Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Cleveland’s black community is on a knife-edge. Having made his name in Hollywood with The Naked City (1948), director Jules Dassin was blacklisted for his communist sympathies in the early 1950s. After several years in Europe, where he made the classic heist film Rififi (1955), he returned to the USA for this reworking of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer. Unjustly forgotten, today Uptight, with its iconic score by Booker T. and the MGs, can be considered an important precursor to the militant Black films that emerged from American cinema in the 1970s.

Screening as part of Look Who’s Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist. Multi-film pass available.