The Mighty Quinn [Media Notes 158]

I saw The Mighty Quinn when it was in theaters, 1989 and loved it then. I just watched it on Amazon Prime. I still love it. Wikipedia quotes Roger Ebert as saying that it’s “a spy thriller, a buddy movie, a musical, a comedy and a picture that is wise about human nature.” The movie takes its title from a song by Bob Dylan (who else?), but sung in a delicious reggae version by Michael Rose, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Cedella Marley and Sharon Marley Prendergast. I don’t know who Michael Rose is, but the other three are on screen and singing. Ralph plays Lola Quinn, wife of Xavier Quinn, played by Denzel Washington. The other two back her up.

Quinn is chief of police on a small Caribbean Island. His best friend from childhood, Maube, played by Robert Townsend, is accused of murder. Maube has grown up to be a cheerful ne’er do well who smokes ganja all day and gets laid. Quinn works hard, all day, and is estranged from his wife. It’s not clear just why, but it seems likely that it’s simply because he works too damn hard and doesn’t have time to be her companion and father to his son. That makes this yet another movie where a man is caught between his work and his woman.

[An aside: Is that THE American movie, or at least one of them?]

And then there’s Ubu Pearl, the local witch, her daughter Isola, Donald Pater, who owns a luxury resort and is the murder victim who gets the ball rolling, Thomas Elgin, a political fixer, his wife, who has the hots for Xavier (and isn’t the only one), Governor Chalk, a former poultry inspector, Fred Miller, who presents himself as representing Pater but who is in fact a CIA operative, and a handful of other people. A couple people get killed (one or two perhaps deserving, the others not), Xavier turns out to be a decent enough musician, and Maube, who was wrongly accused, takes the fall. Why? Because someone has to, that’s how myth works.

Here's a scene from somewhere late in the second third of the movie. We start with Xavier at the piano and end with the crowd singing “The Mighty Quinn.” Alas, I couldn’t find a clip of Ralph, Marley, and Prendergast singing it. That comes later in the movie.