Here’s a question: when was the last time you had as good a time as when you were watching The A-Team as a child? I know.
Many of the best moments of the wholly unexpected documentary Mr T: I Pity the Fool recall his legendary turn as the soldiers of fortunes’ genius engineer, pugilist and instant fan favourite (not that we used the phrase then) BA Baracus. According to Mr T, the show was built around him; when you see now how well it plays to his talents and charisma – a proper tough guy, but shot through with warmth and humour, giving a perfectly outsize performance and never overplaying his hand – it makes a lot of sense, however much it would annoy George “Hannibal” Peppard to hear it.
Mr T is now 74. I know. He looks a bit older, but the charisma is absolutely intact. He sits alone in a darkened room, occasionally being played old footage of his career’s highlights and lowlights, dressed in a stars-and-stripes boiler suit and bandana. You cannot take your eyes off him.
He has done very few public interviews since his heyday, but the clips they show from that period are electrifying, especially his thrillingly uncompromising one with David Letterman in which he unsmilingly explains his look to the increasingly cowed host. The Mohawk-style haircut and feathered earrings honour his African Mandinka warrior heritage. The gold chains are a transmutation of the shackles his ancestors were put in. He doesn’t get involved in “Black exploitation movies – no dope-dealing movies, no pimp roles … Give me the type of role you’d give Charlton Heston.” The audience laughs, not uneasily, missing and making his point.
At the same time, his rise to fame and riches has an inescapably “only in America” feel to it. He was born Laurence Tureaud (spelled Tero throughout the documentary), one of 12 children to his loving and beloved mother Willa Lee, and brought up in an impoverished housing project in Chicago. He and his brothers worked on their fitness together – by the time he was 15, he already looked like an athlete-cum-bodybuilder.
He renamed himself Mr T “so that the first word out of people’s mouths was always ‘Mister’”, after watching his father and brothers – including a Vietnam veteran – being habitually addressed as “Boy”. When his mother was robbed by local “thugs”, he went looking for them; although the story is left unfinished, it is implied that he carried out some serious physical damage. If so, it was a rare lapse in what seems to have been an otherwise hugely disciplined life.
He worked three manual jobs until bouncing gave way to bodyguarding and an entree into the world of television, which led to him being spotted by Sylvester Stallone and cast as the antagonist Clubber Lang in Rocky III. He turned up word-perfect to the audition – discipline again – met the ad-libbing requirements and worked on the accent the part originally required. The film was a hit – and so was Mr T.
Then came The A-Team, enormous popularity and wealth (Mr T commercials and merch was everywhere), an almost inevitable inflation of ego – and then, in the mid-90s, a cancer diagnosis that, along with his increasing demands, caused his star to wane. Since then, he has become a man of God and finds fulfilment in good works and preaching.
That, at least, is how the documentary tells it. In the accompanying publicity tour, Mr T has made clear that he finds the film dishonest and unfair. He says that he wasn’t forced but chose to step out of the limelight, having fulfilled his ambition to set his mother up in comfort for the rest of her days. As a child, he had promised her a house and pretty dresses. “If that’s the lord’s willing,” she replied.
Other objections include the time given to his former agent Peter Young (whom he says he had to sue and who is the main contributor of claims about Mr T’s diva behaviour and “bad decisions” professionally) compared with his longtime pastor, the Rev Henry Hardy, and the omission of counterweights to the hardman narrative.
It is certainly a small, slight documentary. In a 50-minute runtime, some ommisions are to be expected, but even without knowing about its subject’s resulting displeasure, the emphasis on the violent incident reads oddly and the misspelling of his name raises questions about the quality of the research. There is a sense of eagerness with which the picture of Mr T as a monstrous egomaniac is painted. At best, it feels like a rushed job. At worst, it feels like the imposition of another negative narrative on a Black man by fools who are more to be censured than pitied.