One False Move: “Lock Things Up”

Along with location filming in Los Angeles and Pearblossom, California, One False Move was shot in and around the Arkansas Delta towns of Brinkley and Cotton Plant in 1990. When the film was done, it was headed for a straight-to-video release. And then Chicago film critic Roger Ebert saw it at a festival in 1991 and loved it, prompting Beaton to make a successful case to I.R.S. Media for a limited theatrical run. Ebert’s and fellow critic Gene Siskel’s continued championing of the film would ultimately lead to a wider release. Ebert said it belonged “on the very short list of great movies about violent criminals.”

The film is bookended by intensely violent sequences, opening with two brutal home-invasion robberies and closing with a bloody showdown, but the central part of the story relies on a more subtle juxtaposition of opposite forces: urban and rural, personal and impersonal, idyllic and nightmarish. In an interview with Terry Gross for Fresh Air in July 1992, Thornton said: “My heroes were Elvis Presley and Andy Griffith. The Hurricane character, if you really look at it, is a little bit like Andy Griffith . . . Sometimes, Tom and I refer to the movie as ‘Bonnie and Clyde meet Andy Griffith.’” Of course, what makes that idea work is that Hurricane isn’t a one-dimensional yokel. Ultimately, his layers are peeled back to reveal a dark core behind the goofy, aw-shucks sheen. His racism. His history with Lila. His desire to be a cowboy roaming the streets of LA like he sees on TV.

Franklin has spoken at length on the film’s violence, explaining his desire to portray the real emotion behind the crimes. He has often decried how violence was being utilized in the cinema of the time. The pageantry. The disconnection from reality. Graphic bloodshed with no sense of mercy or emotion. In One False Move, he makes sure that every life taken is felt. Lila’s friends at the beginning. The cop she shoots. Even the dealers Ray and Pluto slaughter. I think often of the cut from Lila finding the young boy hiding in the dealer’s house in LA, during the second home invasion, to Hurricane going to comfort his daughter after she wakes from a nightmare. Brutality tempered with moments of grace. This humanity is a product of Franklin’s gentle touch. He shoots and directs his actors with obvious compassion, never letting the characters drift into shallow representations and somehow managing to document all that’s boiling under the surface.

How the film handles race set it apart in 1992 and still sets it apart. Released at a charged time, in the wake of Rodney King’s brutal beating by Los Angeles police and the riots that followed, One False Move doesn’t offer slapdash portraits of Black and white characters or of cops and criminals. Instead, it’s all shades of gray, dealing with challenging material in a way that could never be perceived as easy or formulaic. Hurricane, despite all his flaws and sins, is the protagonist, the hero. How we interpret the film’s racial themes is often filtered through Lila. “Looking guilty is being guilty for Black people,” she says at one point. In what I consider to be the film’s most harrowing line, nearing the climax, she asks Hurricane, “Why’d you ever fuck with me?” There’s so much contained in that question. Why could he fuck with her? Her story comes into sharper focus. Her desire to escape Arkansas for LA and to make it as an actor. Getting caught up with Ray. The descent of a starry-eyed kid from Star City who gets taken advantage of at age seventeen by a white cop with power and then gets sucked into a whirlpool of violence and degradation by Ray. Who might she have been if Hurricane hadn’t fucked with her? Williams’s haunted, heartbreak-heavy eyes tell a tragic tale of the death of wonder and the betrayal of trust. There’s no escape for Lila. Nor is there any escape for Hurricane. In the end, bleeding from a knife wound to the gut, he clutches the hand of five-year-old Byron, the son he had with Lila and has previously refused to acknowledge. Byron looks at the ring of keys hanging from his belt loop. “What do you do with your keys?” Byron asks. Hurricane hesitates. “I lock things up,” he says, laughing a little. He has locked things up his whole life. He has been taught to lock things up. In the New York Times profile, Franklin said that the film “is not an exercise in style . . . [but] an analysis of behavior. It’s about atonement, about reaping what you sow, about somehow reckoning with your own fate. It’s about how in the harvest of our success is usually the seed of our destruction.”