First of all Vincent Canby was wrong. Poitier's character John Kane is not an angel. He is very much a living breathing earthly being capable of error as evidenced by a scene where he thoughtlessly lets slip a bit of information he should not have mentioned. Do I know exactly who or what John Kane was meant to be taken for by Ernest Kinoy the screenwriter? Definitely not. Does that at all detract from the enjoyment of this film. Absolutely not. Think of Mark Twain's The Mysterous Stranger or the sci-fi film classic "The Day The Earth Stood Still" Both of these works are scathing indictments of the pettiness and baseness of human kind. If you have any knowledge of how wisdom is communicated in the eastern religions such as Budhism you will be mesmerized by the conversation that takes place in the jail cell between the world weary Kane and Dr. Thomas. It is significant that it is a physician who more accurately than any other character understands what Kane is up to. Who else but a physician is actually trained to see man as he really is, with all pretenses and garments removed? Dr.Thomas has in his own way been performing the same task as Kane all his life making dispassionate clinical observations. The fact that none of the social issues and conflicts portrayed in the film are fleshed out or resolved in any satisfying way is not a problem for this film. They are all just symptoms of the underlying disease. In my opinion Kinoy is saying the disease itself is simply the nature of man. Perhaps the beating and humiliation of an officer of the law (even a blatantly racist and evil one)- by an African American that takes place in this film was simply too radical in 1971 for it to be aggressively promoted or to be supported by critics. Don't let this film's obscurity keep you from superb performances by Mr Poitier and Will Geer.
Review of Brother John
