Looking back on the New Hollywood movement—that much vaunted period between the ‘60s and ‘80s where the director ostensibly ruled supreme—the main figureheads were all cut from a similar cloth: self-possessed (read: vainglorious), bohemian, college-educated, and shaggy-haired; the beards of Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola were arguably the defining aesthetic trait shared by the four. Of the New Hollywood posse, few were more hirsute than Hal Ashby, late night editor-turned beloved outsider director—but this was an artist who looked the part without acting it, a high school dropout lightly making his way between the totemic works of his brasher peers. And nowhere was his gentle, grounded insistence more evident that in the sharp comedic observations of The Landlord (1970).
The Civil Rights Movement may have drawn to a halt in 1968 with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the signing of the Fair Housing Act, but racial tensions showed no signs of waning through the 1970s. Hollywood, for its part, mostly dug its head in the sand, only commenting retrospectively in passive works like the obsequiously hand-holding Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Despite that, The Landlord, Ashby’s directorial debut, sticks out as an adroit commentary on the cultural frictions of inner city life, one that teeters between affording the titular proprietor too much grace and successfully lambasting the predatory practices enabled by white-owned housing infrastructure. For a first time outing, it remains a remarkably confident work.
The film opens on a slow-paced and evocative montage, cutting between 10-second dialogue-free clips of a wedding, a hazy schoolroom, and the various comings-and-goings of Park Slope, Brooklyn, interweaved with the young landlord himself, Elgar Winthrop Julius Enders (Beau Bridges), waxing lyrical to the camera about humanity’s ant-like drive to gain territory. Elgar, the recipient of a healthy allowance from his wealthy WASP parents, has just purchased a tenement building in Park Slope, an area at the forefront of gentrification—or “urban renewal” as an estate agent tactfully puts it—from which he intends to evict the African-American working class tenants. Fittingly for a silver spoon sucker, his plans are depressingly shallow—to convert the building into a gaudy bachelor pad, chattering endlessly about hanging a giant chandelier in the main foyer. Once he actually encounters the residents, however, his plans begin to change.
At the surface, The Landlord operates much like a fish out of water comedy, mining the disparity between Elgar’s naivety and the hardened wiles of his tenants for laughs, but Ashby repeatedly stretches the film’s genre parameters. Much of Elgar’s initial attempts to instil law and order play out like a live action cartoon, Elgar dashing out screen left and appearing back on screen right as the local kids make off with anything that’s not tied down; money, house plants, hub caps, you name it. Conversely, Elgar’s later love affairs with two Black women are played far more straight, romance flaring beneath dusky dawn-lit blues and in low-lit red-ridden rooms, even as the outside perceptions of such interracial relationships threaten to encroach at every stage.
Ultimately, that tonal dexterity is what makes The Landlord hold up over 50 years later. It doesn’t shy away from the consequences of such pressurised living conditions—heedless hedonism, mental health crises, and outbursts of violence—but it’s also packed with a bevy of quick-tongued one liners, most typically at the expense of slumlords; an early quip from one of Elgar’s tenants goes, “If you didn’t sweat so much, nobody’d take you for a landlord. You could pass for a human being.” And that’s where Elgar sits—halfway between human and landlord, and ignorant of the ways of both. Beneath the wry absurdisms and Elgar’s affable good landlord schtick, Ashby scratches at something provocative about the invasive, watering down nature of white culture. With films as insipid as Green Book (2018) still winning Best Picture, it’s hard to say times have changed all that much.
Special Features
- 2K transfer by Kino Lorber
- Uncompressed mono PCM audio
- The Racial Gap – An interview with star Beau Bridges (2019, 25 mins)
- Reflections – An interview with star Lee Grant (2019, 26 mins)
- Style and Substance – An interview with producer Norman Jewison (2019, 29 mins)
- A new interview with Hal Ashby biographer Nick Dawson (2024)
- An interview with broadcaster and author Ellen E. Jones (2024)
- Trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Vincent Wild
- Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by critic Jourdain Searles, plus an archival piece with Hal Ashby
- Limited Edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings
The Landlord releases in the UK courtesy of Radiance on July 29th
