The Landlord

A film set in Brooklyn. Elgar is twenty-nine and the son of a rich family. He has never worked, never left home, and takes an idea. He buys an apartment building. He is going to empty it and make himself a large flat. The building is in a Black neighbourhood. About ten families live in it and all of them barely manage the rent. The reception on the first day is bad. Nobody wants to move and nobody tells him anything straight. Then Elgar stays. He makes a place for himself in the basement and starts spending time with the tenants. From there the film turns into a story about class and race. A birthday, a family dinner, a fight, an affair and a pregnancy. Fanny is a tenant upstairs. Her husband is in the Black nationalist movement and she becomes involved with Elgar. He has a line with Lanie as well. She is a young dancer, and as the relationship goes on the matter of her family comes up. Elgar's mother comes to the neighbourhood. The well-meaning racism in that scene is the film's sharpest section. What the narrative is interested in is not property but good intentions: Elgar is not a bad man; he wants to harm nobody, and exactly because of that everything he does turns out worse. The tone is mixed. The narrative begins as comedy and drops that entirely in its last section. This is Hal Ashby's first film as director; he had been an editor before, and the cutting rhythm shows it. Lee Grant was nominated for an Academy Award for the part. Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Diana Sands and Louis Gossett Jr are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes American independent cinema of the 1970s and films that address race directly. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a consistent tone; the narrative shifts between comedy and drama several times.