User reviews

After 33 years things have certainly changed but this film still touches on issues that were very controversial back then and even now some of the events that take place are subject to debate. This story is about a young white entrepreneur named Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) and he buys a New York tenement in a ghetto with plans on having the tenants move out so he can renovate it into his own place to live. He moves in and meets Marge (Pearl Bailey) who tells him about the people that live there and he finds out that many of the tenants owe back rent for several months. Elgar also meets Franny (Diana Sands) and they both seem to like each other but she is in love with Copee (Louis Gossett Jr.) who doesn't like Elgar and is always threatening him. Elgar gets a lot of flack from his parents and his mother Joyce (Lee Grant) who doesn't understand him says she will help him with new curtains. Elgar meets a light skinned black woman named Lanie (Marki Bey) and he falls in love and wants to marry her but Franny shows up at his door one day and tells him that she is pregnant with his child.

This film was directed by the great Hal Ashby who makes his directorial debut after spending many years working as an editor. Ashby had worked on some of Norman Jewison's films and the two had become good friends. Jewison wanted to help Ashby on his first film and he was one of the producers. The script is sharply written and each character is very well detailed so that by the end of the film the viewer has a good understanding of each of them. The script does tackle racism and its look at on both perspectives of whites and blacks. Ashby uses colors to make points like the all white house and white clothing that the Enders have while the run down tenement that is occupied by mainly black residents has mainly gray tones with some of the interior shots having red. Along with the sharp script and direction this film has several very good performances in it. Lee Grant picked up an Oscar Nomination for her funny role as Bridges mother and the scene with her and Pearl Bailey is a classic. Bailey was making a rare film appearance and she would only appear in one more film until her death. Arguably the best performance comes from Sands. She shows so many layers to her character Franny and if a role ever deserved an Oscar Nomination it was this one. She's terrific here and sadly she would pass away from cancer only 4 years later. Bridges was still a very young actor when he was cast and even though he hadn't yet developed into the fine actor that he is today his performance is still sincere. Several up and coming actors appear in small roles like Susan Anspach, Robert Klein, Gloria Hendry, Trish Van Devere and Hector Elizondo. After all the time that has passed this film still comes across as poignant and pertinent.

As one of the scruffy underdog filmmakers of the 1970s- who's career unfortunately faltered in the 80s before his untimely death at 59- Hal Ashby was good at taking a set of characters and a particular idea or theme and getting under the surface just enough to make a mark, while also keeping it an oddly entertaining and accessible as a picture for the art houses. Also, it shows Ashby coming out of his cocoon of editing jobs (he even won an Oscar, for Jewison's In the Heat of the Night) by giving the Landlord a very particular rhythm. Many times he'll just let a scene play out, giving the actors the freedom to work with the script their way, and then other times he'll implement montage- or just a subliminal cut-away (or not so subliminal, as Lee Grant envisions an African tribe going to the Park Slope building, and a whole pack of black babies upon hearing about a little 'accident' her step-son caused late in the film).

I was really struck by how he uses experimentation for equal uses of humor, abstraction, and to just feel out the mood of the character(s) in the scene. Like when Brides runs to meet with Lanie at her school, and it's inter-cut with images from Fanny at her apartment, and Lanie, and a couple of other things. It can be called 'European'- and Ashby was an admitted fan of Godard's- but it feels unique to the sensibility of the production and the 'radical' feeling of the period. Meanwhile, Ashby has the best photography back up a first-time director could ask for: Gordon Willis and Michael Chapman, who give the film a look sometimes of lightness, especially when Elgar is at the family home and the walls are all a bland white, or seem to be; then other times they light it darker, like in a more intimate setting like Elgar and Lanie out by the beach at night, or just when at the Park Slope apartment. A scene especially with Elgar and Fanny is effective, not simply because she actually comments on how the red light makes her look a certain way- it's the timing of the actors, the awkward but strong sexual tension, and the red light, and the soft soul music coming up, that makes it one of the best scenes Ashby's ever filmed, thanks to the right team.

