Uptight

Director: Jules Dassin

1968 / 104min / DCP

Inspired by John Ford’s 1935 The Informer, the formerly Blacklisted and long-exiled Dassin’s trenchant Uptight shifts the scene from the Irish War of Independence to contemporary Cleveland, Ohio, in the conflagration that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the film’s stars, Ruby Dee, also contributed to the screenplay, which extensively and sympathetically deals with a Black liberation movement divided between advocates of non-violent protest and proponents of armed insurrection, and earned the production the attentions of a nervous J. Edgar Hoover, who had FBI informants regularly reporting from the set, but ultimately couldn’t stop the completion of this robust work of expressionist agitprop.

Distributor: Paramount

Part of Fugitive Days