Remembering Ron

From the Chicago Reader, February 10, 1995. — J.R.

Ron Vawter (1948-1994), who died of AIDS, was one of those rare actors who, like Tilda Swinton in England and the late Delphine Seyrig in France, remained equally active in commercial and experimental productions. He played the psychiatrist in sex, lies, and videotape and appeared in such Hollywood features as The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. But Vawter also played the male lead in Mark Rappaport’s ground-breaking and visually stunning Postcards and in Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Made in Hollywood (both from 1990) and appeared with Willem Dafoe and other members of the Wooster Group in Ken Kobland’s elegantly creepy and cadaverous video Flaubert Dreams of Travel but the Illness of His Mother Prevents It (1986), a series of surrealist tableaux presented with diverse sound elements. Remembering Ron includes the Rappaport and Kobland tapes, a ten-minute excerpt from Made in Hollywood (unfortunately too fragmented to give much sense of the whole), and Leslie Thornton’s brand-new The Last Time I Saw Ron. This powerful memoir combines glimpses of Vawter in a Belgian stage production, Philoktetes Variations, with diverse kinds of found and new footage and uncanny sound effects. Read more

The Glass Shield

The fourth feature (1995) by this country’s most gifted black filmmaker, Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), is his first with a directly political edgea heartfelt and persuasive look at the racism and corruption of the Los Angeles police force, based on a true story and calculated to burn its hard lessons straight into your skull. The plot concerns the adjustments made by a sincere black rookie cop (Michael Boatman) who joins an all-white precinct and wants to be accepted by his fellow officers; his only real ally turns out to be the one woman in the precinct (Lori Petty, in a singular performance), a Jew who gets plenty of abuse herself. When a murder case arises involving a black suspect (Ice Cube), the hero’s decision to perjure himself in order to support his white partner opens a Pandora’s box of ironies and ambiguities that the movie squarely faces. The distributor forced him to tone down the anger and despair of his original ending, but this still packs a mighty punch. With Elliott Gould and M. Emmet Walsh. 108 min. (JR) Read more