Hoodlum

The white-run Mafia and the black-run numbers game meet head on with explosive impact in this period crime thriller. Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson (Laurence Fishburne) is an African-American ex-con who, after a stay in prison, returns to Harlem at the height of its renaissance before World War II. ...more

Bill Duke, after breaking Hollywood race barriers by directing Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (the first sequel to a Hollywood blockbuster entrusted to an African-American director) returned to familiar ground with Hoodlum. Hoodlum, like Duke's entertaining adaptation of Chester Himes' -A Rage in Harlem, takes place in the underworld of Harlem in the 1930s. But here, Duke is working on a much larger scale. The film is a moderately successful effort to make a film with the sweep and scope of the ...more