If the style verges on being a little "dated" here and there, like in the opening minutes as Elgar talks to the camera and says what he intends to do with the tenement, or those extreme close-ups of Elgar kissing with Lanie (which are quite striking on their own), its attitude towards the pure human problems of race haven't diminished that much. I liked seeing Bridges, who is spot-on as the total naive future yuppie who's heart is in the right place but confused how to really go about it as the new landlord, interact with the other apartment dwellers, their 'welcoming' by chasing him away with a flowered pot in his hands, or at the party when after getting him good and drunk tell him what it's really all about in first-person takes. And most of all it's funny and challenging to see, especially during a tense period around 1969 when it was filmed, how essential decency on either side of the race coin could get complicated by love and lust, of the rich family understandably not understanding how Elgar could go through this- not to mention the eventual 'mixed' dating and the pregnancy- and at the same time the tenees never totally knowing why, aside from foolish design ambitions, wanted to run the place to start with.

The best laughs end up coming from the awkward moments, and the obvious ones, as the subtle moments are meant to be more quiet and the 'big' laughs to come from the interaction of not just in terms of race but class; watch as everyone in the building uses the drapes from Joyce (Lee Grant in a well deserved Oscar nom performance) as clothes and head-dressing, or when Joyce has some pot liquor with Marge, who knows her better than her own family probably does. And who can resist the NAACP joke? Or a throwaway joke about dressing up as a historical figure for a costume ball? Ashby and his writers (both screenwriter and novelist were African-Americans) know not to slam every point home either, which uplifts the comedy to an honest playing field, which means that when a scene like the quasi-climax when Copee finds out about the pregnancy and flips out with an ax at Elgar it's not really all that jokey, when it easily could've been played as such for an exploitation effect. Only the very ending, which feels complicated by a sort of need to tidy things up with Elgar, Janie and the baby, feels sort of forced (not helped by the end song, not too ironic, called God Bless the Children).

But as it stands, the Landlord is provocative fun, if that makes sense, as it works as cool satire, led by sure-fire performances (Bridges has rarely been this good at being true to a mostly unsympathetic character), and it points the way for a career that the director would have where oddball slices of life wouldn't mean there wasn't larger points being made. It's one of the best bets as an obscure find a film-buff can have from 1970.

Certainly one of the Top 10 films of 1970, this ingenious comedy directed by Hal Ashby has never gotten the recognition it so deserves. Beau Bridges in this and Gaily, Gaily showed what a wonderful young actor he was, every bit as good as his brother, but never made that Star leap. Lee Grant (one of the best) is coy and cunning and wonderful as Bridges' mother and Diana Sands is heartbreaking, with excellent work from Lou Gossett and Pearl Bailey.

Great music and a topical plot, you can't help but get involved with this rich young man's "plight". One of Ashby's better films. A high 8 out of 10. Best performance = Lee Grant.

I was pleasantly surprised with the complexity of "The Landlord". It was brilliantly directed. The cutting between different scenes was effortless and added depth to the storyline. There was plenty of symbolism, which is one of the things I always look for and enjoy in a film. For instance, when Elgar (Bridges) and his father are having an argument in the bathroom during a costume party, there is a quick cutaway to another man in the bathroom who has on a gun holster, which I thought was symbolic of the 'shootout' that was going on between Elgar and his father. In addition, the Enders family is constantly seen wearing white, and their home is decorated in white.

I thought the acting was top notch. Beau Bridges was very convincing as a naive, sheltered man learning to appreciate and embrace a different culture. But the movie is so much deeper than that... It dealt with people trying to break free from stereotypes, people struggling to be proud of who they are and be accepted for who they are, and some people not even knowing who they are, trying to find their niche.

I love the scene at the party that was supposedly in honor of Elgar, where more than one person tells him what it feels like to go from being an outcast to being the envy of everyone. If I remember correctly, they likened it to you having a mole in the middle of your forehead, and people are basically disgusted by it. But, then one day, that becomes the thing to have, and people begin to draw moles on their faces, but you have a real mole right there on your forehead, prominent for everyone to see, and suddenly you are "it", and your self esteem is taken to new heights. It seems like everything would be fine for you now, but I also interpreted that speech as saying that, at the time, blacks felt like they were a fad that might eventually fade out. I thought the words were very powerful, as well as the way the scene was carried out.

