Top of the Heap

Director: Christopher St. John

1972 / 90min / DCP

The year after his role in Shaft, St. John was the writer/director/star of experimental genre film Top of the Heap, an unfairly unheralded, entirely unprecedented work that exists at the intersection of arthouse modernism and Blaxploitation. St. John plays a Washington, D.C. cop who, after he’s overlooked for a deserved promotion in his largely lily white and rancidly racist department, starts a vigilante vendetta against street crime, his crack-up under the pressures of terrestrial life reflected in dream visions in which he imagines himself as a NASA astronaut. A sublime, surreal subversion of supercop tropes, unlike anything else of its era.