visible in individual characters. Copee’s shifting identities are humorously absurd on one level, for example, but his mental illness also pushes the movie in an unexpectedly dark direction later on. Crucially, Ashby and Gunn also take Copee’s relationship with his wife, Franny, seriously: although Elgar is the protagonist, the Black characters (especially the women) are real people with real lives, and mostly better developed than the white ones—even Elgar himself.

Indeed, at times you feel you’re missing the real story—that there are probably interesting things happening in these people’s lives that don’t involve Elgar at all. Yet their utter reality is one of the film’s biggest strengths and forges a strong link between the comedic and more serious elements of The Landlord: even when what’s happening to them is ridiculous, the main Black characters are completely believable. Elgar himself is more of a blank slate—though older at 29, he’s slightly reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman’s Ben in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967), discovering through the film what he wants in life and gaining the strength to fight for it. “I am 29 years old and I have run away from home,” Elgar eventually says, realising how bizarre it is that someone could be “running away” at that age.

His family is far more caricatured, with his uber-Republican father (“Young man, I’ll not have you talking against the tobacco industry in this house!”) outraged by his son’s purchase of a house in a “coloured neighbourhood,” and his half-hearted liberal sister (“I think somebody’s got to begin to integrate [racially]… I can’t… I don’t have the stomach for it”).

Walter Brooke as Elgar’s father, Susan Anspach as his sister, Robert Klein as a young executive with a napalm manufacturer who will soon be marrying into the family, and above all Lee Grant as Elgar’s mother (nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress) are all superb. At the same time, Joe Madden is expressively funny in a tiny, silent role as Elgar’s grandfather. Bridges as Elgar himself doesn’t quite deliver what the role truly needs—he’s so weak, passive, and seemingly naive so much of the time that the flashes of determination and grit fail to convince. This isn’t wholly his fault, though; it’s difficult to escape the impression that Ashby and Gunn are more interested in the secondary characters surrounding their nominal protagonist. (Both the director and the writer appear momentarily and uncredited at the very beginning.)

Among the Brooklynites, it’s Sands, Bailey, and Bey who shine, all giving nuanced portrayals of women at different stages of their lives. None of them are flawless by any means, but all are essentially good people. A sequence where Elgar’s mother gets drunk with Marge is one of the film’s highlights and one of the few points where a member of Elgar’s family is seen as a well-rounded human being.

Throughout all this Ashby is immensely confident with the camera, especially at a party scene in the Brooklyn house and in a rhapsodical, near-abstract scene of Elgar and Lanie kissing in extreme close-up. It is also his confidence that enables The Landlord to get away—just about—with some odder directorial decisions when he more or less abandons the storyline in favour of a purely rhetorical flourish: repeated short flashbacks to the child Elgar at school, several points where characters speak directly to the camera, a scene near the end with black children learning martial arts, a repeated image of a pacing nurse.

The Landlord is very much a film of its time. As well as jokes about paedophilia and underage smoking, it includes the N-word, a reference to “pickaninnies,” and a white character in blackface (although in this case, the film is mocking him, not Black people). Indeed, critic Judith Crist wrote, “Not an avenue of offensiveness to any race is left unexplored” (though the other great New York female film critic of the day, the notoriously difficult-to-please Pauline Kael, loved it—a recommendation in itself).

Despite the dominant roles played by very sympathetic and finely acted black characters, it is ultimately a film for white audiences. Blackness is presented as something different and novel to be embraced, rather than an everyday reality. Elgar, with his hyper-white and wealthy family, may not be an average white person himself, but he nevertheless stands in for the enlightened white viewer of 1970, rejecting the racism of their parent’s generation.

However, the gulf between Elgar and the tenants of his new property is obvious from the beginning. A fundamental implication is rarely alluded to until the very end, and this has nothing to do with Elgar’s affluence or his family’s overt prejudice. A Black woman who has just given birth says of her baby, “I wanted him adopted as white… I want him to grow up casual.” With the word “casual,” she’s speaking of what we now call “white privilege.”

In that respect, The Landlord perhaps hasn’t aged as much as it might appear. Even though Brooklyn would be unrecognisable today, the challenges its characters face are not. Ashby’s film may not go beyond broad brushstrokes in its treatment of these issues, but there’s a seriousness at its heart that gives The Landlord far more weight than its sillier comedic moments might suggest.

USA | 1970 | 112 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• 2K transfer by Kino Lorbe and uncompressed mono PCM audio. While the generous selection of bonus features includes some new material as well as three substantial interviews from a couple of years ago, the visual and aural quality of the Blu-ray is distinctly old-school—in a good way. This is not a movie that would benefit from being digitally enhanced, and while there are certainly no imperfections in the transfer to interfere with enjoyment, it still has the feel of analogue film and the feel of 1970.
• ‘The Racial Gap’—interview with star Beau Bridges (2019, 25 minutes).
• ‘Reflections’—interview with Lee Grant (2019, 26 minutes).
• ‘Style and Substance’—interview with Norman Jewison (2019, 29 minutes).
• Interview with Hal Ashby biographer Nick Dawson (2024).
• Interview with broadcaster and author Ellen E. Jones (2024).
• Trailer.
• English subtitles.
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Vincent Wild.
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by critic Jourdain Searles.

Cast & Crew

director: Hal Ashby.
writer: Bill Gunn (based on the novel by Kristin Hunter).
starring: Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Pearl Bailey & Walter Brooke.