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| Michael Boatman and Lori Petty in The Glass Shield |
Cast: Michael Boatman, Lori Petty, Erich Anderson, Richard Anderson, Bernie Casey, Linden Chiles, Wanda De Jesus, Victoria Dillard, Elliott Gould, Don Harvey, Tommy Hicks, Ice Cube, Michael Ironside, Natalija Nogulich, Drew Snyder, M. Emmet Walsh. Screenplay: Charles Burnett, based on a screenplay by John Eddie Johnson and Ned Welsh. Cinematography: Elliot Davis. Production design: Penny Barrett. Film editing: Curtiss Clayton. Music: Stephen James Taylor.
Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield starts as a movie about racism and sexism, but then wanders into whodunit territory, becomes a trial drama, and winds up as an indictment of the corruption-breeding cronyism of police departments. Michael Boatman and Lori Petty play rookies in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department who, because they're the first Black and first woman in the department, immediately become outsiders, regarded as "diversity hires." Petty's Deborah Fields, trained as a lawyer, remains on the defensive, while Boatman's J.J. Johnson decides to go along and get along. They find themselves, however, investigating a murder that has been pinned on a young Black man (Ice Cube), whose arrest Johnson had a part in bringing about. Boatman and Petty are too lightweight for the roles they've been asked to play, especially since the cast is loaded with such heavyweight character actors as M. Emmet Walsh, Michael Ironside, and Elliott Gould. This miscasting causes the film to lose what focus its rather complicated screenplay possesses. To its credit, The Glass Shield, which was made after the Rodney King trial but before the O.J. Simpson trial, feels prescient, and it doesn't come up with pat answers to the problems it exposes.
