The “brutal and shocking” movie Denzel Washington will never forget watching
Context is everything with movies.
If you watch Office Space shortly after getting fired from your job, chances are, you’ll feel pretty good about life by the time the credits roll, but if you watch a film that romanticises professional prowess, like La La Land or All The President’s Men, you might be headed for a mental breakdown, and age is also an important factor. I watched ET: The Extra-Terrestrial at the age of two and have never recovered.
Denzel Washington understands this age-specific phenomenon firsthand, because when asked to reveal his favourite movie of all time, the Oscar-winning screen legend was as thoughtful as ever, explaining that there is no way to give a categorical answer, with him noting that it all comes down to when you see a film and how it impacts you in context, before narrowing it down to the film that had the biggest effect on him early in his life.
He said, “As a younger man, I really enjoyed The Education of Sonny Carson… I just remember that film because it was the first time as a young man that I went to a serious film,” because, as the son of a minister, he explained, he rarely got to see tough movies, and his first experience going to see one still resonates after many decades of watching and making powerful cinema.
Released in 1974 and directed by Michael Campus, the film in question revolves around the titular Sonny, a real-life civil rights activist whose early life is consumed by gang involvement and a brutal stint in prison, which Washington described as “completely brutal and shocking… I just sat there with my eyes wide open thinking, ‘Wow, something really serious is going on here.’”
He added that he would be curious to see the film again now. It had a profound effect on him, even though he can hardly remember the outlines of the plot, and he credits it with introducing him to “the stark reality of the streets,” which is why it’s usually best to keep movies like this sealed in your past.
More often than not, when you rewatch a film that had a profound influence on you as a young person, that magical connection is broken, but with that said, The Education of Sonny Carson is probably an exception to that rule.
In the years since its release, it has become part of the cinematic canon of the 1970s and is often categorised as a blaxploitation movie for its scenes of brutal abuse. The vicious attacks that Sonny and his fellow inmates endure while in prison are almost impossible to watch, though Campus was adamant that they barely scratched the surface of reality.
Nowadays, even people who haven’t even heard of Sonny Carson, let alone seen the film, will probably have encountered it in the world of music. It’s been sampled and referenced by everyone from Lauryn Hill to Travis Scott, and it’s even quoted in the Baz Luhrmann series The Get Down.
