Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975)

Truly Dreadful Film

Lack of good storyline.

Excellent but underrated film

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Cornbread, Earl and Me is NOT a blaxploitation film, what a ridiculous idea. This is a serious, beautiful, and powerful drama that is well acted and thoughtfully conceived. It also has a great soundtrack. Obviously, it is also highly underrated.Everything in this movie rings true to real life, so it is funny to notice that some other reviewers say the opposite. It seems to me their problem is that it doesn't ring true to the fantasy of motion pictures, rather than that it doesn't ring true to reality.Does the courtroom scene not seem realistic? Here is a news flash: the real life drama that goes down in real life courtrooms is chaotic and often bizarre. That's reality. Everything in this film felt true to me, and it rings true as a human story, leaving politics and ideology completely out of it.And speaking of the courtroom scene, the way the coroner in charge of the courtroom treats the people coldly and superciliously and then gradually becomes ashamed of himself as they behave with grace and dignity is TOTALLY TRUE TO LIFE. It doesn't even have anything to do with race, which is one of the beautiful things about this film. The black people in the gallery feel like it has something to do with race, and the movie makes you understand how they would feel that way, but it also leaves the door open for you to understand that from the coroner's perspective race really might not be any factor in the equation of his behavior. He's just trying to churn through the usual bullshit and get through the day.You don't know there are poor people who try to maintain their dignity and want to pay their way instead of signing off on a poor man's waiver? If you think that's not reality, you haven't seen much of the world. You don't know that their lips sometimes tremble when they reject the waiver and pay their cash instead?So much of this movie is really beautifully acted. Laurence Fishburne puts in one of the best performances from a child actor that you will ever see. Several of the adults are even better.To put it simply, this is a great film. The scene when the cops shoot Cornbread is as good an example of how the wrong person can end up being shot as you will find anywhere in motion pictures. The cops are afraid, they're doing something brave under difficult circumstances, we in the audience can practically feel the rain pouring down on us and clouding our vision, and they shoot the person they legitimately believe to be a murderous criminal running away from them. It takes them weeks or more to realize they were wrong. They aren't bad men, or even bad cops, they just made a bad decision under a bad set of circumstances.Or is the basketball element and the families involved supposed to be a caricature that should offend us? Really? Because it could have come straight out of the documentary Hoop Dreams which was produced twenty years later. Are we meant to suppose that all of the people depicted in Hoop Dreams decided to base their whole lives and personalities off of Cornbread, Earl and Me? Or can we admit that in fact families, neighborhoods, and characters like this existed in real life?Apparently Cornbread, Earl and Me is too real for some people. Or maybe it just goes over many audience heads. The beauty of its drama is sometimes subtly wrought, to be fair. But if you can watch it with an open mind it is an extraordinary film and well worth your time.Having seen it once as a teenager, and once again recently (many years later), I feel strongly enough about it to create an account to write this review. So there you go.

Cornbread, Earl and Me is a long way from a perfect film. Some of the characters are overdrawn, and some are cornily acted. But it is, as others say, truthful -- painfully so. And that's to it's eternal credit. At the center of the films' inevitable and staggering sequence is a very young Laurence Fishburn as the nominal "Me". I had heard the odd-sounding title of this film for decades without seeing it. When it came on THIS network, I settled in to give it a watch, expecting something poignant and earnest. It delivered. To snipe at the film unfairly, perhaps, I wish that the police hadn't been so corrupt by design. I wish that the investigators from central precinct hadn't been so fast to act like jerks. I guess I wanted the epically weepy, tragic vibe of the central scene to carry on for at least the middle third of the film. But in rapid succession after the death, we are presented things which turn our sadness to anger and then to militancy. At that point, even the most naive viewer will be aware of how heavily we are being manipulated by the film's makers. The danger of subconscious and then conscious satirical reaction and resulting camp "failed seriousness" is never far away in the last half of this film.I don't disagree with the politics. I don't disagree with the film's matter-of-fact assertion that police are often abusive of the privilege and power that their gun and authorization to use it gives them. I know this is true. But knowing it, that's the thing: I don't have to sit still to be told it and retold it for an hour and a half. Evoking a touching, bitterly poignant moment ... now that's something many and many a freshman film maker attempts, and achieves only clumsily or not at all. I have to give this director and writer kudos for lining up the awful moment where the two halves of the film, the pastoral and the horrific, collide and fracture the characters' world. It's heart-rending. But I think they made a mistake in not allowing the rare and beautiful chord they achieve -- The Truth, wound up in sorrow-- to sustain for a bit longer.The courtroom scenes and a lot else in the last half are rather amateurishly staged and acted. But, thank God, we will always have the first half of this film, with Laurence Fishburn's incredible breakdown, Rosiland Cash's terrible epiphany and the harrowing minutes after that. These moments would seem to guarantee the film immortality.A generous 7 of 10 stars. When this film is good, it wails. When it is bad, it is truly some of the worst "blaxploitation" footage I have ever sat through. If ever any film did, this one proves that a film's heart being in the right place will keep you on it's side, even as it wheels off it's axis and into the void.

The film does have a moderately intriguing mesage about polkice brutality and political corruption being obscenely hoisted upon African American communities in the urban United States. That said, the film is horribly dated, and elements of it are unnacceptable by today's standards. I mean the slain icon's name is Cornbread for Pete's sake!!! Where wre his cohorts Fried Chicken and Watermelon? Moreover, the societal corruption is presented in a way that makes us feel sad and powerless rather than angry and indignant. This is really a product of the early seventies Blaxploitation genre that would be utterly offensive by today's standards were it not for the still relevant and timely subject matter of the film. Worthwhile viewing for those who can differentiate between the message and the overdone elements. I fear, however, that the film's excess could leave white biggots laughing at the maudlin African American stereotypes on parade rather than addressing the political concerns of the film at all.

This is a rather well done film with great performances. Where it drops the ball is on the overdramatic music that sledgehammers the emotional tone of the more dramatic scenes.It resists the temptation of villianizing all of the antagonists, especially the judge (which no doubt would've been portrayed as racist and corrupt in a similar film made today).Bernie Casey (who I'll always think of as U.N Jefferson in Revenge Of The Nerds) is terrific and it's too bad I don't see him in too many films today.Great 70's feel and the first appearance of Larry Fishburn makes this a film to check out.