The Best Old Movies On a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 2-8
The Glass Shield (1994)
Directed by Charles Burnett
It’s fitting that Ice Cube—who, along with the rest of the seminal gangsta-rap group N.W.A., scored a hit and attendant controversy by rapping “Fuck tha Police”—appears in this film as an ordinary guy framed by the Los Angeles police for murder. In essence, The Glass Shield is Burnett’s feature-length “Fuck tha Police” movie, one that courses with a similar sense of outrage at the corruption it portrays. If Burnett’s anger to some extent overrides the sense of poetic observation that distinguished his earlier films (Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep With Anger), his welcome attention to humanistic nuance still occasionally shines through. Otherwise-innocent rookie cop J.J. Johnson (Michael Boatman) does make one costly mistake as a result of his initial eagerness to fit in; even crooked detective Gene Bass (Michael Ironside) is allowed one poignantly human moment in his devastated reaction upon seeing a long-time friend/colleague die right in front of him. Appropriate, then, that Elliot Davis’s cinematography in The Glass Shield abounds in shadowy interiors and silhouettes: No one is completely good or evil in Burnett’s world, as the main character eventually, heartbreakingly realizes. Kenji Fujishima (September 8, 4:30pm, 7pm, 9:30pm at BAM’s “Set It Off: LA Hip-Hop on Film”)