Skin Game

Quincy Drew and Jason O'Rourke are two con men and their trick goes like this: Quincy sells his Black friend Jason as a slave, takes the money, then springs him and they move on to the next town. Jason is a free man born in the North and plays the part by his own consent. They work their way through the America of the years before the Civil War, and one day the con goes wrong. The mould is comedy but the material is not funny: the film turns slavery into an instrument of fraud and mocks the system itself while doing it. James Garner and Louis Gossett Jr. have the leads and the balance between them holds the film up; Jason carries the real risk of being sold in every scene, while Quincy can forget it. Directed by Paul Bogart, it is one of the few films of the early seventies to take on this subject through laughter.