Conceived by director Jules Dassin as a remake of 1935's The Informer transposed to the depressed and tension-filled neighborhoods of 1968 Cleveland, Up Tight! is literally white-hot, incorporating into the dramatic action clips of fire, sparks of machinery, and the molten steel of the mill where Tank Williams (Julian Mayfield) worked for 20 years before being replaced by a machine. Like a crowd of Black Power supporters shouts at one point, he's become "obsolete."

Tank associates with a pocket of Cleveland revolutionaries led by his old friend Johnny Wells (Max Julien), with whom he plans to rob a munitions factory. Wrecked by drink, however, he forces Johnny to go it alone. When Johnny becomes a fugitive and is involved in a shootout with police, Tank, suddenly prosperous for the first time in years, becomes the number-one suspect in his betrayal.

Dassin, who wrote the film with Ruby Dee (who also stars as Tank's "old" lady, Laurie), presents the material from two different approaches – one, Tank's conventional suspense story/psychodrama, aggravated by the Rust Belt economic collapse (which, two years earlier, had sent tremors through Cleveland's black Hough neighborhood and led to riots) and its resulting welfare state, and the other, a thoughtful exploration of the ultimate clash between the rising black revolutionary movement and the nonviolence-favoring old guard, who, while Up Tight! was being filmed, were shaken by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. That event prompted Dassin to rewrite entire scenes of the film, as well as transplant his filming operations to Atlanta, where he was able to capture breathtaking clips of the MLK funeral procession. They infuse the film with a chill-inducing emotional resonance from its beginning.

Cast stand-outs include Frank Silvera as an old-school black civic leader being thrown under the bus by those who accuse of him of pandering to "whitey," and Roscoe Lee Brown as an effeminate weirdo who tries to befriend Tank. It's enlivened by the cinematography of Boris Kaufman (an Oscar-winner for On the Waterfront), which makes full use of the big, bleak Great Lakes industrial setting, not to mention a funny and disturbing sequence in a carnival funhouse, in which Tank explains the Black Power "plant" to a gaggle of incredulous white folks. An original soundtrack composed and performed by Booker T. Jones of Booker T. and the M.G.'s. adds to the film's richness.

Up Tight!, typically, found very limited release in the U.S. at the time it was made (Dassin completed production in Paris), but its high production value and emotional punch make it worth viewing even now.

-Claire Shefchik