The Landlord (1970) Hal Ashby
“In no way did the social practice [of landlords regularly visiting their tenants] obviate the socioeconomic antagonism between the classes. But it tended to stabilize relationships at the personal level and restrict conflict to the economic level itself—keeping it from spilling over into other, personal situations.” -Samuel Delany
A forgotten gem and social satire, Hal Ashby’s (Harold and Maude, Coming Home) first feature film explores racial tension between an upper-class white landlord and his black Brooklyn tenants. Strangely surreal and disorienting, this wacky tragi-comedy anticipates later formations of gentrification and urban renewal. Only two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the film takes head-on controversial subjects such as miscegenation and hypocritical white liberalism.
Of all the outlandish aspects of The Landlord that I could gravitate to, it is probably the role of the affluent white mother that I find so strange and fascinating. This archetype has been resurrected time and time again (seen in The New Normal and Arrested Development on television or in Postcards from the Edge and Igby Goes Down on the big screen)—the liberal, politically incorrect, alcohol-and-pill-popping proper rich white matriarch; it is part of what makes watching the 1% so fun (on occasion). Leave it to director Hal Ashby, who would go on to make a similar commentary on wealthy white American culture in Harold and Maude, to draw out less a dichotomy between the stiffness that is upper-crest society and the authentic grittiness this is urban ghetto life. Such a distinction belongs to another director.
Two scenes especially illustrate Ashby’s disorienting humor that pokes fun at the gentry, less unilaterally, but as part of the dialectic of class tension. In a somewhat early scene, our protagonist Elgar, stands outside on the mansion’s balcony with his sister, Susan, as she smokes a joint. In the background, their father shoots at clay pigeons with a shotguns. The incessant sound of the gun firing competes with Susan’s
praise of her brother’s benevolence. “I think somebody’s got to begin to integrate,” she says as she inhales a drag. “I mean, I can’t, I just don’t have the stomach for it.” Throughout the film the family and their friends, often dressed in white, are not only socially awkward but socially absurd. When Joyce, Elgar’s mother, goes to visit an absent Elgar at his building in Park Slope, she instead hangs out with Marge, the resident fortuneteller. The two get drunk together and spend most of the day laughing and sharing stories. In this exchange, I reminded of Delany’s nostalgia for an immediate and spontaneous form of interclass contact. Class is not temporarily halted by Joyce and Marge’s exchange—they are very much still on polar opposite of the system. In a world with less corporate interlocution, however, this type of contact made, as Delany seems to also point out, capitalism a bit more bearable. At the same time, this co-mingling does not represent in a clash of both class and sensibility. 
On the contrary, the world of the rich is just as wacky as the world of the poor. Both have their idiosyncrasies and contradictions. Both come together in Marge’s apartment, over a few too many drinks, in the form of a lost afternoon.
-M.N.
-M.N.
