If He Hollers, Let Him GO! — If He Hollers, Let Him GO!( Blu Ray)
Based on the 1945 Chester Himes novel of the same name, Charles Martin’s 1968 adaptation of If He Hollers, Let Him GO! follows James Lake (Raymond St. Jacques); a man wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a white woman. On the night he escapes from prison he is picked up by the seemingly friendly Leslie Whitlock (Kevin McCarthy), the pair hit it off until Leslie attempts to blackmail James into murdering his wife Ellen (Dana Wynter) in an attempt to get rich from the inheritance money. Soon James finds himself on the run from the law again, and this time he’s going to make sure he proves his innocence.
When this film opened with a classic prison break sequence, right down to having a roaming search light which James deftly dodges, and an astonishingly good Barbara McNair track called A Man Has To Love blasting over a sequence of tense and claustrophobic shots of James fleeing the scene I thought I would be in for a true underrated gem. Admittedly this level of excitement carried on well in to the film’s first act. It was when James had finally escaped the house of Leslie Whitlock that the film’s pacing began to meander and struggle to keep up with the excitement and tension set up by the those opening forty or so minutes.
Those first forty minutes form an extremely enthralling bottle episode, the film begins with this really simple but very engaging hostage situation. The build up is handled with deft skill as the slow drive home with Leslie and James lures you into this false sense of security as the two seem to very quickly gain each other’s trust. They banter over drinks in Leslie’s living room, with jokes about attributing a Shakespeare quote to Beethoven. You can see there is a palpable racial tension that is being weaved around by Leslie before he quickly descends into blackmailing James. The performances really shine the best during this act of the film, Jacques and McCarthy’s performances effortlessly communicate how uncomfortable and hostile this environment actually is under this sheen of politeness.
Where Martin’s film falls short is in its second half. Here we learn of the reasons that James has been imprisoned, of the prejudice that has locked him away as well as seeing how he ultimately brings Leslie to justice. Now there are elements here which are interesting, notably the discussion of hate crime during the flashbacks, but the disjointed nature of these elements makes this half very messy. Both tonally and narratively the film becomes quite confused and that ultimately leaves us with a conclusion that suffers from being hard to follow.
This new release of the film from Dark Force Entertainment is presented in a crisp 2K restoration from the original 35mm print, with extensive work done on the colour correction of the film. A new restoration for films like this, that is obscure and forgotten, is always a big win for the world of film preservation because now we can discover what these films have to say and the work of artists we thought we’d never see can finally be easily accessed by all.
If He Hollers starts so strongly but very quickly becomes needlessly hard to follow and ends up relying on flashbacks to carry the narrative, which they do to some extent but the interstitial scenes really drag the pacing to a halt. Martin’s skill is best shown in that first act set within Leslie’s house; an incredible piece of tense melodrama that captures some of the subtler aspects of the film's wider study of hate crime.