Heart Transplant

Past the glass and aluminum office buildings run ribbons of superhighway. Beyond the highway are decayed brownstones and rat-ridden lots that have become the graveyards of automobiles and black aspirations. In this ghetto setting, a group of Negro activists conspire to aid the families of 17 jailed "brothers."

The chief conspirator in The Lost Man is Jason Higgs (Sidney Poitier), a radical organizer who plots a theoretically infallible payroll robbery. But harassed by police and chivied by a disciple of nonviolence (Al Freeman Jr.), Jason seems cursed from the opening. When the robbery erupts into blood and death, it is only a formal ratification of doom. Jason's descent from provocateur to fugitive and his ultimate Tristan and Isolde death scene with a white chick (Joanna Shimkus) are even stagier and more predictable.

Director-Scenarist Robert Alan Aurthur is manifestly sympathetic to the black cause. But the film's sincerity is varnished with artifice. The interracial love affair is as uncomfortable as some of the dialogue ("Do you enjoy being a tall, dark secret?"). The film's open-ended references to a mysterious Negro "organization" unfortunately recall the paranoic fantasies of Ian Fleming's Mr. Big in Live and Let Die. Ultimately, The Lost Alan is notable less for what it does than for what its star does not do. After Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, many black critics found Sidney Poitier in the fink of condition. Now, outfitted with shades and a scowl, tersely barking orders for social upheaval, Poitier may still be playing Superman, but it is a black fantasy this time, not a white one.

This year, two movies about black rebellion have imitated film classics of the Irish revolution. Up Tight (TIME, Jan. 3) was based on The Informer; The Lost Man is a darkened copy of Odd Man Out. The transatlantic temptation is all too understandable, for as a French revolutionist observed, "The poor are the Negroes of Europe." Nonetheless, the Irish fiction grew from a native soul and soil. The Lost Man is a legitimate and anguished cry that suffers in translation.

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