Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The Mighty Quinn is probably most noteworthy to most film buffs as a strong, early performance in Denzel Washington’s career, but for this reviewer it stands as testament to a kind of film Hollywood used to live on but now has abandoned: a sturdy, workmanlike adaptation of a fine piece of popular literature.
A.H.Z. Carr’s posthumous debut novel Finding Maubee won the Edgar in 1971 for Best First Novel.
The story of murder and government corruption intersecting with laid back Caribbean life was recognized as perfect cinematic fodder, but the film spent almost twenty years in development hell before Swiss director Carl Schenkel and up and coming actors Denzel Washington and Robert Townsend were tapped to bring it to life.
Denzel Washington plays Xavier Quinn, police chief on a small island in the Caribbean.
When a wealthy businessman is found decapitated in a Jacuzzi and the evidence seems to point to Maubee (Townsend), a small-time hustler and his best friend Quinn has to unravel the mystery of what really happened.
Along the way he’ll have to manage his domestic issues, keep the weak and venal Governor Chalk off his back, and deal with a dangerous assassin (M. Emmet Walsh) looking for a satchel of money the victim brought to the island that Maubee is now in possession of.
The film reminds me very strongly of Gorky Park or Eye of the Needle, not in tone but in how the script expertly condenses the twists of a good literary thriller into a clear and concise movie script while maintaining a strong sense of place and detail that made the books work to begin with. A large part of that is the skill of Washington and Townsend who bring tremendous honesty to their performances and really have you believe (besides a few moments of dodgy accents) that they’ve lived their whole lives out on the island.
Special consideration should be given to Sheryl Lee Ralph, who plays Quinn’s long-suffering wife, Lola. This is often a truly thankless role in police films but Ralph brings a lot of nuance to a character who just wants the man she loves to be more present in their shared life so she can bloom in the ways he obviously has. Her character also lends the film a musical dimension, that’s excellent for the pacing of the film and juxtaposes the rising tension nicely.
The purposive force driving the plot is M. Emmet Walsh’s sleazy assassin, who reveals himself to be terrifying on a dime and pushes the final scenes of the film into a higher gear, culminating in one of the better final twists I’ve seen in a movie of this type. I very much like the way he chooses to play off of Denzel– he regards him more as a misguided annoyance than a genuine threat and right up until the final moments he seems to be two steps ahead of everyone else.
We circle back to the star of the film and…it’s a film noir starring Denzel Washington so like Devil in a Blue Dress or Out of Time you know he’s going to be great here.
Denzel, like Chow Yun-Fat effortlessly evokes the understated cool of Old Hollywood which is why he’s such a reliable commodity in thrillers such as this. One interesting difference is that the “Denzel” persona is not yet formed, as it was in the other movies I mentioned, and so we get a more vulnerable, more varied performance in some ways than we do in those later films. He’s still inhabiting characters at this point rather than tailoring them to fit his sense of self.
The Mighty Quinn is a perfect mystery thriller for a weekend afternoon: a trip to the islands with great music, comedy, and a well tuned script. Highly recommended.
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