Cornbread, Earl and Me (ML Productions, American International, 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I watched immediately after that was a surprisingly good movie from the early Blaxploitation era, a 1975 movie from ML Productions and American International Pictures called Cornbread, Earl and Me. It was based on a 1966 novel by Ron Fair called Hog Butcher, a reference to Carl Sandburg’s famous poem “Chicago” which gives away the film’s location, though the city carefully remains unnamed in the movie and could be any large American city with a substantial Black population. The central character is 12-year-old Wilford Robinson (Laurence Fishburne in his movie debut, though he was 14 at the time and billed as “Laurence Fishburne III”), who along with his friend Earl Carter (Tierre Turner) idolizes the local neighborhood hero, 18-year-old Nathaniel Hamilton (billed as Keith Wilkes but really National Basketball Association star Jamaal Wilkes). Hamilton is nicknamed “Cornbread” and he’s such a great player that he’s been scouted by several colleges, of which he’s finally picked one. He’s also as good a kid as possible given the neighborhood he’s grown up in, which we’re told when a local numbers runner named “One Eye” (Antonio Fargas, who plays the part so much like the really one-eyed Sammy Davis, Jr. I suspect the resemblance was intentional) tries to recruit Cornbread into the gang and Cornbread righteously refuses. Cornbread has a loving relationship with his parents Sam (Stack Pierce) and Leona (Madge Sinclair), shown by father and son playing catch in the Hamiltons’ living room while Leona gets upset with them (they have a china case and I kept expecting the ball to go out of control and break the china, but it never did).

About one-third of the way through, the film’s previously light-hearted tone takes a dark turn when Cornbread, Earl and Wilford have to break up a pickup basketball game due to a rainstorm. They retreat to a convenience store run by an older Black man named Fred Jenkins (Charles Lampkin), and Wilford and Earl make a light-hearted bet that Cornbread can’t make it home in 25 seconds. Just then two police officers, white cop John Golich (Vince Martorano) and Black cop Larry Atkins (former National Football League star Bernie Casey, who turns out to have been a quite good actor, miles above the barely competent performances O. J. Simpson turned in in his attempts at movie acting), discover a young woman in a red dress whose throat has been slashed. The two cops lose track of the fleeing suspect, and when they have a clear view again they mistake Cornbread for the suspect and shoot him dead. They called out a warning before they shot and killed him, but Cornbread didn’t hear it because a garbage truck was in the neighborhood making so much noise that, as Wilford later testifies at the inquest, people could hear that the cops were talking but they couldn’t make out just what they were saying. The neighborhood erupts in spontaneous rage at Cornbread’s killing – not only because it looks like a clear-cut case of police brutality but because they were pinning so many of their hopes on Cornbread to prove that you could make it out of the ghetto and achieve success – and beat up the cops, particularly targeting Atkins apparently because he’s Black and therefore they’re angrier at one of their own than they are at the white cop. The Hamilton parents seek out a Black attorney, Benjamin Blackwell (Moses Gunn, top-billed, who’d turned in the standout performance in the pioneering Blaxploitation film Shaft two years earlier), to file a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city, and Sam Hamilton waves Cornbread’s plane ticket in the lawyer’s face and announces that he’s going to turn the ticket in and use it to pay the attorney’s fee.

Not surprisingly, the city government mounts a full-court cover-up to keep the truth from coming out by intimidating all the witnesses. They sent out a police investigator, Sgt. Danaher (Stefan Gierasch) – the true villain of the piece – to shut up the witnesses. Danaher and his partner plant marijuana cigarettes in Fred Jenkins’ shop and say they’ll prosecute him as a drug dealer if he testifies, and Danaher also threatens Wilford’s mother Sarah (Rosalind Cash) with a cutoff of her welfare checks if Wilford doesn’t go along with the police department’s official version of how Cornbread’s shooting happened. The police have concocted a narrative that Cornbread was a drug dealer and near-fatally assaulted a woman who was going to turn him in – she’s still alive but comatose, so the cops can say anything they want to about her and her story. When Wilford doesn’t go along with the story Sgt. Danaher wants from him, Danaher assaults both Wilford and his mom and makes it clear he’ll do all he can to make their lives a living hell if they don’t go along with the official story. The coroner’s inquest, led by a bored white guy (Logan Ramsey) who just wants to get the damned thing over with and have as little fuss as possible, proceeds with Fred Jenkins telling the story the cops want from him and Earl Carter choking up so totally on the witness stand he can’t say anything at all. Blackwell takes pity on him and lets him off the stand. Next it’s Wilford’s turn, and after a lot of soul-searching between him and his mom (who’s in the courtroom) he gets up and tells the truth – and Atkins backs him up, turning his back on 20 years with the police department to expose the cover-up and say that Wilford was telling the truth about the incident. That’s something of a surprise because in an earlier scene, it had been Atkins who had been the most certain that Cornbread must have been guilty of something – he told his white partner that ghetto Blacks are “savages” and, when Golich questioned whether Cornbread was guilty of anything, Atkins insisted, “We just hadn’t caught him yet.”

Cornbread, Earl and Me holds up magnificently, gaining a lot of its continued relevance by the fact that police officers still quite often shoot down unarmed young Black men and rig up an internal culture that says that Black lives don’t matter. Turner Classic Movies’ hosts for the film, Alicia Malone and her guest, Smithsonian Institution secretary Lonnie G. Bunch, Jr., talked about later films that drew on some of the same themes as Cornbread, Earl and Me, including Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), but Cornbread, Earl and Me was there first. Kudos to the writer, Leonard Lamensdorf, and his director, Joseph Manduke, who also co-produced the film; at a time when most Blaxploitation movies were technically crude and looked like their makers didn’t know a camera from a dildo (though the first Shaft was directed by Gordon Parks, who’d been a prize-winning still photographer for Life magazine and brought some of that same visual sense to the film), Manduke and his cinematographer, Jules Brenner, bring some fascinating compositions to the film that propel us into the action and make us identify with the characters. And Lamensdorf’s adaptation of Fair’s novel creates powerful dramatic conflicts which it resolves in a quite capable and believable way. Manduke and Lamensdorf also got a major jazz musician to do the musical score – Donald Byrd, who in the 1950’s had recorded with Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and since had turned to R&B and funk with a band called the Blackbyrds – and Byrd gave them a haunting accompaniment that featured two long trumpet solos by him and some cool funk grooves from his band as well as two songs, one called “Wilford’s Gone” and another uncredited one with lyrics hailing Cornbread and his skills. I hadn’t held out much hope for Cornbread, Earl and Me, but it turned out to be a great film and a welcome rediscovery; once again, thank you to Turner Classic Movies for exposing me to a major work I otherwise wouldn’t have had the inclination to see!