Unforgivable Blackness - The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson |  | Actors: Adam Arkin, Philip Bosco, Keith David, Ed Harris, Samuel L. Jackson
Studio: PBS Paramount
Category: DVD
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Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 11394
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 2
Running Time: 220 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 705062
UPC: 841887050623
EAN: 0841887050623
ASIN: B000BITURA
Theatrical Release Date: 2004
Release Date: January 11, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Ken Burns's documentary style is so unencumbered; the subject matter is effortlessly presented. His regular mix of photos, subtle sound effects, excellent musical score, and actor readings of historical text hasn't changed since his breakthrough of The Civil War. And it doesn't need to. Even though this 220-minute production is a biography--on heavyweight champion Jack Johnson--the film resonates about the how race was dealt with in the early part of the 20th century. Four decades after the Emancipation, the American black was still struggling to find elementary terms of equality. Along came a strong and headstrong man who took on sport decades before Jackie Robinson and became the key figure in heavyweight fighting, a champion against the longest odds. Samuel L. Jackson voices Johnson's words with great verve and helps create an absorbing picture of Johnson along with various historians and boxing experts laying down the tale of the tape. Here's a man so smart and patient in the ring who took great liberties in his day-to-day life, unafraid to showcase his success, and ruffle the morals of the time (including, most scandalously, marrying a white woman). Viewing film of his prizefights, the amateur eye can understand Johnson's style and bravura. Burns's certainly takes his time and, as usual, has a vast awry of facts of how the world reacted to news of Johnson's success and the conspiracy which led to his downfall. The highlight, natch, are two of Johnson's epic fights near the end of his reign as champ (and the search for a "Great White Hope"). The appearance of James Earl Jones (who won a Tony for his portrayal of Johnson in 1959) and Wynton Marsalis's musical score are grand touches. --Doug Thomas
Product Description
Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 09/30/2005
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
 Best Burns documentary in quite some time January 19, 2005
chefdevergue (Spokane, WA United States)
24 out of 28 found this review helpful
After the adequate "Baseball" and downright disappointing "Jazz," some of the luster associated with the name of Ken Burns has worn off in the last few years. I couldn't help but wonder, when I saw that this documentary was in the works, if we were doomed to get more of the same from Burns, especially considering the involvement of Stanley Crouch in the project. Thankfully, it appears that Burns has returned to form with "Unforgivable Blackness."
Really, it is about time somebody did a documentary on Johnson. If he isn't the best heavyweight ever, there are only maybe two others that one could put ahead of him. Only Ali can rival him for mastery of the science of boxing, yet Johnson is comparatively obscure these days.
In many ways, this documentary spends relatively little time on the actual sport of boxing itself, which will be an annoyance to boxing enthusiasts. Personally, I would have enjoyed a more detailed discussion of just how great Johnson's defensive skills and the fact that he was rarely a slugger in the ring (Stanley Ketchel notwithstanding), but this might have been boring to a mainstream audience. Mostly, Burns returns to familiar territory --- race relations in an earlier era --- only with a dynamic personal & rebellious twist in the person of Johnson, who was utterly unconcerned with his critics, be they black or white, and who felt no compulsion to work for the betterment of anyone other than himself.
Even though I was relatively familiar with the government's persecution of Johnson via the Mann Act, it was still amazing to see just how many resources the government was willing to expend in order to bring one black boxer under its control. Laissez faire obviously is in the eye of the beholder.
To Burns' eternal credit, even though he clearly sympathizes with Johnson, he also points out that Johnson drew his own color line once he became champion. Burns has been notorious for serious omissions in past projects, and I fully expected to hear nothing about the fact that Johnson repeatedly refused to give Sam Langford (the greatest heavyweight never to become champion --- end of discussion) a shot at the title. However, Burns does discuss, albeit somewhat briefly, the fact that Johnson spurned other black boxers because there was a) no money in it, and b) the various White Hopes were much easier pickings. Thanks to Johnson, a whole generation of very skilled black boxers missed its opportunity to fight for a championship, and this is a fact that simply cannot be ignored. If Burns had omitted this, it would have badly tainted the documentary. Good for him!
The archival footage is especially splendid, even with the silly little sound effects added in. Also, kudos to Burns for including Bert Sugar in his cast of talking heads. One can listen to Stanley Crouch only for so long; better to have someone who has spent his whole career writing about the sport of boxing actually discuss the sport. The voiceover work is, as usual stellar. The music (provided in part by Wynton Marsalis, I guess) is decent enough.
All in all, this documentary represents the return of Ken Burns to his earlier form, and I hope continues to produce documentaries of this calibre, although it would be hard to find a story as fascinating as that of Jack Johnson.
Jack Johnson was a Man February 8, 2005
J. S. Kaminski (Aberdeen, NJ United States)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
I knew something of Jack Johnson before I saw this documentary, but Ken Burns tells his story with incredible detail. One of the many revelations for me was the astonishing level of accepted racism that was prevalent at the time. Supposedly reputable newspapers (e.g., The New York Times) and authors (Jack London) are quoted at length, with bigoted excerpts that border on inflammatory. One couldn't imagine hearing something of this nature from today's mainstream media. Just the very idea that a black man/African-American could defeat a white man seemed preposterous to many; so much so that boxers often refused to even fight one. It took Jack Johnson a long time to get a shot at the title; but once he got it, it took white America even longer to get it back. What stands out in this program is the towering figure of Johnson himself.
