The Landlord

At the age of twenty-nine, Elgar Enders "runs away" from home. This running away consists of buying a building in a black ghetto in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. Initially his intention is to evict the black tenants and convert it into a posh flat. But Elgar is not one to be bound by yesterday's urges, and soon he has other thoughts on his mind.

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Movies like The Landlord just don't get made anymore. Nowadays, the plot--an idle, wealthy young man (Beau Bridges) buys a tenement house in a poor black neighborhood and finds himself confronted and changed by the radically different lives his tenants lead--would be the basis for a broad comedy or a ponderous, self-important statement picture in which the hero comes to a profound understanding of something bland and inoffensive. But in the 1970s, a movie could be something too slippery to categorize. The Landlord is part social satire, part character study, part serious examination of race and class--and it delves into these things without having any answers or even strong advice, just a sense of the reality it depicts. Bridges, with his baby-faced innocence, is excellent, as are Lee Grant as his capricious mother and Pearl Bailey and Lou Gossett as some of his tenants; the rest of the cast is less recognizable but just as good. The movie uses abrupt editing to juxtapose the past and present or upper- and lower-class environments; the production and costume design use black and white to subtly comment on our responses to color in the world. The accumulation of all this lacks the focus that might make The Landlord a great movie, but it is a provocative, unpredictable, and engaging one, and well worth watching. --Bret Fetzer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.