I don't think a film such as this could be pulled off properly now, because there is the constant threat of backlash if things aren't completely "PC", not to mention the fact that things are so different now. I think this film was made at the right time, but it still rings true 31 years later. And, thank goodness for the satisfying and realistic ending.

Movies that deal with race have often been awkward things. One of the biggest problems is they tend to be horribly patronising in tone, many of them looking essentially at how white people can help black people. Most of them were of course written by someone white, which while it doesn't necessarily make it ill-informed, it doesn't tend to help either. The Landlord is one of the few from this era that is based on source material by a black writer (novelist Kristin Hunter). Hunter's novel was adapted by Bill Gunn, who is also black. Of all the pictures I have seen dealing with race in America, it is by far the most confrontational, and really the only of this period that really challenges white social supremacy as well as overt racism.

The late 60s and early 70s was really the age of the odd-looking movie, especially with all the new, young directors that were cropping up. The Landlord was the debut of Hal Ashby, a former editor who had recently won an Oscar for his very fine job on another race-related movie, In the Heat of the Night. Ashby has a somewhat blunt approach, and like most young directors seems to be trying to make his mark with lots of unusual but ultimately pointless camera angles and extremely obvious symbolism. One thing that is very striking is how the scenes at the Enders family home are very white and the scenes at the flat block are very black. This is not done so much with set and costume design, but with lighting, strip-light brightness for the former and gloomy half-light for the latter. In fact the movie might as well be in monochrome for all the actual colour tone there is in it. The black/white metaphor of this is a little heavy-handed but at least it also serves the purpose of highlighting the stark difference in quality of life. What is probably best about Ashby's method here is the distance he puts between camera and subject, often putting a bit of scenery in between us and the action, making us feel like snooping witnesses. He will then suddenly take us by surprise with a close-up as a character delivers some key line of dialogue.

In line with Mr Ashby having been an editor, The Landlord is very much an editor's movie. This was also the age of weird editing pattern, and there is a lot of cutting back-and-forth, mixing various scenes together. Sometimes this is rather effective (for example the powerful montage of schoolchildren towards the end, or the sight-gag inserts of what Lee Grant is imagining when she finds out she will have a black grandchild), but mostly it is just a little distracting, and because it is so mechanical it threatens to alienate the audience from the material. However, shining through the rather ostentatious style are some very fine acting performances (especially from Bridges, Grant and Diana Sands), notable for their realism in spite of the occasionally bizarre situations they are in. And what's more, in amongst this choppy editing is a story which is at turns comical, thought-provoking and gently poignant, which alongside its hard-hitting stance ultimately carries a message of hope and humanity.

Our hero here is Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders (Beau Bridges), age 29, a White, rich, and very naïve man who, much to the disgust of his hateful bourgeoisie family, cheerily buys a rundown urban tenement building, filled with Black, poor, and very sophisticated adults and street-wise kids. Elgar thus sets himself up to be caught in the middle of an inevitable culture clash.

Director Hal Ashby creates a cinematic social commentary suited to the late 1960s and early 70s that is both comedic and thoughtful. Elgar's tenement dwellers wrestle with serious issues, like how to pay the rent. Elgar's snobbish mother worries about what Elgar wears to an elitist banquet. The plot doesn't "flow" in a traditional way; instead, it feels "jerky"; long scenes are followed by very short scenes, followed again by long scenes, and so on.

This change in rhythm, brought about by cross-cutting, amplifies ironic contrasts between these two social classes. The resulting editing is satisfying in that the comedy takes the edge off of the anger attendant to the more serious subtext. This film style works well until the final twenty minutes when the plot becomes too heavy handed and alarming. The bow and arrow scene in the middle is okay, but the fearful ax scene toward the end, sans humor, is not okay because it disrupts tonal balance.

Ashby also wanted the cinematography to be darker in the tenement scenes than in Elgar's aristocratic family segments. The result is cinematography so dark in ghetto interior scenes I could sometimes not distinguish people from furniture.

Casting and acting are quite acceptable. The standout performance is Diana Sands as Fanny, "Miss Sepia of 1957". And then there's wonderful Pearl Baily; I never realized she had been that young looking.

