Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Just as Reservoir Dogs and Mean Streets inadvertently created templates for the countless other “gritty,” “darkly comic” urban dramas that would follow in their wakes, it appears as if the foundation of a new sub-genre of crime movies has been built on the backs of “feral” youths condemned at birth to life sentences in shanty towns, housing projects and barrios, from Glasgow to Rio de Janeiro.

City of God and Amores perros are the most recognizable examples of the trend, but also representative are such merciless treatises as Our Lady of the Assassins, Sweet Sixteen, the little-seen Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes (from Argentine, it recently was released here on DVD by Facets Video) and the woefully under-screened, On the Outs. While vastly different from each other, newcomers Tsotsi and Dirty fit the same mold of pictures fueled by heartless violence, pulsating variations of American hip-hop music, nearly indecipherable street patois and a refusal by their directors to offer easy solutions or Hollywood endings.

Adapted from an apartheid-era novel by Athol Fugard, Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi is a leading candidate for an Oscar as this year’s Best Foreign Language Film. Set in post-Mandela Jo’Burg, it chronicles one eventful week in the life of a gang leader, whose nihilism is an indictment of governments that promise freedom and opportunity for everyone, except their own disenfranchised youths.

The LAPD’s Rampart Division scandal inspired Chris Fisher to write and direct Dirty, which is what a feature-length version of FX’s The Shield might look like if Detective Vic Mackey’s Strike Team wasn’t so determinedly white. While most of the characters are adults, the movie’s police protagonists grew up on L.A.’s meanest streets, and the next generation of thugs is represented by a multi-racial gang of punks as fearsome as any in City of God.

This isn’t to say that movies about malevolent teens (once characterized simply as juvenile delinquents) are a new phenomenon. It’s the palpable sense of despair that arrives with each new addition to the genre -- combined with the visual intimacy afforded by digital technology -- that separates the new titles from their predecessors.

Certainly, the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood described by Michael Curtiz in Angels With Dirty Faces isn’t all that different than the slums of Rio shown in City of God and the terrific new documentary, Favela Rising. Nor were the original Dead End Kids any less menacing than the urchins in Los Olvidados, Lord of the Flies, The Harder They Come, A Clockwork Orange, Pixote, Salaam Bombay! and Ratcatcher. If the hooligans in Richard Brooks’ The Blackboard Jungle had lived long enough to raise hoodlums of their own, we might have seen them in such pictures as The Warriors, Bad Boys, Colors, Mi Vida Loca, Kids, Gummo and River’s Edge.

The difference, of course, comes in knowing that embracing an outlaw lifestyle isn’t nearly as romantic as it might have been when judges routinely gave rebellious teens the option of going to jail or joining the army. The armed services no longer willingly accept society’s outcasts, and even Hollywood has a difficult time buying Hollywood endings, anymore.

“The children of the permanent underclass have become the shadowy figures we now all fear, no matter the race or income,” argued Hood, who had just learned that Tsotsi had won the Jury Prize for Best Picture at the Pan-African Film Festival. “Most of the people who live in the shanty towns are decent people, just trying to get along. Tsotsi’s at the center of the drama, and he does terrible things before he’s given the opportunity for redemption … and viewers must decide if he can be forgiven.”

Much separates the new breed of socio-realistic films from those made before there was a consensus on the existence of a permanent underclass of poor and disenfranchised people, not only in Third World countries but also in the U.S. and Europe. A closer reading of the sexy French drama of star-crossed love, “Lila Says,” which is set in a poor Arab neighborhood in Marseilles, might have provided an early predictor of the recent riots throughout France over allegations of police brutality.

Hollywood, of course, has never been comfortable working in shades of gray. For decades, audiences were asked to believe that only thing separating poor people from a realistic shot at middle-class bliss was a determined high school teacher, an observant record producer, a colorblind coach or priest cut from the same cloth as Pat O’Brien. The bad apples, then, who rejected their sage advice, were left crushed along the side of the road like so many Rocky Sullivans and Cody Jarretts.

As in reality, today’s headlines suggest otherwise.

Unlike several generations of Mafia chieftains, few of today’s gangstas are allowed 30 or 40 years of productive criminality before being forced to die a natural death in prison, and they know it. Such negative variables as abject poverty, fatherless family life, early incarceration, AIDS, lack of education, a numbness toward violence and government indifference far outweigh the opportunities provided by traditional safety nets and good intentions. Instead, desperate souls embrace such longshot options as the lottery, tryouts for “American Idol,” prostitution and careers in sports, music and high-volume dope dealing.

After all, if former Crip Snoop Doggy Dogg can become a cuddly pop-cultural icon – after being put on trial for murder, and starring in a porno – there’s hope for everyone. Is this not the message delivered by such films as Hustle & Flow, Great Rich or Die Tryin’ and American Pimp? It should be remembered, however, that Tupac Shakur’s bright future as a crossover star ended in a hail of bullets. That’s real, too.

“Violence is the language of people who have no other way to communicate,” asserts Fisher, whose Dirty is loaded with it. “And, it’s a language people understand. That’s why I think we missed an opportunity after the (Rodney King) riots in 1992.

“People were trying to communicate their feelings about police brutality in the only language they understood. The Rampart Division scandal grew out of the LAPD’s refusal to listen.”

The Tsotsi of Tsotsi, as portrayed so dynamically by newcomer Presley Chweneyagae, left home at an early after being abused physically by his alcoholic father. His AIDS-afflicted mother was bed-ridden and unable to provide a buffer between the boy and her husband. As we meet Tsotsi, he and his three droogs are embarking on what we assume to be a typical night out on the town, except that this one results in the death of a black commuter with a fat wallet.

