Melted Copper

By Stefan Kanter

The very title betrays the facile irony: The Great White Hope is a walk-on; the film, based on Howard Sackler's Pulitzer-prizewinning play, concerns the Doomed Black Hope. He is Jack Jefferson (James Earl Jones), a full-throated paraphrase of Jack Johnson, World Heavyweight Champion from 1908 to 1915. The last five supersaturated years of his reign form the basis for Sackler's fictionalized crisis in black and white.

Jack Jefferson enrages the country not only because he has wrested the title from an Irish-American but because he has acquired a Caucasian mistress, Eleanor (Jane Alexander). A great copper statue of a man, Jefferson cannot be legitimately toppled. But he can be melted down legally. Arrested on a rigged Mann Act violation, the champ jumps bail and flees to Europe. There the bruiser becomes the bruised. The retreat starts in alcoholism and ends in a Budapest cafe where with aching symbolism he "lawzy me's" his way through the role of Uncle Tom on a tiny stage.

Such clanking devices would have even seemed excessive back in 1870, but restraint is a word unknown to Sackler. Jefferson refuses a standing offer to take a dive for a white champ in order to cancel out his previous "crimes." In a final Meaningful Act, he even rejects his beloved Eleanor, whom he suddenly sees as an albatross. In a scene that would shame Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor's drowned body is brought onstage, and the broken Jefferson capitulates.

The boxing footage cannot compare to the celebrated gutfights of Body and Soul and The Harder They Fall. Moreover, Director Martin Ritt has staged some segments as if they were to be razzed at a Panther rally. One in particular, when a prayer is chanted for the Black Hope, must rank as the most patronizing view of Negro life since Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

250-Watt Grin. Given such raw dramaturgy, such dim insights, who could possibly have thought The Great White Hope worthwhile? James Earl Jones, for one. And in fact he proves that the role of Jefferson is an actor's dream. Though he played it 429 times onstage, Jones has, if anything, grown fresher. He does not act the part so much as consume it, then let it shine out of his eyes and resound in his mouth: "If I lets it go too long, then everybody say, now ain't dat one shiftless nigger . . . an' if I chop him down quick, then dey holler dat po' man up dere fightin' a go-rilla!" When white folks watch, Jefferson plays animal or vegetable. The 250-watt Satchmo grin flicks on at will, the massive shoulders shrug at circumstances beyond comprehension. But under the actor is the lava of black rage. When it erupts, the other players are inflamed. When Jane Alexander appears with Jones, she is a common-law Desdemona, the only believable white character in the film.

It is a pity that The Great White Hope is not up to its star. In Jones' eight-ounce gloves, black is beautiful, black is ugly, black is violent, black is gentle, black is self-deceit, black is truth--in brief, black is a man, and a man is the world. It is the kind of pounding, feinting, bloody, unbowing portrayal that ensures an Academy Award nomination--and possibly the prize itself. In drab surroundings, James Earl Jones' performance is a knockout--a technical knockout, to be sure, but how many heavyweight championship bouts are put on nowadays?

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