Black Man's Burden

By J.C.

THE EDUCATION OF SONNY CARSON

Directed by MICHAEL CAMPUS Screenplay by FRED HUDSON and MICHAEL CAMPUS

You get a faceful of social outrage in the very first scene. A bunch of young kids sit on a stage, squirming in the summer heat as some starchy board of education types present them with scholastic awards. One old caricature, decked out in clothes more appropriate to a stroll on a widow's walk, extols an essay written by young Sonny Carson. She tells the audience all about how wonderful it is that this young Negro boy has raised himself up out of the slums, written about a few of his experiences, and set himself on the path of success. The irony begins to bead up like heavy drops of sweat. The camera closes in on Sonny, no more than junior-high age and already cynical. When his achievement is cited as a "splendid example of the American dream," Sonny shifts uneasily. He, like anyone watching this movie, can see it all coming.

From the awards ceremony it is just a matter of a few fast cuts to Sonny and some pals breaking into a local store, to Sonny's term in reform school, to his discharge onto the hard streets of Brooklyn, where he gets into a life of petty crime. There is no surprise here. Awful predictability is the point, and the movie capitalizes on our sorrowful expectations of Sonny's destiny. It also leeches off a shared sense of social outrage.

For compensation, the movie can boast some accurate location work around New York and some fine, sinewy performances by Rony Clanton as Sonny, Joyce Walker as his girl friend who turns to the needle, and most especially by a group of black nonprofessionals, a lot of them recruited from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Once in a while, the movie quiets its tone of social soap opera and pulls together a strong sequence: a gang fight, staged with the right kind of rushed clumsiness and dulled, all-directions violence, and a lacerating funeral sequence with a lightning-rod eulogy by a preacher (Ram John Holder).

Unfortunately, the film takes frequent detours into the realms of paranoia and blind hatred. There is a portrait of a white Italian cop (Don Gordon) so foamingly, arbitrarily vicious that it moves beyond believability into hysteria. That is the worst territory possible for a social documentary, albeit a fictional one.

The director, Michael Campus, has a background in slick television reportage. This is his second feature, but Sonny Carson still has the glossy look of most network documentaries. Campus has tried to give the movie an anxious, scruffy look, but even the rough edges seem smoothed out and engineered with the calculation of a film maker on a sort of heartfelt slumming expedition. -J .C.

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