The low-budget feature Top of the Heap was released in 1972 by Fanfare Films, a distributor that specialized in exploitation movies like Born Losers and Execution Squad. Christopher St. John, the film’s writer, director, producer, and star, had played a supporting role in Shaft and acted in some soft-core porn films marketed primarily to black audiences. Given the histories of its distributor and auteur, American spectators likely assumed that Heap would be a run-of-the-mill blaxploitation flick—though, to be fair, a brief synopsis would seem to promise this too. St. John plays a black police officer in Washington, D.C., who feels alienated from many of his fellow cops, who look down on him because he’s black, as well as his family and peers, who look down on him for serving the Man. As personal and professional stresses pile up, the cop loses his grip on reality and ultimately breaks out in violence.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But Top of the Heap is no low-rent action movie. The conversations about black upward mobility are serious and ambiguous. The acting is focused, even understated at times (it’s worth noting that St. John had been a member of both the Yale Repertory Theater and the New York-based Actors Studio before he started appearing in exploitation movies). And, most surprisingly, Heap is full of ambitious dream sequences that dramatize the protagonist’s troubled subconscious. Some of these—like the ones in which St. John imagines himself as the first black man on the moon—are silly and satirical in nature. Others—like his nightmare of being visited by his dead mother—display the influence of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and other European art films.
The story gets worse. Soon after the film received its curtailed U.S. release, “two writers claimed they worked on the project and didn’t get any credit on the screenplay. The Writers Guild shut the film down, took away its right to be distributed. They never took [St. John] to court, but the film was shut down—and basically, Chris was shut down as a filmmaker. Now he was known in Hollywood as a troublemaker because he had done all the wrong things.”
Top of the Heap Sun 10/20, 4 PM Black Cinema House 6901 S. Dorchesterblackcinemahouse.org Christopher St. John will take part in a postscreening Q&A via Skype RSVP required Free
