WHEN A MOVIE HITS HOME TURF : Nation Has More to Worry About

‘Colors,’ the controversial cop/gang movie, has provoked protests from groups as divergent as the NAACP, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the Guardian Angels. Is it shallow? Does it raise public awareness to an out-of-control problem? Will it provoke more violence in Los Angeles streets? Does it offer any answers? Calendar invited the views of poet Wanda Coleman, lawyer John Huerta and staff writer Lawrence Christon.

By now the media-burn surrounding “Colors” has fairly well scorched it to a cinder in the public eye, which is always avid for a new distraction. I wish it weren’t so. That is, I wish all the fuss over “Colors” didn’t have to do with whether or not it glorifies gang life, whether it’s an incitement to riot.

It doesn’t, and isn’t. I saw the movie twice last weekend, once in a Downey middle-class mall, which attracted crowds of young Latinos, Asians, and a scattering of blacks from surrounding neighborhoods; and once at the Warner Theater in Huntington Park, which is as close to barrio life as you’ll get outside East Los Angeles.

In both instances, the crowd waiting outside had the odd combination of stillness and restiveness of people anticipating Event. When you came out of the movie, their eyes searched yours for a clue. Chances are, like almost everyone else, you left feeling somber. Without venturing a critical opinion of “Colors’ ” aside from saying I found it narrowly conceived, a cinematic comic book, it does share one element with classical tragedy: its sense that everyone is implicated in an inescapably bloody mess, a terminally bad fate.

The crowd sided with Maria Conchita Alonso when she jeeringly repudiated the tough white cop, played by Sean Penn, who was her one-time lover; he didn’t fit into their social scheme (though it was curious about why she became so debased as a home girl). There was an audible gasp when a Chicano mother was sliced open by drive-by gunfire intended for her neighbors, the partying 21st Street gang. There were cheers for the bloody vengeance the gang took on Rocket, “Color’s” chief sociopath, a young black gangster who seemed drugged by nothing as much as the premonition of his own violent end.

One of the most peculiar reactions came when Hodges, the Robert Duvall character, was mortally wounded. However stereotyped this role of a street-wise veteran cop is (Duvall deserves a medal for jettisoning its cliches and flying clean), he represents a link with something outside the barrio and the ghetto--that glowing geometrical L.A. skyline rising out of a dreary urban waste like a surreal Fantasyland. If, to most of the young gangsters in the movie, and to some people in the audience, he was a soldier of the oppressor, there was a flicker of decency in his face. Like them, he was trying in some realistic way to sort a saving grace or two out of a ruinous situation. When he fell, so did a certain possibility. Out of an audience of 900 at the Warner Theater, one person applauded Hodges’ shooting. The rest sat quietly, perhaps in the disappointed realization that good intentions aren’t enough--even in the movies. (A lot of people got up to leave after this scene, not realizing there was one more to go.)

Maybe some people were right to fear the incendiary effect “Colors” might have on the surging violence of contemporary gang life. But the outcry is nothing new. Remember the 1955 “Blackboard Jungle,” where a stolid and tormented Glenn Ford embodied liberalism’s fumblingly earnest sympathy with the plight of that new American phenomenon, the juvenile delinquent? (And remember how the officious arch-conservative, Louis Calhern, referred to them as animals?) There were plenty of civic and religious leaders, police spokesmen and newspaper columnists (those were the days before the media became a monolith partially clouded with self-fulfilling prophecy), to decry the picture’s glorification of this amoral postwar caste, America’s new barbarians. But nobody left the movie with much more in mind than Bill Haley & the Comets’ jumpy “Rock Around the Clock.”

After the Civil Rights Movement crested in the ‘60s, those minorities who didn’t make it into middle and professional classes were left to fester in officialdom’s apt phrase, benign neglect. Now the ‘80s have given us the payoff, a new synthesis of heightened evils whose incurable twin scourges, AIDS and crack, are burning through the social fabric like white phosphorous.

What’s the incentive for the ghetto kid to cross his rubicon, to get out? His death squad does a drive-by; ours, in the form of covert CIA operatives abroad, “destabilizes.” He does drugs; in the face of white-collar addiction, corporate America introduces alcohol- and substance-abuse programs into its insurance umbrella. He uses his woman in bed; we (the Establishment) use her in advertisements and as stereotypical icons. His cultural heroes love the fast lane; we commemorate a drugged-out Elvis and still call him King.

Love and compassion? At our sales conventions (and America is nothing if not the land of the salesman, beginning with The Great Communicator) we still hear Vince Lombardi’s line: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” The good life? Ivan Boesky sounds the credo: Greed is good. And what’s so superior about that prototypical 25-year-old venture capitalist who makes 400 thou a year, wears red suspenders and eats designer ice cream? He doesn’t have the ghetto home boy’s fraternity, nor his sense of manhood. And now they both have access to the same money.

Gang life is mostly grim, for sure, a mountingly pathological social condition. But to carp about “Colors,” the way we’ve seen it argued, is to fuss about a flag without looking at the ravages in the country it represents.