FILM COMMENT : Artistry in Any Color : The new films of Carl Franklin and the Hughes brothers tell American tales with elements that are both particular to the black community and universal. Are you listening, Spike?

Some years ago, “An American Werewolf in London” turned that part of the horror genre around by making the man who became a beast under the light of the full moon a young Jewish guy from Long Island. He brought to the British Isles his nightmares about Nazis, his neuroses, his outsider paranoia and full servings of guilt, all of which were counterpointed by the parodic twists of urban Jewish wit. The film had successfully done something that Ishmael Reed once said: Familiar genres can be renewed by using an ethnic point of view.

The best Afro-American films often do just that. They invent fresh ways of experiencing the stories and the situations that give narrative form to the human condition in American terms.

Three new films give us a chance to look at different aspects of the phenomenon. Because Spike Lee’s “Clockers” is a move forward for the diminutive director but does nothing to enrich American cinematic artistry, I want to discuss Carl Franklin’s “Devil in a Blue Dress” and Allen and Albert Hughes’ “Dead Presidents”; they refresh the detective story and the tale of the heist while either reclaiming the Afro-American humanity of the past or giving the street pressure of the black criminal world its ominous due.

There are very obvious reasons for the success of Franklin and the Hughes brothers. The physical styles of Negroes, the contrasting body of rhythms, intonations and accents they bring to English, their slang, the facial expressions, the slick to gutbucket approaches to sexuality and the panorama of skin tones open up truly American tales with elements that are both particular and universal.

We have long heard this in the best of our American music and oratory, seen it in our dance and our athletic games and laughed at how it applies to stand-up comedy. When the Negro arrives with real talent and imagination, Americana is enriched in the very same way that it has been deepened and broadened by the best of the Irish, the Jews, the Italians and so on.

This rarely happens in our cinema, and we have lost golden ages of Negroid Americana because the conventions of minstrelsy held sway for so long. In our own century, when Hollywood was going about the business of creating an American mythology that spoke to and for the world, the vitality and the drama of the Afro-American life that gave so much to the culture and the meaning of the nation were largely reduced to no more than the well-meaning liberal propaganda focused on how bad it was for the colored people to live under the caustic reign of the white folks.

Though there have been exceptions over the years such as “Hallelujah,” “Carmen Jones,” “Nothing but a Man,” “Claudine,” “Cooley High” and “To Sleep With Anger”--to name a few of the few--the complexity and the range of rural and urban Negro life in the worlds of work, play, romance, family, politics, adolescence, religion, crime and everything else in which humanity most powerfully and subtly makes itself either clear or mysterious are largely absent. From the flip side, there was the blaxploitation craze of the ‘70s, which was the cinematic forerunner of rap. Its cardboard celebration of dope dealers, pimps, whores, guttersnipes, derangement of the senses and anarchy was a phenomenon worthy of James Baldwin’s phrase “Uncle Tom turned inside out.”

‘Devil in a Blue Dress’

‘Devil in a Blue Dress” is so good at reinventing the feeling of a genre that its cinematic craft makes a blaxploitation film like “Shaft” seem even more heavy-handed than it did 25 years ago. That should not surprise us, given what its director, Franklin, did in “One False Move,” his first film and a splendid reworking of the chase with racial, regional and class nuances.

What Franklin has achieved in his second film, with no small help from Denzel Washington and the rest of the cast, is a feeling for urban American life in a Negroid mode that neither points at itself with ethnic pomposity nor fails to use the detective story for the revelations about the nature of our civilization that is its most ambitious task. Brilliantly adapted by Franklin from Walter Mosley’s novel, the film takes us down into the social sewers that are always revealed by the explosions of violence, that subterranean world of perversion and respectable people who are exposed as no more than fat rats in power.

The substructure of Los Angeles in the 1940s, which was where Philip Marlowe had his adventures and learned more about the proportions of sludge than he wished to, is now the daunting tunnel of large question marks that Easy Rawlins is tested by as mystery upon mystery pulls the World War II veteran into the squish and stench of spiritual dung. Because Rawlins is a Negro, when he goes where he goes and suffers the insults, beatings and threats that are basic to the detective story, there are other dimensions put into the tale. His meetings with politicians, knuckleheads, the rich and the police have racial elements that intensify the class prejudices and the brutal uses of power the traditional detective encounters in hard-boiled situations.

Body position, flashes of the eyes and facial expressions are quite important because much of what happens is played between the words, with assumed or rebuked privilege the wire carrying the electricity. To the film’s credit, all of those situations have a very natural feeling, with only a brief voice-over near the end coming off as a sanctimonious race editorial.

Equally good is the feeling of the Negro world that Rawlins lives in. The life that blues and jazz musicians were putting into their music comes forward with a confidence, a lush sensuality, a camaraderie and a wit that adds another layer to the gallows humor we refer to as “black comedy” in a non-racial sense. Relaxed community, buoyancy and harshness are superbly balanced, creating nothing like heaven but something quite akin to the sense of vitality at odds with tragic darkness and absurdity that was central to John Ford’s vision.

