Cooley High

Continuing to work my way through the movies I recorded during the "Black Experience on Film" spotlight on TCM a few months back, I'm up to Cooley High.

The movie opens up with a montage of shots of Chicago, after which a title helpfully tells us this is Chicago, 1964. Cochise (Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs) is a high school senior and star of the basketball team at Cooley Vocational High School, hoping to get a scholarship to play basketball at Grambling State which will also get him out of the Chicago projects. His best friend is Preach (Glynn Turman), a smart and sensitive young man who writes love poems and dreams of going to Hollywood to become a screenwriter.

But being high school seniors, they also develop a case of senioritis as we called it back when I was in high school, leading them to fake illness and blow off the day at the Lincoln Park Zoo with a couple of other friends. Their other hangout is Martha's, a cafe where they spend time shooting the breeze and shooting craps, the latter much to the chagrin of Martha the proprietress. At the cafe the meet Brenda (Cynthia Davis), another student at Cooley High, in whom Preach shows an immediate interest; the two end up having a brief relationship.

However, Preach and Cochise also meet Stone (Sherman Smith), and Robert (Norman Gibson). They're gang members who already have criminal records, which should be a bad sign, but Preach and especially Cochise want to enjoy life, and it's not as if there's all that much to do in that part of Chicago. Eventually, Stone and Robert steal a car and offer Cochise and Preach a joyride. Preach tries to drive, and his lousy driving skills bring the attention of the police, which ultimately results in the arrests of all four.

Preach and Cochise have a teacher, Mr. Mason (Garret Morris) who cares about both of them since Cochise actually does get his scholarship and Preach is the bright one who should have a future ahead of them. So Mason intercedes with the cops on their behalf, pleading for leniency because of that and their heretofore clean record. Of course, Stone and Robert see Preach and Cochise getting released, and logically think that it's because the two ratted on Stone and Robert. They want misplaced revenge, with tragic results.

Cooley High is a movie that I found started off rather slowly and a bit aimlessly, as though it was going to be more of a slice-of-life movie. But around the time of the joyride things pick up and the movie gets much better, thanks to the script which was based on the screenwriter's own experiences. (I was kind of surprised by the craps scene, since that's usually a big signal for racial stereotypes, but the screenwriter and director were both black and having been based on real life, there was obviously no ill intent here.) The movie is also helped out by a score of Motown songs (no other labels here presumably for cost-saving music rights reasons).

High school wasn't like this at all for me, in part because I grew up in a small city district, and in part because I grew up in the sticks (literally, next to 1000 acres of state forest), and in part because I had a warped childhood. So I don't quite identify with the characters the way that other people might. But that doesn't mean I don't like the movie, which was quite enjoyable and well worth a watch if you haven't seen it before. It's available on DVD too if you want to watch.