This Month

7 Movies, 2 Documentaries / November 16 and 23

TCM presents a two-evening tribute to Gordon Parks (1912-2006), a multi-talented American film director who also distinguished himself as photographer, musician, composer, writer, and painter. Our salute focuses on his work as a filmmaker and includes the TCM premiere of Listen to a Stranger: An Interview with Gordon Parks (1973), a 20-minute documentary about Parks and his illustrious career.

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, and gained early experience as a photographer in fashion and portrait work. He distinguished himself with a government project for which he photographed poor Americans during the 1940s.

Parks won acclaim for his photographs for Life magazine from 1948 through 1972 and began his career as a film director with documentaries on black ghetto life. He would become recognized as the first African-American to write, produce, and direct films for a major Hollywood studio.

Below are the other films in our salute to Gordon Parks.

Flavio (1964) is a short (12-minute) film developed from an essay by Parks for Life magazine, where he had become the first African-American staff photographer. The short focuses on the difficult life of a 12-year-old Brazilian boy living in a family of 10 in an impoverished neighborhood across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.

The Learning Tree (1969) is the movie with which Parks became the first black filmmaker to work at a major studio – in this case Warner Bros. He produced, wrote, did the music for, and directed this coming-of-age drama based on his own semi-autobiographical novel. Kyle Johnson plays a teenager enduring tragic events as he grows into a man in 1920s Kansas. The film was one of the first 25 to be certified by the U.S. National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Shaft (1971), the first film in the Shaft series, introduced a new kind of black screen hero as played by Richard Roundtree – the suave, confident, forceful, sexy, non-apologetic private detective who was a force to be reckoned with on the streets of Harlem. Parks directed from a screenplay by Ernest Tidyman and John D. F. Black based on the novel by Tidyman.

Roger Ebert wrote at the time that “The strength of Parks’ movie is his willingness to let his hero fully inhabit the private-eye genre, with all of its obligatory violence, blood, obscenity, and plot gimmicks.”

Shaft’s Big Score! (1972) is the second entry in the series, with Parks, Tidyman, and Roundtree repeating their roles as director, writer, and star. Parks himself filled in as composer of the score when Isaac Hayes, noted for his work on the original film, was unavailable. In this edition, the murder of an old friend leads Shaft into a war between competing gangsters in the numbers racket.      

The Super Cops (1974) is an action film directed by Parks and based on a book by L.H. Whittemore that was in turn inspired by a true story. Ron Leibman and David Selby play a pair of New York City policemen who fight the system on the streets of Brooklyn and earn the nicknames “Batman and Robin.” With this one, Parks created one of the early “buddy-cop” movies.

Leadbelly (1976) tells the story of blues and folk singer Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter and his struggles as a young man in the segregated South, which included time on chain gangs in Texas and Louisiana. Parks directs a cast headed by Roger E. Mosley as Ledbetter, and the script is by Ernest Kinoy.

Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (1984), a made-for-TV movie, marked Parks’ return to directing after an absence of eight years. The film is based on Twelve Years a Slave, the 1853 autobiography of Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. Avery Brooks stars as Northup in a script by Lou Potter and Samm-Art Williams. The story was filmed again as 12 Years a Slave in 2013.

Moments Without Proper Names (1987), Parks’ final film as director, is an hour-long self-portrait in which the artist looks back on his life and career. Included are a review of his photographs spanning four decades, his musical compositions, and interviews with actors Avery Brooks, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Joe Seneca.