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| Herbert Norville in Pressure |
Cast: Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau, Lucita Lijertawood, Sheila Scott Wilkinson, Ed Devereaux, T-Bone Wilson, Ram John Holder, Norman Beaton, John F. Landry, Archie Pool. Screenplay: Horace Ové, Samuel Selvon. Cinematography: Michael J. Davis. Film editing: Alan Cummer-Price.
"Message movies" get a bad rap. The message too often undermines characterization, turning people into ideas. Horace Ové's Pressure is guilty in that regard. His young protagonist, Tony (Herbert Norville), is a vehicle for the film's ideas about racism, immigration, capitalism, and imperialism. Tony is the England-born son of Trinidadian immigrants, who would like nothing more than for him to assimilate into British culture. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), who came to Britain with his parents, however, has turned his experience of racism into activism in the Black Power movement. Tony has finished school but struggles to find work, and his idleness begins to get him in trouble. Eventually he joins Colin in the movement, but the film ends on a bleak moment in that struggle, too. It's easy to dismiss Pressure as preaching to the choir and to observe that the struggle for economic justice and ethnic identity continues unabated 50 years after the film was made. But Pressure is skillfully made, effectively dramatizing its issues with scenes that verge on comedy, like Tony's job interview with a politely indifferent potential employer, and even touches of the fantastic, like the dream Tony has under the influence of a reefer. Ové has successfully channeled anger into art.