When Rawlins needs support and calls in his fellow Texas buddy, the murderous Mouse, we also see a turn on Ford’s understanding that good men, in order to bring about something close to justice, must sometimes make use of those who are loyal, callous and absolutely ruthless.

As Easy Rawlins, Washington gives us his finest performance on film. He achieves what only the very best of remarkably handsome actors can, an exceptional range of feeling that either intensifies his looks or neutralizes them so that the weights and nuances of passion are liberated. We can see the emotion flitting across the actor’s face and hear its various meanings coloring his speech.

One of the best of Washington’s many splendid moments comes when we notice that his eyes have suddenly gone wet after he pounds a bar with a hammer because he realizes that someone truly considered a friend has betrayed him. Let us hope that Washington and Franklin find the right scripts and work together many more times.

Just about the whole acting gang is extremely good, but the one other than Washington who will startle with his invention is Don Cheadle as Mouse. The actor slips the potential noose of the cartoon and makes his character a small package of thoroughly human anarchy. The orchestration of the devil in Mouse’s soul is as fresh as the interpretation James Cagney brought to Tom Powers in “Public Enemy.” Rarely does anything this original reach our theater screens.

The broad, unsentimental understanding of community and the tragic wit of its morality are some of the reasons why this film will be remembered as another signal victory in our struggle to artistically realize the universal potential of our ethnic particulars. Able to intoxicate through the many ingredients of its artistry, “Devil in a Blue Dress” is truly new down-home brew in an old and favorite bottle.

‘Dead Presidents’

The Hughes brothers are going places at a hot pace. While they zipped past “Boyz N the Hood” with the severe and unapologetic accuracy of their first film, the 1993 “Menace II Society,” “Dead Presidents” goes far beyond that effort in its ambition. This time, consciously or not, they have run some new changes on the theme of “The Roaring Twenties.” In the 1939 gangster classic, Cagney played a World War I veteran who returns to Manhattan and can’t get the kind of a life he wants outside of crime. The central character of “Dead Presidents” comes home from Vietnam to a New York community in which he finds himself unemployed and, after hard luck and trouble, decides to better things by getting together an older crime mentor, a female black radical and some fellow war veterans for a big stickup.

The Hughes brothers have a special gift for capturing grit and counterpointing it with humor that is either smooth or prickly. Though in their early 20s, they have done quite a job of bringing back to life the world of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s that was grist for so much blaxploitation. Where the sense of place and the vision of life in those films were just so much chocolate-coated ham, “Dead Presidents” has the soul and complexity of motive all narrative art must possess if it is to touch its source and communicate beyond it. For all their brashness, the Hughes brothers are in pursuit of the sticky, unpredictable manifestations of humanity, the moments of tenderness and clumsiness between young lovers, the bitterness that seeps into the spirit as the hard blues of life in our time throws withering body punches and smacks one’s head until it rings like a big cathedral bell.

Theirs is a gift for moving forward by fast or slow blackout, a technique they used in “Menace II Society.” This is the old, classic way to control the passage of time. The individual episode in the new film is like a chorus in jazz music, an improvisation on a theme. We are given a wide scope of emotional states and reactions as the film goes its tragic way. The Hughes brothers want to show how the kind of nice young men who are attracted to the streets and want some kind of adventure can become embroiled in social scenes where either furious or ice-cold violence is the bloody coin of the realm. The directing twins also understand just how trouble and combative politics can drain a lot of the sweetness from certain kinds of women.

As their themes develop, we see variation given to recurring images and situations. The delivery truck that takes three of the central characters on a milk route foreshadows the armored one the same three will try to rob near the end. The rooms and the relationships change. When we are returned to pool halls, automobiles, dining rooms and street corners, something else is inserted, a twist of feeling or a chance for revenge or deeper romantic passion or gloomy recognition.

The image of the main character running in his girlfriend’s neighborhood is picked up in Vietnam and later follows the robbery. The black face paint of jungle battle becomes the white mime masks of the robbers. The Hughes brothers also know how to make violent situations move beyond shock and take on different meanings--comic, terrifying, exhilarating, humiliating and heartbreaking.

What reviewers have missed in terms of character development is the obsession with manhood of Larenz Tate’s Anthony, the lead role. Not listening close enough, they don’t comprehend his evolution from a good-natured high school kid all the way over to the planner of a heist. The belief that his masculinity must entail coming to terms with extremely tough situations is what attracts him to running numbers and hanging around with pool hall thugs as a teen-ager, then draws him into the Marines and volunteering for the toughest unit in Vietnam. When his family is shocked by his decision to reject college for the military, Anthony reminds his father how he had told his sons that going into the service “made you a man.”

