The Mighty Quinn (Olive Films, A&M Films, Star Partners, MGM, 1989)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night shortly after 9 my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of the 1989 movie The Mighty Quinn, a film which practically defines “quirky.” The film was based on a novel by Albert H. Z. Carr called Finding Maubee, set on a fictional Caribbean island called “St. Cara” and dealing with a local assistant police chief, Xavier Quinn (Denzel Washington), whose boyhood friend Maubee (Robert Townsend) is the prime suspect in a particularly brutal murder. The victim’s head was severed and placed in his own Jacuzzi, but it turns out that he actually died from the bite of a fer-de-lance snake (also the murder weapon in the first Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance) and whoever severed his head was attempting to kill someone who was already dead. The film was shot in Jamaica but it was pretty clear that it was not actually set there; the island’s chief executive, Chalk (Norman Beaton), is called “Governor” as if it were still a British colony, not an independent member of the British Commonwealth like Jamaica, whose chief executive bears the title “Prime Minister.”

The novel was published in 1971, after Carr was already dead, and it won a posthumous Edgar Award for Best First Novel even though Carr had been active at least since the 1930’s writing magazine serials and film stories, mostly romantic comedies like Let’s Get Married and Women Are Like That. It’s unfortunate that the film wasn’t made immediately after the novel was published, while Sidney Poitier (a real-life Bahamian) was still young enough to have played the lead – Denzel Washington tries his best but the requirement of a Caribbean accent pretty much defeats him. Still, he’s fine at playing a sort of in-between character at home neither in the world of respectable St. Cara society (white or Black) nor in the criminal underworld he has to live in to do his job as a homicide cop. The Mighty Quinn is an odd film to categorize because it has the potential to be film noir – it has an implacable villain, a suggestion of corruption in high society and the political system, and even a potential femme fatale – and it also counts as a musical.

The “Soundtracks” page for it on imdb.com lists 19 separate songs, at least half of which are actually performed on screen, mostly by an aspiring female quartet of reggae singers, including Cedelle Marley and Sharon Marley Prendergast, daughters of reggae legend Bob Marley. The film credits Marley’s widow Rita (mother of Cedelle and Sharon, though Bob Marley had children with women other than his wife) as musical consultant, and she’s in the film as one of the singers at a local wedding where the story begins. What’s more, the songs were pre-recorded at Bob Marley’s old studio, Tuff Gong in Kingston. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that this fim contains a lot of music, since it is named after a song by Bob Dylan – though he subtitled it “Quinn the Eskimo,” which seemingly makes it an odd choice for a film set in the Caribbean. The song is performed at least twice in the film in an “adaptation” by Michael Rose. (“The Mighty Quinn,” the song, needs all the help it can get; Bob Dylan wrote it in 1967 and he wrote a great hook for it – “Come on without, come on within, you’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn” – but the rest of the song is a mess. Dylan said at the time, “I write in chinese of flashing images,” and sometimes the images hung together and created a powerful poetic whole, but they didn’t this time and it took Manfred Mann’s cover for “The Mighty Quinn” to become a classic rock song.) There’s even a scene in which Delzel Washington sings and plays piano (he probably had help with the piano part but it’s almost certainly his real voice) on a cover of Taj Mahal’s “Cakewalk Into Town,” though as other musicians join in it segues into the film’s second version of “The Mighty Quinn.”

Directed by Carl Schenkel from a script by Hampton Fancher – the director’s name meant nothing to me, even though Charles and I have seen one of his other films, Knight Moves; but the writer worked on the scripts for Blade Runner, one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made, and its sequel Blade Runner: 2049, one of the worst) – The Mighty Quinn made for a fascinating comparison with the Lifetime movie Temptation Under the Sun, also set on a fictitious Caribbean island (“St. Luke”) and also with intimations of political, social and moral corruption. Both feature incorruptible law-enforcement officials, though the one in Temptation Under the Sun is a white woman instead of a Black man and she’s a U.S. citizen ordered to take a vacation because her higher-ups are trying to protect a City Councilmember whom she’s investigating for murder. In Temptation Under the Sun the woman cop ends up in a hot, steamy affair with a local fishing-boat operator; in The Mighty Quinn the film seems to be leading up to a sexual encounter between Quinn and Hadley Elgin (Mimi Rogers, the first Mrs. Tom Cruise), wife of sinister white authority figure Thomas Elgin (James Fox, the white British actor who played a gangster fleeing from the law and ending up in the home of a rock star, played by Mick Jagger, in Nicolas Roeg’s first film, Performance [1968]) who’s among the people warning Quinn to let the case alone and join in the frame of Morbee for the murder.

According to the film’s imdb.com “Trivia” page, Washington and Rogers actually shot an interracial sex scene but the studio, MGM, deleted it after both Black and white preview audience members reacted hostilely. Though my mind was reaching back to Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974) and the scene in whckh Madeline Kahn’s Dietrichesque character asks Cleavon Little if it’s true Black men are “unusually gifted,” and after they have sex she screams, “It’s twue! It’s twue!”, I can see why preview audiences did not want to see the two have sex. Not only is Washington’s character married to Lola (Sheryl Lee Ralph, one of the singers in the reggae quartet) and they have a son, Henry (David McFarlane), but like Philip Marlowe, Quinn has too much integrity to be sidetracked from a murder investigation just by the promise of a hot bod. There’s also the interesting character of a “conjure woman,” Ubu Pearl (Esther Rolle, who along with Washington turns in the best performance in the film), who despite living in a remote cabin and needing a wheelchair greets people on her front porch who make the long journey to see her. She’s also the aunt of Isola (Tyler Ferrell), a young woman who was impregnated by the original murder victim and is raising the baby as a single mother while getting no help from dad – which means we’re not at all sorry to see him go.

Ubu Pearl is herself murdered by the film’s ultimate villain, Fred Miller (M. Emmet Walsh), a white American involved in a scheme to fund the Nicaraguan contras with $10,000 bills; the U.S. Treasury no longer prints bills that big, but did in the 1920’s and again in the 1950’s and part of Miller’s scheme was to steal some from the Treasury’s hoard and use this money that doesn’t officially exist to fund the contras. One of the film’s running gags is that Quinn keeps hearing reports from his underworld contacts that they’ve seen $10,000 bills while the U.S. officials he contacts insist that no such bills exist. The money is actually in an old brown suitcase Maubee had stolen and Miller grabs it and recovers the funds – only in a scene that’s become clichéd ever since it seemed so fresh and original in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Asphalt Jungle (both directed by John Huston!), most of the money blows away at the end. Miller himself tries to flee in a helicopter, but both he and his pilot are bitten by a fer-de-lance that either sneaked into the cockpit or was planted there. (That’s right, snake ex machina.) Morbee also gets blown up, but even in a film made over 20 years at the end of the Production Code he had to pay for his crimes even though our sympathies are with him. Charles had seen this movie before when it was relatively new at the “Magic Cinema” in Grass Valley, California, where he and his mother then lived, and he told me he’d been disappointed that it wasn’t even more of an anti-contra film than it was, but it holds up surprisingly well even though some of the stories aren’t all that developed and I’d personally have liked to see far more of Robert Townsend’s character, including more insight into how Morbee and Quinn bonded as friends and have stayed that way over the years.