The Split (1968)

(On Cable TV, July 2022) At first contemporary glance, The Split is enjoyable, but nothing special—a story about thieves mortally fighting each other after a successful robbery. It certainly gets extra points for a strong cast, in between Jim Brown as the protagonist, Diahann Carroll as his girlfriend, Gene Hackman as a dogged policeman and such notables as Ernest Borgnine and Donald Sutherland in supporting roles. Crime fiction fans will note that the film is based on Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark’s” Parker novel The Seventh and that Quincy Jones does the music. But digging a bit in the film’s historical context reveals a number of innovations that would not be apparent to twenty-first century audiences: The Split was the first film to be rated R under the MPAA’s then-new rating scheme that replaced the old production code—and it does feel a touch too brutal to be a feel-good film with one death being particularly haunting. The casting of Jim Brown in the lead role also had other consequences—Film historians will point out that the film was the first to employ a black stuntman. More interestingly, Roger Ebert called The Split “the first Hollywood film to deliberately, overtly exploit black-white tensions in American society,” and it’s easy to see how this kind of intention paved some of the way to the blaxploitation wave of a few years later. Which does underscore one important aspect of watching older films—you can watch them cold as their own thing, but they’re usually far more interesting as a building block in a much bigger multidimensional tapestry weaving art, culture, careers and history.