This is not the Johannesburg of Fugard’s novel, as Tsotsi has been updated to reflect the issues affecting a very different South Africa. Among the hurdles facing Hood was the tightrope he would be forced to straddle while avoiding tensions between the country’s many “nations” (similar to Indian tribes here, except much bigger), any one of which might feel slighted if Tsotsi’s action reflected poorly on its people. It explains why Hood, given a choice of 11 “official” languages, elected to employ “Tsotsi-Taal,” a mongrel dialect that originated in Soweto.

Moreover, the film would have to reflect a Johannesburg in which there now is an established black middle-class, and whites are no longer ensured jobs based solely on the color their skin. And, yet, the shantytowns continue to teem with life.

“Our primary intention was to make a taut, well-paced, character-driven psychological thriller,” says Hood, who had earned a law degree in South Africa before heading to Los Angeles to study film at UCLA. “We also wanted to transport our audience into a world of radical contrasts: skyscrapers and shacks, wealth and poverty, violent anger and gentle compassion. They all collide in a classic story of redemption.”

One night, Tsotsi ventures forth from his clapboard home, for the purpose of stealing an automobile that he can turn into cash at a local chop-shop. Unfortunately for everyone involved in the situation, the carjacking results in the near-fatal shooting of the driver, and inadvertent kidnapping of her infant son.

Inexplicably, Tsotsi elects not to leave the child at the door of a local church or hospital, choosing, instead, to carry the child home with him. He uses his wiles to keep his new playmate from starving to death or drowning in his makeshift diapers, and the experience rekindles long-sublimated memories of his mother’s love. He’s tempted to raise the child himself, but quickly realizes that the boy would have almost no chance of enjoying a productive life.

It is at this juncture that Hood places Tsotsi at the crossroads of redemption and oblivion. In doing so, he puts audiences in the uncomfortable position of having to act as the boy’s jury. Indeed, he made two endings: one in which Tsotsi is killed by police and another that gives him a momentary reprieve, at least.

“The climax could have been played cool and hip, or sentimental,” Hood adds. “I needed to find a place between the cool approach and melodrama. I didn’t want to condemn or forgive Tsotsi, who had been pushed to the point of emotional breakdown and was dealing the extreme loss (of his surrogate son).”

In Dirty, the die has already been cast.

“The other side of the story is never presented,” says Fisher, another law school graduate who exchanged the drama of the courtroom for the intrigue of the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. “These characters are the worst of the worst, and the film wasn’t made to inspire discussion on NPR. I found this to be very liberating.”

The audience learns early-on that the undercover cops played by an unrecognizable Cuba Gooding Jr. and Clifton Collins Jr. (Perry Smith, in Capote) are corrupt, and the “rat squad” is on their tails. We also know that these officers, Salim Adel and Armando Sancho, have acted at the behest and urging of their superiors, who also benefited from the team’s ill-gotten gains. As in the real Rampart scandal, the gangs on which the police preyed were among the most vicious in the city, so few in the community bemoaned their fates.

When the deal finally comes down, Fisher has consciously left the audience with almost no one to cheer. This left distributors in a quandary as to the most appropriate marketing tack.

Dirty was screened before racially diverse audiences in Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia and South Carolina. For some reason, the distributor even thought there was something to be gained by previewed it in cities where other Gooding other pictures – Snow Dogs, Radio, The Fighting Temptations and Boat Trip, among them – had done well. Not surprisingly, nothing was.

In fact, Hispanics and African-Americans tended to be far more forgiving of the racial taunts and violence than white audiences, who were noticeably uncomfortable with some of the more aggressive exchanges.

“The whites didn’t know when it was OK to laugh, so they didn’t,” Fisher recalled. “The blacks and Latinos at those screenings totally got it. I showed it to students in Leonard Maltin’s class at USC – who segregated themselves by race in the classroom – didn’t know what to make of it.”

At its core, Dirty is an exercise in genre entertainment, as were Fisher’s Nightstalker and The Hillside Strangler Murders. As such, its target audience expects take-no-prisoners action, artfully crude dialogue and comedy that’s as far from being politically correct as it could possibly be.

“Dirty plays it right down the middle,” Fisher adds. “It was layered to take advantage of different levels of audience experiences. I wanted the experience to be visceral … intense …it wasn’t intended to be a crowd-pleaser.”

Officers Adel and Sancho are successful, both as cops and thugs, primarily because of the education they received in the gang-dominated streets of the Los Angeles. Their moral compasses were bent before they were sworn in at the police academy.

In Dirty, the permanent underclass is represented not by the adults – who, by and large, are benefiting quite nicely from a life of crime – but in the packs of feral wolf pups who idle away their time hustling, getting high, stealing anything not nailed down and skateboarding along the Venice strand. The kids are most vulnerable when wrangled out of the herd by the cops or older gangstas. When they return to the pack, however, they demonstrate all the fear of jackals in pursuit of a wounded antelope.

After bracing one of the smallest members of the pack, Splooge, Adel makes the mistake of groping his girlfriend, Rita. This not only pisses off the boy, but it also inspires Rita to grab a rather large handgun and realize her dream of someday killing a cop.

Although the characters in Tsotsi and Dirty live half a world apart from each other, the differences between them are minimal. Hood and Fisher leave viewers with the impression that Splooge and Tsotsi could change places and not skip a beat.

Perhaps, that's the saddest thing of all.

February 28 , 2006
- Gary Dretzka

.