It's fun and playful stuff like this - along with the film's floaty camera and hip hop soundtrack - that oppose what you might expect from a "hard hitting" movie on race relations in America. It thankfully lacks the very blatant view associated with Lee's celebrity persona and lacks the aggressive edge, and focus on violence, of the "black cinema" wave that followed Right Thing - headlined by Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society in the early 90s.
Right Thing takes place on the hottest day of the year in a mostly black neighbourhood in Brooklyn. No single narrative - just a relatively large cast brought together Altman style by a big event near the film's end. If there is a main character it's Mookie (played by Lee himself), a pizza delivery boy for Italian American joint Sal's Pizza. Danny Aiello gives the best performance as Sal, proud of his homegrown family business and proud to be part of the neighbourhood. He runs the place with two sons, the older of the two - Pino (John Turturro) - hates the neighbourhood and is openly racist. It's from here that many tensions start to arise.
There would be no point in going through the whole cast. The actors do well and Lee's script creates a cesspool of conflicting forces clanging against each other. Among the most interesting: Radio Raheem, a juggernaut of a man hauling around around an anger-inducingly loud radio and who does a great rendition of Robert Mitchum's famous good vs evil hands scene, here with golden brass knuckles. There's a jittery man, walking the streets and trying to spread the message of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X despite a stutter. A good hearted old drunkard named Da Mayor who utters the film's title line. And DJ Love Daddy (a pre-Fiction Samuel L Jackson) to tie everything up.
The immense heat is an easy metaphor: that Lee isn't showing racism brought on by revenge or personal reasons. Pino isn't on a vendetta. The bigotry in the air here is the stuff just beneath the surface - the stuff Lee seems to believe is everywhere (whether you believe it's there or not is a different matter). And all brought out by something as primal as high temperatures.
Francis Ford Coppola's influence looms large over Lee, nowhere more clear than in Right Thing. In the 70s, while most directors were taking influence from the careful arrangements and strive for artful shots of the French New Wave, Coppola was looking back to the the Hollywood studio golden years in the 40s and 50s. Coppola copied and Lee took notes. It's why every shot of Right Thing has a grandness to it. The mise en scene is obvious, like in a scene where Sal sits with palm to face in disappointment while outside the window behind him his son gets into a much unneeded argument. It's a style that offers a lot less in analytical possibilities, but gives less the impression of a film being staged than a bold camera luckily walking in on important events. It's a style that works wonders for capturing the mesh of disgruntled thoughts one's mind turns into under sweltering heat.
The big question that hangs over the film is, in the end, does Mookie make the right choice? It's not yes or no. There's not a single issue raised here that's black and white. Lee has been called a racist by many, and very well may be one, but it would be impossible to make the case for that here. No radical, blindly fighting against racism that it turns into a form of racism itself, would show the scenes that Lee does. Of a gang of mostly blacks trashing up and destroying a store for reasons you probably feel are unjustified. There's conflict in almost every frame of this movie, but if we're talking about things solely from the view of race: there's a fairness to the film's unflinchingness.
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