Social commentary films do not usually age well. And "The Landlord" certainly shows its age. I kept expecting a Simon and Garfunkel song at almost any moment.

Overall, this film is an enjoyable throwback to a bygone era of hippies, social consciousness and the generation gap. It has its flaws, but hippie Ashby gets his message across effectively, owing to an adroit mix of seriousness and humor.

It was a great movie. I'm only 22 yrs old and just saw it for the first time only recently. It is a great movie that is able to drive several points home--consisting of racial prejudice, the view of African-American lifestyle at that point in time, and even the social snobbery that can occur in the upper-class. What is so wonderful about it however is the fact that it showcases these issues with such a wonderful quick sense of humor that one minute you might be in silence from a profound piece of dialogue or suspended moment and then the next scene will quickly have you laughing. Beau was great and so was EVERYONE else, especially Lee Grant.

Recently watched Hal Ashby's directorial debut, "The Landlord" at Manhattan's Film Forum. A complete revelation. How has it happened that this film is not as known as others from the same period? It is easily among the top films of the Hollywood renaissance of the '70s. Its take on racism is as fresh and complex as it was in 1970. In fact, one other reviewer is dead wrong about the film having no intrinsic style. It is a film loaded with style. (And, if I may add, if this reviewer thinks that all films aren't made in the editing room than you're sadly mistaken.) The film is as complicated, multi-layered, messy and ultimately indefinable as the problem of racism itself. There is no way to honestly treat this subject by making a neat little package film. We've been peeling this onion for hundreds of years and we'll be peeling it for hundreds more. Racism is as deeply ingrained in our society as our love of money and power. This film is only a "chore to sit through" if you have an aversion to fantastic writing, unbelievably great characters, amazing cinematography, brilliant editing and, yes, a complexity born of its subject. A film for the ages. Now if only the ages will catch up.

I was really with "The Landlord," Hal Ashby's offbeat 1970 comedy, up to a point, but by the end I really disliked this movie.

Most of the responsibility for that falls on lead actor Beau Bridges, who plays a socially conscious man brought up by an oblivious rich family and decides to rehab an apartment building in a black ghetto. I didn't like his character much, but that's not really the problem. I just don't like Beau Bridges very much, so it was hard to get into the groove of the film since he's in virtually every scene. Hal Ashby's quirky fingerprints are all over this movie, but the story starts to meander and unravel the longer the movie goes on. It's a shame I didn't like it more, because it's become incredibly relevant again, what with its dissection of gentrification and misguided white liberal guilt.

Lee Grant received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for playing one of the most popular character types to be recognized in that particular award category, the overbearing mother. She plays her like a dingbat society matron from one of those 1930s screwball comedies, but her performance becomes progressively more awkward as the film around her begins to shift in tone while she doesn't modulate at all to match it.

Grade: B

Beau Bridges plays a rich young man who, on a whim, buys a tenement building in a lousy neighborhood. His intention is to renovate the building into luxury apartments, but over time this changes as he starts to bond with his Black residents and seems like he would like to be Black as well. At first, when he comes to the building, he is scared away by some of the residents. Seeing Lou Gossett and the rest chasing him down the street was awfully funny, as were the social commentaries made by comparing these people with Bridges' stuck up liberal family--a family with lofty ideals, but were amazingly prejudiced at heart. However, after being a mildly diverting comedy, the film turned dreadfully serious and just seemed to lose momentum. It also had some nice insights about prejudice and race relations. In the end, though, much of original impact of the film just seemed lost. And, while it was meant as a bit of shocking film in its day, today it seems a tad dated and Bridges' character a bit unlikable.

I think aside from this mixed focus, I was also disappointed because the film was directed by the same man that did the delicious black comedy, HAROLD AND MAUDE. While some elements of THE LANDLORD seemed similar to this other film in spirit, this only seemed to be in fleeting glimpses. There were many excellent moments, but overall it just didn't hold my interest.