I couldn't help noticing that Johnson appeared to be the prototype for the modern American athlete. All the brashness, bravado, conceit and over-indulgence that we associate with the "headliners" of today...all this began with Johnson. He seemed to revel in flouting society's conventions. When you think of the arrogance of Ali, the controversy of Jim Brown, the bravado of Namath...Jack Johnson was all this before they were. At the same time, however, I can't help but remember Charles Barkley saying "I am not a role model." Jack Johnson wasn't either, as much as Black America wanted him to be. In the end, he was too loud, too defiant, too controversial. He was too much, really, for the times. But I came away from this program thinking exactly what he wanted his epitaph to be: Jack Johnson WAS a man. No doubt about that.
Five stars.
Ken Burns at the top of his game January 14, 2005
Fred McGhee (Austin, TX)
31 out of 40 found this review helpful
I purchased a copy of this DVD at Costco for $14.99, on 10 January, 2005. Kudos to PBS Home Video for making it available for public purchase before the PBS premiere of the film on January 17, and also for making it so affordable.
This is an important and necessary film, and overall, it is Ken Burns' best treatment of the subject of race yet. I have never been quite happy with Burns' classic northeastern liberal interpretations of race in some of his other documentaries, and I'm certainly no fan of Stanley Crouch, but Jack Johnson is such a compelling subject that even Burns can't mess this up. This is an extremely watchable and informative film whose strengths are incremental and long lasting. The film's biggest strong point, perhaps, its thorough basis in well conducted historical research. The performers, particularly Samuel L. Jackson and Billy Bob Thornton, also do a terrific job.
Wynton Marsalis' soundtrack, of course, is terrific as well.
I'm glad that the DVD contains a "deleted scenes" extra feature, something that is standard practice with DVD's these days, but not necessarily with Ken Burns films.
All in all, a superior product, one that deserves wide attention and acclaim.
Documentary filmmaking at its very best October 28, 2005
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I've been a big fan of the work of Ken Burns ever since seeing his THE CIVIL WAR in 1990 on PBS, and have loved both his epic documentaries like BASEBALL and JAZZ and shorter ones like those on Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Abraham Lincoln. If one has seen much of his work, one is aware of two ongoing preoccupations: the history of United States and the role of race in that history. Therefore, a documentary on the boxer Jack Johnson falls very much in the stream of his previous work. Nonetheless, the choice of subject is a tad surprising; Jack Johnson is someone who is known, but not exactly a household name. Before this documentary, my knowledge of Johnson consisted of the fact that he was the first well known African American athlete, flourished a couple of decades before Joe Louis, and was the subject of a highly successful stage play starring James Earl Jones. I didn't even know if any film footage existed of his bouts. In short, unlike Burns's other documentaries, this was definitely going to be a total learning experience. The result was one of the very best, if not the very best, short documentary that Ken Burns has produced.
Amazingly, there is not merely a rich photographic record of Johnson's career, but an amazing amount of film footage. As a result, you can get a wonderful sense of what he was like as a boxer, perhaps the first boxer of whom that can be said. In fact, he might be the earliest major athlete of whom we have significant film footage. Upon reflection, the reason for this is clear. Cameras were not truly portable in 1908-13 and really could only be used from fixed positions. This meant that filming baseball or horse racing, the other two major sports at the time, was close to impossible. But boxing utilized a small area that could easily be filmed. I was fascinated to learn that many of the major boxing matches were filmed for distribution to movie theaters, meaning that well before performers such as Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin became popular, people were going to movie houses to watch boxing. The film and photos reveals a remarkably quick and agile and skilled boxer, a man who looks huge and a bit bulky when clothed-and his obsession with clothes is blatant from early in the documentary to the end, obviously one of the best dressed athletes of all time-but astonishingly lean though muscled when in his boxing gear. The film reveals a boxer who favors a defensive posture, weight back, ready to counterattack, but not one who tends to go at his opponent. With his speed and agility, he will clearly remind anyone of Muhammad Ali, another boxer whose style emphasized defense more than offense. But the racism of Johnson's time refused to make a virtue of his style, describing him as "shifty" instead of skilled, even though his style was exactly that of Gentleman Jim Corbett. The photos of Johnson are especially impressive, showing an astonishing physique. His upper back and shoulders are almost inconceivable for an athlete in an age in which weight lifting played no major role in physical fitness. In watching Johnson, he clearly seems an athlete decades ahead of his peers. One wonders how baseball players of the teens and twenties fare in an age that has pitches like the slider and a battery of relief pitchers, but one can easily imagine Johnson doing well even today. His skills as a boxer are obvious in all the footage that is shown of him.
