Shot on location with a cast of relative unknowns (principal player Cuba Gooding, Jr., had a bit in the 1988 Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America), the film boasts a number of strong, star-making performances (among them a laconically menacing turn by rapper Ice Cube) and a palpable sense of street level verité. Singleton opens with an irreverent layover of x-rated language on top of the Columbia logo before cutting to a curtain warming nod to Rob Reiner's Stand by Me (1986) by way of a provocative treatise on faulty notions of racial history, origin myths and human evolution.
Although he is billed here as Larry Fishburne, Boyz in the Hood marked a sea change in the career of the actor presently known as Laurence Fishburne. Born in Augusta, Georgia but raised in Brooklyn's Park Slope by his mother after his parents' divorce, Fishburne was acting on the New York stage and appearing on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live by the age of 12. He made his feature film debut as a pre-teen in Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975) and through the next decade carved out a vivid early career playing menacing young adults of varying degrees of intelligence, from Navy gunner Tyrone "Clean" Miller in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) to the amusing but deadly Jimmy Jump of Abel Ferrara's King of New York (1990). In between, Fishburne's range as a comic performer was showcased on the Saturday morning cult favorite Pee-wee's Playhouse (1986-1987), in which he appeared as the affable Cowboy Curtis. Although he turned down a key role in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), Fishburne agreed to play a college activist in Lee's follow-up, School Daze (1988). Fishburne drew on his own memories of living for a time (post-Apocalypse Now) with his no-nonsense dad, a Bronx-based corrections officer, for the role of Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s father in Boyz in the Hood. There's a dash of Malcolm X and a splash of Louis Farrakhan in Fishburne's adamantine neighborhood visionary (first seen watering his lawn, like Ward Cleaver). Although there's nothing fantastical about "Furious" Styles, it isn't difficult to chart the further trajectory of Laurence Fishburne's career from this down-to-earth character to the oracular, mentoring, time-slipping Morpheus of The Matrix (1999) and its two sequels.
With the success of Boyz in the Hood (boosters of the Academy Award®-nominated film included Woody Allen, of all people), John Singleton was allowed a greater choice in follow-up material than is afforded to most young filmmakers working within the Hollywood studio system. (Singleton remains the youngest director nominated for a Best Director Oscar®.) Although his choices were bold (1995's Higher Learning) and high profile (a 2000 sequel to Shaft), Singleton's career never reached the same exalted plane; subsequent projects have either been ignored (Rosewood in 1997, Baby Boy in 2001) or bear the stamp of work-for-hire (2 Fast 2 Furious, 2003).
More successful in instituting a brand has been Ice Cube, who parlayed his film debut into a robust body of work. As an actor, a writer and a producer, Ice Cube has bolstered a number of relevant films made by and for blacks, including F. Gary Gray's Friday (1995) and its two sequels, his own The Players Club (1998), and Tim Story's Barbershop (2002), which spawned two sequels and a short-lived TV series. While his early film work focused on action roles (Trespass [1992], Anaconda [1997], Ghosts of Mars [2001]) that capitalized on his Boyz in the Hood gangbanger, the former O'Shea Jackson is equally well known nearly twenty years on as the star of the family films Are We There Yet? (2005) and Are We Done Yet? (2007) and the crime comedy First Sunday (2008).
Producer: Steve Nicolaides
Director: John Singleton
Screenplay: John Singleton
Cinematography: Charles Mills
Art Direction: Bruce Bellamy
Music: Stanley Clarke
Film Editing: Bruce Cannon
Cast: Angela Bassett (Reva Styless), Morris Chestnut (Ricky Baker), John Cothran, Jr. (Lewis Crump), Ice Cube (Doughboy), Larry Fishburne (Furious Styles), Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Tre Styles), Lexie Bigham (Mad Dog), Darneicea Corley (Keisha), Tammy Hanson (Rosa), Na' Blonka Durden (Trina), Dedrick D. Gobert (Dooky), Tyra Ferrell (Mrs. Baker).
C-107m. Letterboxed.
by Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
"John Singleton's Boyz in the Hood - A Case Study in Urban Violence" by Katie Raymond, Associated Content
John Singleton interview by Jeff McNeal, The Big Picture, 2001
John Singleton interview by Paul Fischer, Film Monthly, 2003
Laurence Fishburne interview by by Alex Simon, Venice Magazine, 2006
Laurence Fishburne interview by Paul Chutkow, Cigar Aficionado magazine
