Anti-Personnel Weapon

In the '60s, the most castigated figure in American life was the white liberal. Maligned by youth, by blacks, and eventually by himself, the white liberal has only recently begun to counterattack. Who went South to integrate Mississippi? he asks. Who supported the Warren Court? Urban planning? Pollution control? Open housing? But whenever the liberal begins to bolster his case, along comes some damaging new weapon to support the radical credo. The latest is a destructive anti-personnel device entitled The Liberation of L.B. Jones.

In less than two hours it provides an anthology of liberal cant bound in a dust jacket of selfesteem. Lord Byron Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne) is a wealthy undertaker with two sources of shame: his skin, which is black, and his wife (Lola Falana), who has been carrying on with a white policeman (Anthony Zerbe). Jones discards his cowardice and sues for divorce--a maneuver designed to expose the sinners and, incidentally, the hypocrisy of the state of Tennessee. Jones' "liberation" is his murder, but along the way he frees his brethren and damns the Old South, as presented by his pompous white lawyer Lee J. Cobb.

Anyone familiar with Scenarist Stirling Silliphant's television work (Route 66) knows his fondness for the stereotypic. In L.B. Jones he has added extra fillips: not only are there shuffling old Negroes sassing the massuhs between yassuhs, there are also satanic, mush-mouthed cops who are rapidly replacing the Indian as exemplars of tribal villainy. Mandatory violence is provided by scenes of the forcible rape of a black woman, the throat-slitting of a black man, and the lovingly detailed dens ex machina of a cop chewed to death by a threshing machine. Director William Wyler (The Friendly Persuasion), who once knew better, now forces his actors to boom their lines as if they were reading them from the base of a monument. Under his ham hand, each confrontation seems like an incitement to violence rather than understanding.

At its first New York preview, The Liberation of L.B. Jones provoked a brief fistfight between a Negro youth and a white man. This response -- which could echo at theaters around the country -- accurately reflects the film: frustrating, morally ugly, and in the end as banal as evil itself.

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