SOURCE: "Law of the Jungle," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 642-7.

In the following excerpt, Cardullo discusses Lee's Jungle Fever and suggests that Lee watch African films to "discover something not only about artistic economy, about the virtue (and resonance) of a simple tale straightforwardly told, but also about the culture of his Mother Africa."

… Spike Lee's Jungle Fever is about villagers of a different kind: those of New York City, which, with the possible exception of upper Manhattan, is America's most parochial city. (My mother, who spent the first forty years of her life in Brooklyn, rarely felt the need to venture outside Flatbush, let alone the borough itself.) Lee's "villagers" are all played by professionals, and it shows in the unevenness of their work, in the absence from all but a few scenes of an ensemble feeling. For every subtly inflected performance...