The Game

My review was written in August 1989 after watching the film at TVC screening room in Manhattan.

A timely pic about a New York mayoral election, "The Game" is a diamond in the rough -low-budget, no-name filmmaking with a punch. It augurs arrival of another talented black indie filmmaker, Curtis Brown.

Like Spike Lee, Brown is a Brooklynite who studied at New York University and bootstrapped his way into film. For his debut feature, he takes a Lee-esque strategy of a militant screenplay in which he plays the role of the heavy himself.

Script by Julia Wilson and Brown is an ingenious and insightful look at politics and power. Brown portrays Leon Hunter, a chess expert working at a top public relations firm who's assigned (for expedient reasons) by his boss to run the mayoral campaign of a white candidate (Dick Biel). Like the current real-life Gotham mayoral race, there are two leading white candidates and one black in the film, but characters bear no resemblance to Edward Koch, Rudolph Giuliani or David Dinkins (Giuliani's name is mentioned in the film only in his prior U. S. Attorney status).

Fancying himself as a kingmaker, Brown maneuvers to have Biel win at any cost. Key plot twist, worthy of classic B movies of yore, has Brown exploiting a hospital identification mixup following the unwarranted police shooting of a messenger (Billy Williams). Switching bodies, he instigates a situation wherein candidate Biel can simultaneously attack the administration and take a hard-line stand on police corruption/brutality while the black candidate waffles.

A clever subplot manages to develop sympathy for several contrasting positions: the bigoted cop (Charles Timm) who shot the messenger; the cop's deeply religious partner (Richard Lee Ross) has a crisis of conscience over whether to tell the truth or be blindly loyal to Timm, and the messenger's wife (Silvia Yearwood), a former Black Panther, whose subsequent assimilation is put to the test by the violent act.. Thesping is solid, especially by Ross and Timm, though Brown's lowkey performance fails to maximize the character's potential in a role tailor-made (if pic had a bigger budget) for Clarence Williams III or Billy Dee Williams. Bruce Grossberg provides terrific comic relief as the roly-poly hospital morgue attendant.

Despite budget limitations, the film is consistently interesting and offers many novel touches. For example, Brown's constant chess-playing by phone with a mysterious adversary adds suspense and is neatly resolved. A blackmail setup scene (shades of Gore Vidal's "The Best Man") in which Brown entraps his own candidate for future post-election control is staged off-camera while we watch a sexy dancer (Claire Baker) instead, a stylish and tasteful form of representation. Ending is delicious, capped with a memorably cynical tag line of dialog.

Tech credits are acceptable with an okay score by Wilson. Pic reportedly has been trimmed from its original length by a reel to 103 minutes for release.