Do the Right Thing plays out over a single day on one block in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy, and the heat is the plot as much as any character is.
Mookie (Spike Lee) delivers pizzas for Sal (Danny Aiello) while neighbors, cops and shopkeepers circle each other under a sun that never lets up. There's no ticking-clock plot device forcing the confrontation that closes the film; the temperature does that work instead, turning small frictions into something that cannot be walked back.
Lee wrote, directed, produced and starred in the film, casting Danny Aiello as Sal alongside Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as Da Mayor and Mother Sister, the block's elders. He built the ensemble around a real place: a single stretch of Stuyvesant Avenue, constructed as a set so the production controlled every color and prop on the street for the whole shoot. The script grew out of Lee's anger at real incidents of racial violence in New York in the years just before, including the killing of a Black teenager in Howard Beach.
Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson shot the film in color pushed past naturalism, reds, ambers and yellows that make the heat visible rather than just implied, intensifying as the day wears toward evening. The crew rigged a heating element near the lens to warp the air on camera. Combined with off-kilter angles and characters who periodically address the camera directly, the visual language keeps tipping the film out of tidy realism and toward something more agitated and immediate.
The film premiered in competition at Cannes in 1989, where it was widely tipped to take the Palme d'Or before the jury, led by Wim Wenders, gave the prize to Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape instead, a snub Lee publicly criticized at the time. It went on to a $37 million worldwide gross and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1999. Check theplot.tv for current streaming and rental availability before watching tonight.
