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# Do the Right Thing: One Block On The Hottest Day

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/do-the-right-thing-one-block-on-the-hottest-day)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

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## Do the Right Thing (1989)

Critics warned it would start riots. It was nominated for a screenplay Oscar and lost Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy.

Runtime

120 minutes

Director

Spike Lee

Budget

$6 million

Box office

$37.3 million worldwide

Cinematography

Ernest Dickerson

## A Neighbourhood As A Pressure Vessel

Lee confines the film to a single block in Bedford Stuyvesant over about twenty four hours of a heatwave, and lets the temperature do the structural work. Ernest Dickerson shot through warm filters and lit interiors with orange, the wardrobe is built from primary colours, and the camera tilts into Dutch angles as the day goes on. For most of its length it is a comedy about a street: a pizzeria run by an Italian family with a Black clientele, a radio station, three men under an umbrella, a man with a boombox. The argument that detonates it is about a wall of photographs. Lee refuses to make anyone simply right, gives Sal genuine affection for the neighbourhood, and then stages a death that makes the question of who was reasonable beside the point.

journey·6 Movements

# Watching Do the Right Thing

Intensity

/

Movement

Fight The Power

Announced

"A dance under credits to a Public Enemy track that will play from a boombox for the rest of the film."

> Always do the right thing.

What to watch for

0%

The temperature tracked in every scene by sweat, fans and water

Dutch angles arriving gradually as the day gets hotter

Two closing quotations, from King and from Malcolm X, left unreconciled

Radio Raheem's love and hate monologue lifted from The Night of the Hunter

Sal written with real warmth so the ending cannot be filed as simple

Several prominent critics predicted the film would provoke violence among Black audiences. It did not, and Lee spent the next decade being asked about the prediction rather than the film.

The Cannes jury under Wim Wenders gave the Palme d'Or to sex, lies, and videotape. Lee said afterwards he had made a bat with Wenders's name on it.

[Do the Right Thing on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097216/?utm_source=slatesource)