'80s Roulette: BABYLON

I have every single movie released in theaters in the ‘80s in the United States on a hard drive, and once a week, I’m going to hit shuffle and review whatever film comes up first.

Welcome to ‘80s Roulette!

SEPTEMBER 11, 1981

Babylon
David N. Haynes, Trevor Laird, Victor Romero Evans, Brian Bovell, Archie Pool, Brinsley Forde, Karl Howman, Beverley Michaels, Ann Duncan, Beverley Dublin, King Sounds, Cynthia Powell, T-Bone Wilson, Mark Monero, Vilma Hollingberry, Mel Smith, Stefan Kalipha, Malcolm Frederick, Patrick Worrall, Anthony Trent, Maggie Steed, Bill Moody, Peter Lovstrom, Derek Broome, Charles Cork, Gary Whelan, Donovan Platt, Alan Igbon, Paul Greenhalgh, Yvonne Agard, Michael Gunn, Harry Miller, David Gant, Frank Sylvester, Granville Garner, Angur Zeb, Mikey Campbell, Shaka, Cosmo Laidlaw
cinematography by Chris Menges
music by Dennis Bovell
screenplay by Franco Rasso & Martin Stellman
produced by Gavrik Losey
directed by Franco Rosso
Not Rated
1 hr 35 mins

Blue and his friends spend a week getting ready for a sound clash against another sound system in the Afro-Caribbean community in Bristol, England.

While this is in my ‘80s library, the film was not released in the United States until 2019 because it was considered too difficult. It played in London and was set to play the New York Film Festival, but at the last minute, the screening was pulled, and the festival put out a statement about how they were afraid it might set off racial violence. Absolutely gutless and stupid, and it made an already difficult pick-up basically impossible. The film is about the Jamaican community in Bristol, England, so the accents are nearly impenetrable for a typical American audience. I can see how it’s a difficult prospect commercially, but being afraid of this film is crazy. People love to act like we somehow “fixed” the racial divide in this country after the Civil Rights Movement in the ‘60s, but that’s obviously not true, and in the last decade, if anything, it has become a more pronounced divide than at any point in my lifetime, and films like Babylon feel like they remain just as relevant and vital as they ever were. It should have been seen in 1981, and it’s equally worth your attention now.