It is that same concern with manhood that prods Anthony into violent criminality. When he finds himself in a situation where his wife and a cuckolding drug dealer contemptuously scoff at him for “not being a man,” the angry desire to stand equal to the well-off criminal and become a provider underlies the decision that dooms his future. A proud and frustrated young man who becomes irrationally impatient when faced with difficulty, Anthony chooses to do something that is bold and military and carries with it a skewed commentary on the political fate of Negro Americans. As with Hughes characters in “Menace II Society,” Anthony’s politics are essentially vague, no more than slogans soaked in his rage. He is attracted to Black Power rhetoric because of its assertiveness, not because of what it says.

Tate, whose humanization of foolhardiness and violence in the first Hughes brothers film was so impressive, stretches out and proves himself perhaps the most talented of young American actors other than John Leguizamo. The course from naivete to fury is negotiated with so many turns of feeling that we witness an easygoing but mischievous young guy develop into a professional soldier, a diligent father, a confused drunk and an unemployed man ready to die rather than submit to the deadly force of a hustler who sticks a pistol in his face. The wholeness of his humanity is another high mark in our contemporary art. Keith David, Rose Jackson and Clifton Powell are equally marvelous. Quite good are Chris Tucker and Bokeem Woodbine.

Where the film fails is in its not making the Black Power sections sufficiently charismatic. No matter what we think about such political pulp, it needed to be delivered with more force, enough to let us believe it might get Anthony’s attention. There is a lot of wit in the way period black pop tunes are used--for instance, James Brown chanting “pay-back” just before Anthony explodes on a bully.

Overall, this is a very strong effort and one that takes on the subject of the difficulties young men of this nation have often had when they go to war looking for manhood and glory but return home to unemployment, a different world and the humiliations that result from a lack of skills. It is a story as American as that of Frank and Jesse James.

‘Clockers’

‘Clockers” is another confounding example of the incomplete talent that is Spike Lee. Surely blessed with the ability to quickly absorb cinematic techniques, he is almost always at a loss for the human understanding that would move his work into fullness.

The filmmaker’s problem is that he suffers from what Ralph Ellison recognized when observing that the self-aware satirist is usually a sentimentalist who uses ridiculing humor as a device to protect his or her work from the mush that destroys artistry. Lee is not self-aware enough to recognize that about himself and realize that comedy brings out his strengths. A black nationalist version of the comic director in “Sullivan’s Travels” who wants to make “big statements,” the pretentious Brooklyn mighty mite is not up to the demands of dramatic development, which is why his efforts outside the mode of satire always sink into long, virtuosic videos bellowing out obvious messages.

Only Lee could make a film about the blood-spattered world of drug dealing and announce that it would be the nail in the coffin of the genre. That is his way of submitting to convention while pretending to spurn it. But because Lee and Richard Price wrote the script from Price’s novel, and because the director had such brilliant actors as Harvey Keitel, Delroy Lindo, John Turturro and Regina Taylor, there is much more success than one would expect of something solely conceived and scripted by the filmmaker.

While making an unflinching connection between the street anarchy of the crack business and the visions that come out of gangster rap, the film repeatedly shows how much stronger the adults are than children, even those who are armed and ready to go buck wild at any moment. When these street punks have to stand up to enraged men or women, they fold up or hide behind the foul-mouthed sullenness that is a form of retreat in face of a greater opponent. If Lee is saying that the rat dung of gangster rap is an influence that helps reduce human beings to spiritual rodents, he might be right. But since one of his kids advocates the Afro-fascist simple-mindedness of Chuck D and Public Enemy as alternative, Lee remains in a political muddle.

There are also real problems of perspective because Lee doesn’t arrive at the “Shakespearean achievement,” which is making us recognize the humanity of people with whom we don’t identify, something the Hughes brothers did so well in “Menace II Society.” These young crack dealers who work on Brooklyn project benches in “Clockers” remain so distant that they come off as some suborder of mammalian life.

Mekhi Phifer’s performance as Strike, the dealer whose soul we are supposed to see volleying back and forth between good and evil, shows so little acting skill he can do nothing with the extremely limited emotional scope of the character. He is probably most interesting for the attentive movie fan because, even with his dark, dark skin, Phifer looks so much like Billy Halop of the Dead End Kids--an unintentional comment on the difference between American faces and the divisions of the races.

However boldly Lee flirts with the kind of wild, thematic, cross-cutting Godard brought to his political period, there is no structural command. There are also unbelievable moments, as when an older drug dealer savagely and systematically destroys a boy’s car right across the street from a police station. As usual, Lee is never one to avoid stopping his film to give the young people a lecture on doing the right thing.

When one thankfully gets to the end, the feeling of having gone nowhere is mixed with the deep appreciation for the work of the best of actors and the director’s undeniable technique. Who is to say that Spike Lee might not someday bring it all together, equaling his cinematic technique with a true sense of the human heart? Perhaps all he has to do is spend some time seriously studying the films of Carl Franklin and the Hughes brothers. They are already bound for glory.