Louis Gossett Jr.’s forgotten gem — a ‘comedy’ about slavery
When Louis Gossett Jr. died last week, most tributes led with his Academy Awardwinning performance as a ferocious drill sergeant in “An Officer and a Gentleman.” There were also notable mentions of his 1961 film debut in an adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” in a role he originated on Broadway, and “Roots,” the 1977 TV miniseries about a Black family’s harrowing journey through slavery that mesmerized the nation and garnered Gossett an Emmy for his memorable turn as Fiddler.
But one film was ignored in virtually every poignant appreciation of Gossett’s nearly 70-year career: “Skin Game.”
Released in 1971, “Skin Game” starred Gossett as Jason and James Garner as Quincy, two con men scamming their way across the South in 1857. Here’s their hustle — Quincy, pretending to be desperate for money, walks into a saloon and “sells” Jason, his loyal “slave,” to the highest bidder. Under cover of darkness, Quincy then rescues Jason, and off they go to pull their so-called “skin game” in another town, each getting an equal share of the take.
It’s a partnership — except it’s not. And only Jason recognizes this.
Billed as a comedy, there are funny moments — Garner and Gossett have great timing and chemistry. But the film never loses sight of a nation coming undone as it hurtles toward civil war as well as Jason’s increasing discomfort with a scam in which he, as a Black man, must always endure the greatest humiliations and risks.
It’s Jason who has to sleep in slave pens on dirty hay while Quincy relaxes in a nice hotel on clean sheets. He suffers white men sticking their fingers in his mouth to count his teeth or ordering him to remove his shirt to “see what they’re buying,“as Quincy callously says. And it’s Jason, who has never been enslaved, who winces in shame when he sees Black people who aren’t pretending to live in the most inhumane conditions.
When Jason complains to Quincy, his partner’s throwaway answer is: “What are you gonna do? You’re the color they’re buying this year.”
Garner gets the above-the-title screen credit, but the film belongs to Gossett. His Jason is its moral fulcrum as he tries to navigate not only the explicit racism he encounters everywhere, but also from his partner and friend. Quincy isn’t pro-slavery, but he’s no abolitionist. Like the white people who believe they’ve been preordained to subjugate Black people, he’s making way too much money conning them to wish for slavery’s demise.
At the film’s end, Quincy is the same man he is at the beginning — oblivious to Black suffering, including Jason’s. (Kudos to Garner, whose company produced the film, and screenwriter Peter Stone, under the pseudonym Pierre Marton, for avoiding the “white savior” syndrome that has plagued films such as “12 Years a Slave” and “Hidden Figures.”)
But Jason is also oblivious, if to a lesser degree, to the miseries of those enslaved, a kind of class divide that happens within races. When Black people, who proudly claim their African origins, ask Jason where he’s from, he says, “New Jersey.” Gossett shows Jason’s evolution from a man who, by luck of birth, has been able to insulate himself from the horrors inflicted on millions who look like him — until he inevitably loses his freedom, but refuses to liberate only himself.
The film never mocks slavery or those enslaved. It does not exonerate white people who call themselves “fair,” but don’t hesitate to turn a Black person’s back into bloody shreds for any perceived infraction. It weaves in bits of history that weren’t readily taught 50 years ago — or, for that matter, in certain parts of this nation today — about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, John Brown, the white abolitionist who was executed in 1859 for inciting an attempted slave rebellion, and the fact that the Transatlantic slave trade continued for decades after it was supposedly outlawed in the early 19th century.
Of course, that’s not how the film was marketed. Its poster featured photos of Garner and Gossett with the words, “Would you buy a used slave from this man?” That deeply off-putting line did the film no favors, and could be why it’s been largely, even intentionally, forgotten.
Perhaps that will now change with the posthumous attention on Gossett’s work. It’s what the film, and his beautifully nuanced and urgent portrayal of a man who can no longer suppress his Blackness or his recognition of racist injustice to accommodate the comfort of his indifferent white friend, has long deserved.