Black Cinema House To Present Jules Dassin S Rarely Revived Uptight This Sunday

• Uptight

On Sunday at 4 PM Black Cinema House will screen the rarely revived Uptight (1968), a drama set among black revolutionaries in Cleveland, Ohio. Urban planner and architecture critic Lee Bey will introduce the film and lead an informal discussion afterwards (tickets are free, but it’s recommended you reserve a seat—you can RSVP here). The movie features an original score by the great Booker T. Jones (his only one, save for John Cassavetes’s Opening Night) and a cast that includes Roscoe Lee Browne, Juanita Moore, and Ruby Dee, who also cowrote the script. The director is Jules Dassin, best known for the American film noirs The Naked City and Brute Force and the European heist movies Rififi and Topkapi. If you know Dassin from only those films, he might seem an odd fit for a movie about black radicals. In fact, Dassin’s radical politics predated his filmmaking career—and at one point, they almost ended it.