Although little mention of Muhammad Ali is made in the documentary until the very end, it is almost impossible to watch this film without comparing him constantly to Ali. Though he facially lacked Ali's very handsome looks, his boxing style, his brash insistence on being his own man, and some of the ordeals he goes through bear a striking resemblance to Ali's career. Near the end the film talks of how Ali self-identified with Johnson after his being stripped of his title after refusing to serve in the military. The big difference between the two is the fact that Johnson was very much the party animal, while Ali has always been a much more serious person.
The film is split into two parts, the first half dealing with the rise of Johnson and culminating in his defense of his heavyweight crown against Jim Jeffries, former heavyweight champ and the major "Great White Hope," whom whites hoped would recover the crown for their race. The second half deals with Johnson's "Fall," and centers primarily around efforts to convict him for his sexual relations with white women using the Mann Act. Though one can't respect Johnson's way of relating to women (he was abusive to women and either incapable or uninterested in fidelity), the way the government proceeded against him based primarily on his race is, of course, utterly loathsome. The nadir is his losing to giant Kansas Jess Willard, who beat Johnson in 1915 in Cuba in the 26th round of their match (though it should be pointed out that under today's rules Johnson would have been the clear winner, out boxing Willard through nearly the whole fight until tiring in the 105 degree heat at the end). Johnson's story ends less sadly than one might have anticipated, despite spending a year in prison for his Mann Act violation nonetheless managing to have enough money to maintain his lifestyle until dying at age 68 in a car crash.
The documentary has all the professionalism that one has come to associate with Ken Burns's films and has the additional virtue of a remarkable score by Wynton Marsalis, who featured so prominently in his JAZZ series. Many of the commentators were familiar from previous documentaries, including Stanley Crouch, Gerald Early, and George Plimpton, while Keith David, who did the narration for JAZZ was narrator here as well.
I strongly recommend this documentary. It is Burns's at his best on a topic that will interest just about anyone and not merely boxing fans. It deals with a major American figure who deserves to be better known. In debates about the greatest boxers who ever lived, Johnson is often mentioned for his superb defensive skills, but hopefully after this fine effort he will be remembered as a truly great all around boxer and perhaps even the very best.
On a personal note, I live only about six blocks south of Graceland Cemetery, which I have for some reason never bothered to visit, despite being the resting place of many famous Americans. But seeing that Johnson is also buried there just might be enough for me to go seek out his resting place and pay my respects.
 "Rise," yes. "Fall," no. February 2, 2005
Center Man (Norwich, CT United States)
13 out of 17 found this review helpful
Blacks could not fight for the world heavyweight championship in the 19th century. The "world's strongest man," it was thought, could not be black: Blacks were not men. That attitude drove race relations to an all time low between 1890 and 1917. Segregation, disenfranchisement and lynching took root throughout the country. Hanging black men was sport.
Which makes Jack Johnson's bravery remarkable. He refused to be a "complacent negro." When Tommy Burns, then-heavyweight champion, refused to give him a fight, Johnson chased him around the world and forced him to accept his challenge for the world title. Johnson knocked Burns out in 1908, then beat Jim Jeffries, "the Great White Hope," in Reno, NV in 1910. White America, by and large, did not approve. Prosecutors later railroaded him on a false count of transporting women over state lines.
Quite a story, huh? Ken Burns thinks so, and he empties his tool box here, pulling out breathtaking cinematography, top-of-the-shelf voiceovers, and superb period photographs. The director gets a big assist from the wealth of film with Johnson. The speedy jabs and sly charisma fly out of the flickering black and white frames, making Johnson one of Burns' more dynamic protagonists.
That's important, because this is pretty grim stuff. The slurs thrown at Johnson made me shiver, as did the casual assumption that blacks like Johnson were beasts. The boxer, to his credit, refused to bow to any of it.
That's a shining example for the rest of us. It's a problem for "Unforgivable Blackness."
Race is Burns' chief concern, and his documentaries show an admirable frankness in tackling the issue. Johnson, from a distance, seems like the race problem personified: An exceptionally gifted athlete, his considerable talents were overlooked because of his skin tone. It would seem, then, that the hatred demolished Johnson.
Except it didn't. In the face of violent abuse, he smiled, insulted his smiters and slipped back into a well-tailored suit. A $50 speeding ticket? Johnson gives the cop $100 and tells him he's coming back the same way. Attacked for dating white women? He dates another, and another and another. Convicted on trumped-up "white-slaving" charges? Johnson leaves the country and tells people he likes Mexico better.
That makes the "Fall" part of Burns' subtitle problematic. As deeply ingrained as racism was, no one ever stripped Johnson of his title. He lost it not because of his race, but because of his age and his refusal to take Jess Willard (his successor) seriously. He was persecuted, and eventually went to jail. But even in prison, Johnson followed his own drummer, and seems to have lived a fairly happy life after his release in 1921. We should all have falls like that.
Burns says a great deal about America's shameful racial attitudes in the early 20th century, but overreaches when he tries push them down on Johnson's shoulders. Johnson shrugged the hate off and stood tall in the ring. His opponents handed their money over and flooded the arena, screaming and spitting and praying that a white man would knock him out. Johnson smiled, dispatched his opponent and had a great dinner on his enemies' cash. He never fell; his fierce individualism made him soar above his contemporaries.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
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