When writer/director John Singleton made his feature debut with “Boyz N the Hood” in 1991, he was fresh out of USC film school and barely into his twenties — at 24, he became the youngest director ever to be nominated for an Oscar, breaking the record Orson Welles set with “Citizen Kane.”
“Boyz N the Hood” was the kind of movie a director of any age dreams of: a commercial, critical, and artistic success that was both personal and popular, finding its way into the zeitgeist from the moment it premiered.
It was probably inevitable that everything Singleton would make after “Boyz” would exist in its shadow, much as Welles remained most celebrated for “Kane” in spite of making another half-dozen masterpieces over the course of his career. Yet while Singleton never again found himself at the center of the culture the way he was with “Boyz,” his perspective both broadened and deepened considerably after his electrifying debut, yielding several films that were every bit its equal — and some that were even better.
The Criterion Collection‘s new 4K UHD and Blu-ray release “John Singleton‘s Hood Trilogy” provides an indispensable starting point for thinking about Singleton’s career both including and beyond “Boyz,” with pristine new transfers of three essential Singleton classics and enough supplements to keep an ambitious cinephile busy for a week. The set consists of “Boyz,” Singleton’s 1993 follow-up “Poetic Justice,” and the 2001 release “Baby Boy,” in which Singleton returned to his South Central Los Angeles roots after a foray into mainstream studio fare with “Rosewood” and “Shaft.”
The South Central setting is the common thread between the three films, though tonally and structurally they’re quite different from each other. “Boyz” remains one of Singleton’s most provocative and passionate films, an autobiographical cry from the heart about three friends (played by Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, and Morris Chestnut) trying to survive in a neighborhood where an influx of crack and gangs has created a pervasive threat of violence.
Although the marketing for “Boyz N the Hood” played up the gang violence aspect, it’s actually not something that takes up a huge percentage of the movie’s screen time. The film is as much an “American Graffiti”-esque coming of age story and a teen comedy as it is a piece of social commentary or a political document (though it is these things as well). In fact, the most remarkable thing about Singleton’s writing and directing is the confidence with which he moves between emotional registers and styles; “Boyz N the Hood” is as fun as it is harrowing, as stylized as it is grittily authentic.
Its closest cinematic ancestor in terms of merging anthropological detail with heightened visual storytelling and feverish personal expression is probably Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” an influence Singleton name-checks in one of the archival audio commentaries featured on the disc. That audio commentary and some great making-of documentaries also delve into Singleton’s unbelievable Cinderella story as a USC film student who turned his thesis script into a studio green light after slipping “Boyz” to his boss, Stephanie Allain, when she was a development executive at Sony and Singleton was a script reader.
The supplements also provide insights into Singleton’s many bold and effective creative choices, from giving his modestly budgeted movie scale through sound design (the constant sirens, helicopters, and babies crying give a constant sense of the world beyond the frame) to casting rapper Ice Cube in his first screen role. “Boyz N the Hood” has a memoirist’s knack for detailed observation and a cinephile’s catalog of references with which to give those observations context — it plays like an Italian neorealist drama made by someone with a Spielbergian flair for entertainment.
Back when “Boyz” was released to great fanfare — receiving a rapturous reception when it premiered at Cannes followed by rave reviews and big box office back in the States on its way to Singleton’s Oscar nominations for his script and direction — expectations were inevitably raised beyond what was reasonable. As a result, the quieter and more relaxed “Poetic Justice” couldn’t help but feel like a minor disappointment. Viewed today, however, the story of a hairdresser (Janet Jackson) who finds emotional release through poetry and romance with an unlikely neighbor (Tupac Shakur) seems every bit the equal of Singleton’s debut — contemplative where “Boyz” was anxious, lyrical rather than aggressive, and concerned with its lead character’s interior life as much as her external circumstances.
In between “Poetic Justice” and “Baby Boy,” Singleton directed three movies, including his best, “Higher Learning.” That 1995 release expanded Singleton’s vision to encompass an Altman-esque ensemble of characters situated at a university not unlike the director’s alma mater, USC, and combined the empathy and insight of “Poetic Justice” with the intellectual rigor and righteous rage of “Boyz.” Singleton’s strengths as both a humanist and a humorist are at their most evident in the poignant, funny, “Higher Learning,” which makes room for dozens of characters and issues without shortchanging any of them — it’s also got one of the most varied and effective soundtracks (both in terms of its needle drops and Stanley Clarke’s audacious score) of the 1990s.
Between “Higher Learning” and “Baby Boy” Singleton exercised different muscles by directing a historical drama he did not write (“Rosewood”) and reviving some 1970s IP with his remake/reboot of the blaxploitation classic “Shaft.” Taking a detour from autobiography meant that when Singleton returned home for “Baby Boy,” he had even more cinematic tools at his disposal than he did when he made his fully assured debut. “Baby Boy” isn’t as tight as “Boyz” or “Justice,” but it takes more chances and blends even more wildly disparate styles, from its surreal opening showing the grown Tyrese in his mother’s womb and its slice-of-life documenting of early 21st-century South Central to the heightened screwball comedy between Tyrese and love interest Taraji P. Henson.
It also covers so much ground that it enabled Singleton to leave South Central behind for good, at least on movie screens (he would return to the area for the TV series “Snowfall”). After “Baby Boy” Singleton took another studio assignment, “2 Fast 2 Furious,” resulting in the biggest hit of his career and the movie that introduced Tyrese and Ludacris to the enduring franchise; he followed that with “Four Brothers,” an urban riff on the John Wayne Western “The Sons of Katie Elder” that confirmed Singleton’s gifts for lean, visceral action filmmaking.
Singleton pivoted into television after the critical and commercial failure of his 2011 thriller “Abduction,” and never went back to movies; a stroke ended his life far too early, in 2019 at the age of 51. Singleton ultimately left the world with less than 10 feature films, yet the range and depth of those movies place him among the greats — and make his passing all the more tragic, as one wonders how much more he had to offer. Even if he had never made anything beyond the three films in Criterion’s “Hood” collection, he would belong in the pantheon.
“John Singleton’s Hood Trilogy” is currently available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Criterion.
