"We're not your truncheon meat, punchbags or statistics to keep the arrest rate ticking over. Just another bloodstain in the back of your Rover" - VHF (Knife Amnesty), Cloth.
The early eighties London of Leroy Logan is a world of grey suburban streets, careworn red brick industrial units, unremarkable cars, drizzle, burger vans, racist graffiti daubed on Asian owned store fronts, and police kicking the shit out of an innocent black man for a perceived minor traffic infraction in broad daylight and in full views of passers by.
It is not, you will have surmised already, the sort of environment in which a young second generation Jamaican lad joins the police but Steve McQueen's Red, White and Blue (the third of five films in his excellent Small Axe compendium, on BBC1 and the iPlayer) isn't some figment of the director's imagination. It's based on the true story of Leroy Logan who joined the Metropolitan Police in 1983, after witnessing police brutality dished out to his own father, and eventually rose to become the chair of the Black Police Association and, in 2000, was awarded an MBE for his role in advancing policing in Britain.
Red, White and Blue isn't about Logan's later years and, except for a brief scene where he's stopped and searched outside a school while still a small boy - to be rescued by his 70s leather jacketed dad, it all takes place over the brief period of time which saw Logan leave his well paid, and "solid", job as white coated lab technician, sign up for the police, attend training college in Hendon, and, eventually, start to walk the beat of his local Islington manor.
He's called a coconut, an Oreo, and a Judas by his peers ("that's Constable Judas to you" he quips back) but the abuse he receives from his fellow officers, and seniors, is far worse and cuts much deeper. Logan's got a steely resolve, for sure, but will it be enough?
On top of the difficulty in getting on in a famously vicious and racist work environment, Logan (played brilliantly by John Boyega) has to contend with the hornet's nest of tension and resentment his joining up has let loose upon his family. His father Ken (Steve Toussaint) is of the 'police and thieves' persuasion ("all the peace officers turn war makers") and doesn't want his son inside the belly of a beast and not least at a time he's in the process of taking two police officers to court for "wrongful arrest".
For which you can read a solid beating. Logan's mother (Joy Richardson) is quietly supportive and his aunt Jesse (Nadine Marshall), a former police liaison officer, provides regular, and vocal, encouragement to Logan (much to his father's chagrin) as does his running friend Ed (Mark Stanley) who implores Logan to "sign up".
Against a musical backdrop of Al Green, Billy Joel, Marvin Gaye, and Melle Mel's White Lines (Don't Don't Do It), as well as regular hits of Logan's father's string drenched lachrymose country and western music - which seems to be on in the car just as much as it is in the background as they play Scrabble in their flock wallpapered front room, we see Logan move into a new home with his pregnant girlfriend Gretl (Antonia Thomas), excel as the only black face in the boot camp atmosphere of Hendon Police College, and become the face of recruitment for 'coloured' officers and something of a minor celebrity in the police mess.
But not in a good way. His locker is daubed with vile racist graffiti, he's blanked by his colleagues, and, most dangerously of all, he's left to apprehend a violent criminal alone when those supposed colleagues leave him high and dry and in lethal peril. We see all of this cuts Logan to the core but it hurts him even more to see black people who have been arrested being beaten and racially abused (using very similar language to that which John Terry directed towards Anton Ferdinand).
The drama never truly resolves and that's quite correct because racism within the police, and our other institutions, is still a serious and ongoing problem. Though McQueen makes this point abundantly clear he is still, at heart, an artist and he allows a few of his trademark whimsical quirks to sometimes give the film a hazy, dream like, quality.
There are occasional lengthy brooding silences, there are lopsided camera angles, and there is one extended scene of a flock of birds in flight that seems to suggest Logan feels trapped in his environment and would like to free himself of it. Logan's best friend was, and is, Leee John from the band Imagination. Played brilliantly by Tyrone Huntley, it gives McQueen a chance to drop that band's So Good, So Right into the proceedings and he also can't resist a joke about joining "the force" that will no doubt please fans of Boyega's Star Wars character Finn.
But the Star Wars nods, the arty add-ons, the well mined seam of historical family tension, and even the slinky post-disco funk of the Body Talk hitmakers, all make up a wonderfully realistically captured background to the foreground story of a man trying to do the right thing in an environment, in a world, where there are many people out there who will take offence at that.
Logan's only real ally in his local Islington cop shop is the Asian PC Asif Kamali (Assad Zaman) who we see being told by his superior to not speak Urdu to a local shopkeeper who has become the victim of an all too predictable crime. Kamali is excellent and so is everyone else in this brilliant piece of historical drama but it is Boyega at all times you can't keep your eyes from. Logan's pensive and kind nature is underpinned by an almost messianic drive to do the right thing and make life better for everyone in his community and Boyega captures that perfectly and without showing off. It's hardly a wonder he's become such a big star.
The message Red, White, and Blue delivers, feintly portrayed but clearly felt, is that racism in the police force isn't a case of 'a few bad apples' but a wholly rotten tree. It is, and there can be no doubt about this in the wake of the last thirty years and the death of Stephen Lawrence, institutional. A culture of racism permeated the Metropolitan Police from top to bottom and, as with any culture, when that was threatened it closed ranks, protected itself, and sought to attack those that threatened it.
White officers who may or may not have been racist felt that using crude racial epithets enhanced their job prospects and eased them in to the social milieu of the police and anybody who spoke out against it was made to feel uneasy, unwelcome, and even unsafe. It would be nice to say that this was a drama set in a dim and distant past but it wasn't. This was less than forty years and now, in 2020, we have a government so obsessed with division as a means to power and the endless creation of culture wars that, to my mind, the only thing that's changed in relation to racism in the important institutions of the United Kingdom is the optics. They just hide the racism better now.
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