Like Leo the Last, The Landlord concerns itself with a guilt-ridden property owner in the middle of the slums. Unlike Leo, however, The Landlord is a glossy, flat, fake Hollywood attempt at black social comedy.
The plot creaks around a 29-year-old rich kid named Elgar (Beau Bridges) who buys himself a tenement in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. His elaborate renovation plans change abruptly when he meets his new tenants, including a black free-school teacher (Melvin Stewart), a former Miss Sepia (Diana Sands), her eight-year-old son (Douglas Grant) and slightly deranged husband (Louis Gosset), and a worldly-wise den mother (Pearl Bailey) who feeds Elgar soul food and introduces him around. Friendships form fast. Elgar falls in love with a black painter and part-time go-go dancer (Marki Bey), then has a brief but pregnant liaison with Miss Sepia. But Elgar has been more hypnotized than radicalized by the blacks, and film's end finds him with his illegitimate son going in search of his lost go-go dancer and a new home.
The Landlord is the first film by Hal Ashby, a former film editor for Director Norman Jewison. Ashby seems to have picked up Jewison's stylistic slickness, which is stamped all over the movie like a muddy footprint. One Landlord love scene consists of almost nothing but enormous closeups of lips and hands against a glaring white background. Ashby and Scenarist William Gunn make things easy on themselves throughout by portraying the tenants as a group of whimsical, life-loving characters out of The Time of Your Life; Elgar's snooty family is caricatured with pig-bladder subtlety.
There are, however, some remarkable performances in The Landlord. Lee Grant and Bob Klein, as two members of Elgar's family, act with closely calculated wit and an eye for the tellingly ludicrous gesture. Diana Sands is lithe and musky as the former Miss Sepia. Best of all, though, is Beau Bridges. His peppy performance ranges widely between antic comedy and tough melodrama. He handles both with equal facility, as well as the subtler shadings in between. He is surely one of the very best young actors in films today, good enough to make The Landlord worth seeing. That in itself is quite an accomplishment.