Hal Ashby's debut film may be somewhat over-directed, but it is one of his best;funny, provocative and pointed. And I prefer it to Bound for Glory,Coming Home,Harold and Maude and Shampoo. The Landlord is Ashby's most audacious film and along with The Last Detail (1973)it's his best. The change in tone is consistent with the main character's developing awareness and involvement with the tenants he had planned to displace in order to convert the building into his private home. Lee Grant is terrific as Bridge's mother and earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actress and no less memorable are Diana Sands, Pearl Bailey, and Louis Gossett Jr. Bridges is winning as the landlord who arrives to make change and winds up being changed and Trish Van Devere is funny in her one scene. The on location shooting, terrific cinematography and surprising dialog keep it real and interesting. Not as well known as it should be.

You sound to me like a bigot. You have eyes that are funny. Elgar is a rich white girl, twenty-nine years old, who recently purchased a rental property in the ghetto. He acts as the landlord and initially wants to demolish the property and build a house; however, he has some reluctance in constructing his dream home after getting to know the residents.Will Elgar succumb to his family members ' peer pressure or keep the property as it is? "You know what NAACP stands for? they are not always colored people." The Land Lord is delivered by Hal Ashby, producer of Harold and Maude, The Last Chapter, Coming Home, Being There, Shampoo, and The Slugger's Wife.For this picture, the plot is fun and entertaining to watch unfold, but not too original or special. The characters are intriguing and the script has been written reasonably well. The cast includes Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett, and Marki Bey. "I think you've got a series of castrations."I found this movie enjoyable and entertaining to watch unfold, but some scenes were boring, some interesting, and some humorous. This movie was worth watching once, but in the classroom I wouldn't suggest it was shifting society or worth watching. "

I tried to stay with "The Landlord". I really did. I watched it first because I was into early 1970 movies filmed on location in New York City. When I found that there wasn't too much background footage, I stuck with it to see where it was going. Now, I understand what the writer and filmmaker were going for: the perception and direction of the black community at this period of time and the integration of a naive white person in the midst of it. But I found it to be slow moving, not due to the actors - who do a decent job - and wondering where it was going and ultimately when it was going to end. I know that tons of people like and love this film. And I'm not saying it's awful, but I did lose interest in it, very early on.

Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) is a trust fund baby who has never really worked. He buys a ghetto tenement house. He plans to evict the tenants and remodel the house in gentrifying Brooklyn. The fish out of water starts to find himself falling for the black neighborhood and its people.

Director Hal Ashby is starting the 70's with a comedic satire about race, wealth, and gentrification. It's got the 70's style. I like the premise. I like the ribbing but it's not that funny despite all the wacky attempts at humor. It's just dated. As a comedy, I struggle to get to a laugh. Like his Being There at the end of the decade, I have a tough time with Ashby's style of social comedy. I appreciate it but he rarely makes me laugh. Harold and Maude is probably the only one.

Hal Ashby (famous for the likes of "Harold and Maude", "The Last Detail", "Shampoo", "Bound for Glory", "Coming Home" and "Being There") made his directorial debut with the offbeat Beau Bridges vehicle "The Landlord". Bridges plays Elgar Enders, the son of a wealthy - but pretty despondent - landlady (Lee Grant). Grouchy and pretty bigoted, this woman cares only about her African-American tenants paying their rent. So when Elgar takes over the apartment building, he not only decides to change things for the better, but he also begins to develop a relationship with one of the women in the building.

Like many movies that came out around 1970, this one features numerous jump cuts between totally different scenes. I don't know the specific purpose of this, but I get the feeling that they may have done it to create a sense of the confusion pervading the world due to the unprecedented changes occurring around that time. But I will say that it helps to stress Elgar's disgust with his family's ignorance and scorn of the world outside theirs. You really have to root for what he does as landlord of this building, just as a complete rejection of everything that he's been raised to believe and do.

All in all, I wholeheartedly recommend this movie. Maybe it goes a little overboard in practically beatifying Elgar, but he really deserves it. Lee Grant's character will probably make your skin crawl. Louis Gossett Jr. - whom I previously only thought of as Fiddler on "Roots" - plays one nasty dude (though we understand why he's like he is). Ditto Prof. Dubois (Melvin Stewart).

So see it. You'll probably like it. Also starring Robert Klein and Hector Elizondo in early roles.

