The Cool World

The Cool World (1964)

HOOKER! FUZZ! JUNK! RUMBLE! These are words that mean big trouble in...

A fifteen-year-old boy wants to buy a gun from an adult racketeer named Priest, in order to become president of the gang to which he belongs, and to return them to active "bopping" (gang fighting) which has declined in Harlem.

Date of release
1964-04-20
TMDB
5.5 / 10 (22)
Runtime
1h 45m
Genres
Crime, Drama
Director
Shirley Clarke

Casting

Interesting facts

The Cool World is a 1963 American drama film directed by Shirley Clarke about African-American life in the Royal Pythons, a youth gang in Harlem. In 1994, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Production

This semi-documentary style movie was produced by soon-to-be documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, directed by Shirley Clarke, and adapted by Clarke and Carl Lee from the 1959 novel The Cool World by Warren Miller, with original music was by Mal Waldron and cinematography by Baird Bryant

A play, written by Miller and Robert Rossen based on the novel, was first shown in Philadelphia and then twice at Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre on February 22 and 23, 1960, featuring Raymond St. Jacques, James Earl Jones, Calvin Lockhart, Hilda Simms, and others. The film helped launch Antonio Fargas, Clarence Williams III, Carl Lee, and Gloria Foster, who married Williams three years later.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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