Word: cooley
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...that confront Senators when it turns out this otherwise wise and honorable man has lied about membership in the Communist party. The issues are cast in fifties terms, but the "Profiles in Courage" feeling is universal. The chief attraction lies in a stunning performance by Charles Laughton as Seab Cooley, the archetypal Southern Senator, who, like Sam Ervin, turned out to be a fairly wise man. The climactic scene, when the Senate votes on the nomination, is as exciting as anything that happened during Watergate. Absolutely staggering...
...COOLEY HIGH...
There is currently some noise around to the effect that Cooley High-about growing up black in Chicago in 1964-is a separate but equal American Graffiti. Such impressions should be corrected immediately. It requires a certain defensiveness, or an anxious if inadvertent condescension, to maintain that Cooley High, crude of mind and clumsy of execution, can even compete with the smart high spirits of American Graffiti...
...Cooley High has all the grace of an Army training film. Like the kids in Graffiti, the students in Cooley High are trapped near the dead end of their own young lives. The difference is that the odds of escape are even heavier against the blacks. They have to fight their poverty and the everyday threat of their streets even to get a chance. The Graffiti kids never really knew they had a chance. They took their fate-and everything else-for granted, which is a different kind of tragedy. Around Cooley High, you either knuckle under or you fight...
...movie is less concerned with these matters, however, than with making bad broad jokes: when some students play hooky and go to a Chicago zoo, a gorilla hurls his dirt onto one of them; on the run from a couple of guys looking to do him harm, one of Cooley's brighter hopes hides out in a bathroom where a young lady sits screaming on the toilet. The movie does have two energetic performances by Glynn Turman and Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs, but they are just about overrun. One of the Cooley kids takes off for Hollywood to become...