Cooley High: Young, Gifted, and Black

Cooley High’s characters face major changes in their lives—one will fall in love, the other will win a scholarship to college—before a fateful run-in with the police ultimately leads to disaster. But from the beginning, the film’s freewheeling sense of fun is what drives the majority of its action. In the priceless opening sequence, Preach hatches a plan to ditch class with his friends by faking a nosebleed. (Schultz has said this moment is an homage to Amarcord, a film based on director Federico Fellini’s own childhood memories.) Once outside, they race after a city bus, hopping onto the back bumper and riding it to the zoo, where they outsmart a hot-dog-stand clerk in order to boost some snacks, then mess with a gorilla—which exacts revenge on Pooter (Corin Rogers), the perpetually picked-upon baby of the bunch. Such moments of levity make the terrible turn of events in the film’s final scenes that much more poignant and affecting.

Upon its release, Cooley High became an overnight classic, universally admired. Over time, it influenced generations of filmmakers—everyone from Robert Townsend, who has a small part in the movie, to Spike Lee, who put Cooley High on his list of essential films. More than anything, for a young John Singleton, who saw it in the theater with his mother, Cooley High drove home the medium’s power to pull at an audience’s heartstrings. “It’s such a good movie,” Singleton recalled his mother saying when he asked why she was crying. In many ways, Singleton would go on to show a taste for the same kind of material when he made his Oscar-nominated debut film, Boyz N the Hood (1991). Both depict the first sparks of young romance for a teenage boy as he and his friends navigate perilous streets, holding out for a brighter future.

By the midseventies, Hollywood was still recovering from a slump and pursuing a strategy of targeting specific demographics. One of the results was the blaxploitation genre, which had not so much started as exploded on the heels of record-breaking hits such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). But more and more, blaxploitation movies were looking like an endless cycle of power, sex, and revenge fantasies, typified by Hell Up in Harlem (1973) and Friday Foster (1975), which tended to play off only the idea of Blackness, and which turned racism into shtick. Marking a change of direction—including for American International Pictures, which also produced Hell Up in Harlem and Friday Foster—Cooley High is a pivotal film. It stood out because of its focus on Black love and the deepening emotional bonds among the members of a generation of young Black men from the streets.

Schultz is something of a humanist, and he’s also the first film director to make good use of the Motown catalog, which is woven throughout the narrative and likely helped the picture cut across generational boundaries with moviegoers. Preach’s determined pursuit of Brenda (Cynthia Davis)—a bookish, pretty, light-skinned Black girl who is impressed by his knowledge of poetry—begins when she interrupts his dice game and we hear “Stop! In the Name of Love,” by the Supremes. The film’s soundtrack, which also includes the Four Tops and Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, is spontaneous and natural, an essential element of the film’s warmth—nowhere more palpable than in the sequence that shows Preach and Brenda canoodling on a bridge and strolling arm in arm across the train tracks to the sounds of the Temptations’ “My Girl.”

The film was shot on location in Chicago for less than a million dollars, a modest sum for that time, which meant a brisk shooting schedule of around six weeks. When the production couldn’t afford to hire a storyboard artist, Schultz found an art student from the neighborhood for the job. Cooley High used only three professional actors: Turman and Jacobs, whose chemistry is unmistakable, and the future Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris, as a history teacher who tries in vain to reach Preach and Cochise. Many of the other people we see on-screen were recruited from within the community, which made the studio uneasy but gives us a film inhabited by individuals who are so raw and bursting with life that they draw us into the story. Juanita McConnell—who plays Martha, the meat-cleaver-wielding proprietor of an after-school hangout—was among the personalities discovered by Gloria Schultz in Chicago ahead of filming. The film also used the real-life members of the Cobra Stones gang Sherman Smith and Norman Gibson as the characters Stone and Robert, who set the tragic ending in motion when they pull up in a stolen Cadillac and invite Preach and Cochise for a late-night joyride (itself the movie’s most thrilling sequence).

Schultz’s empathy is one of his gifts as a director. He seems to understand every one of his characters—their elation, confusion, and disappointment—and each line and gesture is made to count. You can watch this movie just for the performances, which are pure pleasure. Take, for instance, the kitchen-table scene between Cochise’s mother (Lily Schine) and Jimmy Lee (Steven Williams), her flimflam-artist nephew, who is fresh out on bail. He wears a patterned blazer with a matching kelly-green shirt-and-pants combo—an outfit that he says he needs for work. “You ain’t never done a day’s work in your life,” she tells him, very plainly, but you pick up the love and sorrow in her voice. There’s also the stunned look on the face of Johnny Mae (Jackie Taylor) at the house party when she realizes that her sometime hookup Cochise, who has just asked her to put on a slow jam, intends to dance with someone else. So many, many moments that, in another director’s hands, would barely register or last in the mind.

Schultz shows a complexity of emotions through the simplest means, as in the scene when Preach sneaks back into his house after he and Cochise have been arrested for grand theft auto. It’s late at night, and his mother, who has just returned home from working overtime at one of her three jobs, confronts him about what happened. “I’m tired, I ain’t doing it no more,” she says, exasperated, when he tries to explain, then orders Preach to bring her “the belt.” But in the little time it takes him to return, his mother has fallen asleep in a chair, and a weary and blue Preach leans over and gives her a gentle kiss on the head.

Part of what sets the film apart from other coming-of-age stories is its episodic quality. Like Robert Altman, whose work on Nashville he admired, Schultz loves big ensemble casts and is incredibly skilled at telling intersecting stories. But what’s most important about Cooley High is not its form but its unassailable spirit, its power, and its window onto a world where young Black men are celebrated. It is imbued with a youthful romanticism and what the eminent sociologist and author W. E. B. Du Bois once referred to as “the divine gift of laughter.” It makes “the world human and lovable,” he wrote, “despite all its pain and wrong.”