Trouble Man: Marvin Gaye Scores the Cool Avenger

Marvin Gaye scored exactly one film. He had come off What’s Going On the year before, an album that changed what a Motown artist was permitted to be, and the thing he chose to do next was write the music for a Los Angeles private-eye thriller called Trouble Man.

The score is a masterpiece. The film is a lean, cold, competent seventy-per-cent of a masterpiece, and the interesting question is what happens when you bolt one to the other.

Trouble Man was released by 20th Century Fox in 1972, directed by Ivan Dixon. Robert Hooks plays Mr. T, a private operator who runs a pool hall and solves problems for people who cannot go to the police. Two men, Chalky Price and Pete Cockrell, hire him to find out who has been robbing their dice games. Paul Winfield plays Chalky. Ralph Waite plays Pete. The setup is old, and the film knows it.

Mr. T is a professional and the film respects it

The character is the picture’s best decision. Mr. T’s coolness is the coolness of a man who is extremely good at a job and has priced it accordingly, which is a very different register from the movie tough guy landing lines.

Watch how the film introduces him. Someone needs help; he names a figure; they pay it. That transaction repeats throughout, and it is the whole characterisation. He does not moralise about his clients. He does not do favours. He carries a gun the way a plumber carries a wrench, and Hooks plays every scene with the low-wattage patience of somebody who has done this exact conversation four hundred times.

That professionalism gives the film a spine that most of the cycle lacks. Shaft is a better-known picture and John Shaft is a considerably more entertaining man, and Shaft is also a movie star doing movie-star things. Mr. T is closer to the actual private-eye tradition — the operator with a licence, a rate and a set of rules he will not break because breaking them ends the business.

The pool hall is the other half of the characterisation, and Dixon shoots it as an office. Mr. T works out of a room where men play a game that rewards patience, geometry and the ability to see three shots ahead, and the film never once has anyone remark on the metaphor. It simply keeps putting him at the table between scenes. That restraint is worth more than any amount of dialogue about what kind of man he is; the audience assembles the character out of where he chooses to sit.

Ivan Dixon directs it with the same economy. He had been an actor, most visibly on Hogan’s Heroes, and he shoots like a man who has spent years watching directors waste time. The coverage is efficient. The Los Angeles locations are used without commentary. There is no fat on this film at all.

The following year Dixon made The Spook Who Sat by the Door, one of the most incendiary films any American studio ever accidentally financed, and the contrast between the two is instructive. Trouble Man is Dixon proving he can execute. Spook is Dixon with something to say.

Why the score is doing the film’s emotional work

Here is the mechanics section, and it is unusual, because the craft argument for Trouble Man lives almost entirely in the mix.

Gaye delivered a suite of instrumental soul built on a recurring theme, and the way it interacts with the picture is close to the opposite of standard practice. Conventional scoring amplifies what the actor is doing: the character feels grief, the strings confirm it. Gaye is supplying feelings the screen refuses to show.

Mr. T is a closed man. Hooks plays him almost affectless — no soliloquies, no confidant, no scene where he explains himself. On paper that character is unreadable. What makes him legible is that Gaye’s music is playing his interior continuously. The theme is melancholy, weary, faintly resigned, and it accompanies a man who never once expresses any of those things. The audience receives Mr. T’s inner life through the speakers while the screen gives them a professional doing his job.

That is a genuinely sophisticated piece of construction and I suspect it was partly accidental. Gaye reportedly worked with considerable freedom, and what he produced is more emotionally specific than the screenplay warrants. The film benefits enormously from the mismatch. It has the surface of a hard-boiled procedural and the temperature of a torch song, and the gap between them is the only place the character actually exists.

Compare it with the other great scores of the moment. Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly work is a moral argument conducted against the images — the music is explicitly telling you the man on screen is wrong, and I have written that one up in Super Fly and its soundtrack. Isaac Hayes on Shaft is pure star introduction, a fanfare for a hero. Gaye is doing the character’s inside, and it is the only score of the three that would make no sense without the film attached.

The title song became a hit in its own right, and the album has outsold the memory of the picture by an enormous margin. That is the usual story with this cycle, and here it is deserved.

There is one more thing the score does that no dialogue could. It gives the film continuity across a plot that keeps changing rooms. Trouble Man is structurally a sequence of meetings in unrelated locations, which is the standard shape of the detective picture and the standard reason those pictures feel episodic. Gaye’s theme returns often enough to function as the connective tissue, so the film reads as one continuous mood instead of eleven separate errands. Composers have used recurring themes since the silent era; using one to solve a structural weakness in the screenplay is a slightly different trick, and it is the reason this film hangs together at all.

The ancestor

The parent is the hard-boiled private-eye film of the 1940s, and specifically the strand where the detective is a working man rather than a knight. The Philip Marlowe pictures gave the form its romanticism. The colder tradition — the operator who takes the money and does the work — runs through the B-pictures and the Gold Medal paperbacks, and Mr. T is squarely in that line.

What the blaxploitation cycle contributed was the answer to a question the old films never asked: who does a man call when the police are the problem rather than the solution? Mr. T’s entire business model is that a whole community has no functioning access to the institutions everyone else uses. The film states this once, flatly, and then simply operates on it for ninety-nine minutes. That is a sharper piece of politics than a dozen speeches, and it is the same insight Across 110th Street built an entire tragedy on the same year.

The case against

The plot is a machine and you can hear it running. The double-cross is visible early, the antagonists are thinly sketched, and the middle hour is a series of interviews that generate information without generating tension.

Mr. T’s opacity is a double-edged decision. It works because Gaye is filling the hole, and a film that requires its composer to supply the protagonist’s inner life has a screenplay problem. Strip the score out — try it, the film is worth the experiment — and what remains is a well-made programme picture about a man you never get near.

The women are barely present. The action is competent and unmemorable. Fox gave the film a real budget and it looks like a studio product, which costs it the grubby documentary charge that the independent pictures of the cycle got for free.

The verdict: Trouble Man is the coolest film blaxploitation made and one of the least loved, and both facts have the same cause. It withholds. It refuses to be likeable, refuses to explain, refuses the swagger the poster promised, and hands all of that to Marvin Gaye instead. Watch it as the rare thriller where the composer is the co-author. For the wider shelf, the blaxploitation canon has the full argument, and Truck Turner is the version of this material with all the swagger left in.

Where to find it: Fox’s catalogue keeps it in circulation on disc and it appears on the streaming services carrying the library. Get the soundtrack regardless.

Spoilers below

The case Mr. T is hired to solve does not exist. Chalky and Pete engineered the whole commission: there is no mystery robber, and the point of hiring him was to use his reputation as cover while they moved against Big, the man who runs the territory. Mr. T has been employed as a rumour.

That is the film’s real idea, and it arrives late enough that it recontextualises everything. The professionalism the picture has spent an hour admiring is exactly what made him usable. Because he takes money and asks nothing, because he does the job and holds no opinions, he is the perfect instrument for people who understand that about him. The rate card is the vulnerability.

The last act is him correcting the error, and Dixon shoots the revenge with the same flat efficiency he has used for everything. There is no catharsis in it. Mr. T works through the men who used him the way he has worked through everything else in the film, on the clock, and the score stays melancholy throughout — Gaye declines to give the audience a triumph even where the images might support one.

The final image is a man walking away from a job that cost him more than the fee. What he does about it is nothing, because nothing is what the character does about anything. The music carries the whole ending, and it carries it into a place the screenplay never earned and the film is better for reaching.