Make no mistake; this movie is not about a rich white boy who wants to be a landlord; nor is it a full-blown comedy. It is a vivid description of race relations in New York in 1970; and I believe not too much has changed since then. Beau Bridges does a very nice job as the rich landlord from Long Island. He is the spoiled son of rich white folks. His mother is played wonderfully by Lee Grant, a very undervalued screen talent of the era. T Pearl Bailey is exceptional as well, as is Lou Gossett Jr before he became a drill sergeant.

The film shows Beau having a heavy dose of brown sugar, and also shows the plight of poor blacks in the poor section of Brooklyn. There is really nothing new here, but the acting is first-rate and the story is engaging. Worth your time.

Directed by Hal Ashby. Starring Beau Bridges, Diana Sands, Marki Bey, Lee Grant, Pearl Bailey, Louis Gossett Jr., Walter Brooke, Melvin Stewart. (PG)

Young, privileged WASP (Bridges) is looking to strike out on his own and becomes the landlord of a tenement in the inner city; cue the rude awakening. Adapted by Bill Gunn from Kristin Hunter's novel, film explores the urban black experience, racial tension, gentrification, and more to mixed success, marred by poky pacing and too many half-formed ideas and story threads, which tangle up quickly as the film progresses. However, the rebellious spirit, moments of subversive wit and troubling truth, and consistently creative photography (by Gordon Willis) elevate it from its messy and occasionally dated frippery. Well-cast, with Sands' subtle expressiveness a standout. Feature directorial debut for Ashby, one of the most important directors of the 1970s.

68/100

I'm not sure this satirical comedy about race relations in 1970's America would be made today, times being what they are. Let's just say that if it were made today it would almost certainly be directed by an African-American director and the satire would be even more pointed. Unfortunately for many people the stereotypes are just...well, too 'stereotypical'. It was a Norman Jewison production but directing duties were handed to his former editor Hal Ashby, making his directorial debut.

It's about a white yuppie, (Beau Bridges, very good), who buys a tenement building in an African-American neighbourhood as an investment but finds he just can't get rid of his tenants and that, as he gets to know them, he becomes a little too involved in their lives and problems. Here is a movie about as subtle as a sledgehammer and it's often hard to shake the feeling we are meant to laugh at these characters, both black and white, rather than with them as if sending up the rich white folks makes the racist jibes seem funny.

About midway through it takes a somewhat melodramatic and unlikely turn that might seem even more offensive than the comedy but in its favour you can see that Ashby was prepared to take chances, (as Jewison had done with "In the Heat of the Night"), and risk being offensive if that's what it took. The performances throughout are excellent, (Lee Grant was Oscar-nominated as Bridges' mother), and while today we have to view it as a period piece and something of a curiosity, it's also a striking debut and deserves to be better known.

Set in Park Slope, Brooklyn in those long ago and faraway days before yuppification gentrification and mansionization hit the now chi chi neighborhood Hal Ashby's directorial debut is a good but flawed film about black/white relations. It is best when dealing with Beau Bridges' privileged mama's boy meeting resistance, rejection, partial acceptance and finally salvation through his encounters with various African American denizens of a tenement he has inherited. It is weakest when dealing with the rich caucasian world which Bridges eventually renounces. Bill Gunn's screenplay and Ashby's direction seem to go out of their way to be nuanced and credible when dealing with poor blacks and, conversely, to be issued a caricature permission slip in their vision of rich whites. Through the inconsistencies, however, shine the performances of several actors, chief among them Diana Sands, Lee Grant, Lou Gosset, Pearl Bailey and Bridges back in the day when he was in an acting horse race with his kid brother. Give it a B minus.

Beau Bridges plays a rich white kid who buys a tenement slum in a Brooklyn neighborhood mostly populated by blacks; he quickly butts heads with the ambivalent tenants over his plans for the property. Hal Ashby-directed comedic drama attempts a then-fashionable avant-garde approach to the scenario, with sequences chopped up in an irritatingly 'clever' style and fantasy sequences interspersed which strive to tell us The Truth. It's an ambitious movie with a fine cast (including Lee Grant as Bridges' dotty mother and Diana Sands as his eventual lover), but the picture intrinsically has no style at all--it's a movie made in the editing room, and it is so punctuated with a kind of lazy ambition that there's very little to respond to. *1/2 from ****