Blaxploitation Films
Date: 2001-07-01 07:00:00+00:00
Description: What is Blaxploitation? In the early 1970s a type of film emerged that featured all- black casts, really cool soul, R 'n' B and disco music soundtracks, characters sporting big guns, big dashikis, and even bigger 'fros, and had some of the meanest, baddest attitudes to shoot their way across our screens. More than that, for African-American audiences these films were an antidote to the sanitised 'safe' images of blackness that Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby presented to America. These films depicted a reality about the world which African-American audiences could identify with, even if the stor
Publisher: Kamera Books

Mikel J. Koven

BLAXPLOITATION

FILMS

For My Dad

This book is dedicated to the memory of these African-American pioneers who have died since the
publication of Blaxploitation Films (2001). They will be missed.

James Brown (composer) – (1933–2006)

Roscoe Lee Browne (actor) – (1925–2007)

Don Chastain (actor) – (1935–2002)

Ossie Davis (actor/director) – (1917–2005)

Ivan Dixon (actor/director) – (1931–2008)

Tamara Dobson (actor) – (1947–2006)

Robert DoQui (actor) – (1934–2008)

Teresa Graves (actor) – (1948–2002)

Julius Harris (actor) – (1923–2004)

Isaac Hayes (composer, actor) – (1942–2008)

James Hinton (cinematographer) – (1916–2006)

Willie Hutch (composer/musician) – (1944–2005)

William Marshall (actor) – (1924–2003)

Rudy Rae Moore (actor) – (1927–2008)

Ron O’Neal (actor) – (1937–2004)

Gordon Parks (director) – (1912–2006)

Brock Peters (actor) – (1927–2005)

Billy Preston (composer/musician) – (1946–2006)

Richard Pryor (actor) – (1940–2005)

Cirio Santiago (director) – (1936–2008)

Mel Stewart (actor) – (1929–2002)

Paul Winfield (actor) – (1939–2004)

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

BAADASSSSS

THE MAN

GENRE FILMS

CONCLUSION: SPOOFING THE GENRE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Copyright

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INTRODUCTION

When I wrote the first edition of this Blaxploitation book for what was then the Pocket Essentials series (2001), I thought I knew what the term meant. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘like Shaft and shit.’ Not only was writing the 2001 edition a tremendous learning curve, but in the seven or so years since its publication, I have had to rethink a number of my assumptions about these films, particularly in light of some of my other work on exploitation cinema – specifically La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (2006). My understanding of exploitation cinema as ‘vernacular’, my perception of these films and what they were trying to do back in the 1970s has substantially altered. Since I began thinking of these kinds of movies as ‘vernacular’, I have felt the need to revisit a number of the films in this book and rethink much of my understanding of Blaxploitation in general. And yet, this book still needs to stand on its own as an introduction and attempt at cataloguing the phenomenon of Blaxploitation films.

The first thing to note, rather obviously perhaps, is that this genre, this period of filmmaking if you prefer, is a fusion of two different words – black and exploitation. Blaxploitation films are, by definition, ‘black exploitation’ films. But the problem comes when we ask who is being exploited? We
know that most forms of exploitation cinema – for example, splatter movies or pornography – exploit
images of violence and/or sexuality; the raison d’être of the films is the presentation of sex or violence, not their discourse or analysis. Any semblance to plot or story is purely accidental. These filmmakers exploit our desire to watch violence and/or sex, and if producers could get away with it they would give us nothing more than scenes of what we’ve paid to see. Extending this to include Blaxploitation films, these must be films that exploit our desire to see black people, specifically African-Americans, on screen, doing presumably what one expects or wants to see African-Americans doing.

And yet, as Blaxploitation star Fred Williamson notes in the documentary Baadasssss Cinema, discussed below, the fusion of ‘black’ and ‘exploitation’ was a political manoeuvre designed to discredit these ‘vernacular’ films in favour of greater political autonomy for the middle-classes. The actor notes:

‘NAACP and CORE – they’re the ones who created this terminology: black exploitation. That has to be
clear, on the record. It came from them. It didn’t come from the white press. Who was being exploited?

All the black actors were getting paid. They had a job. They were going to work. The audience wasn’t
being exploited. They were getting to see things on their screen they’d longed for.’

Suddenly, this definition becomes even more problematic. Blaxploitation films fulfilled African-American filmgoers’ desire to see black actors and actresses on screen in leading roles. However, what we see those African-Americans doing on screen in those leading roles gives a warped view of black
culture in the early 1970s. The roles for black characters within Blaxploitation films, although more diverse than what had previously been seen (as explained in Donald Bogle’s seminal work on the representation of blacks in American cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks [2001]), did not necessarily reflect the lives of African-Americans in the United States at that time. The films contain the dreams and aspirations of American blacks and also sell images back to them. This means
that I am drawing a faint line between Blaxploitation films made by black filmmakers and ones made by white filmmakers. This is not to say that black filmmakers never pandered to white stereotypes, nor that white filmmakers are necessarily insensitive to black representation but, as I examine the films in this book, certain differences occur frequently enough that a preliminary pattern emerges.

As for the term ‘exploitation’, in this case it refers to the actual marketing of a film, i.e. using the publicity to have a specific impact (see, for example, Eric Schafer’s Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!

[1999]). In theory, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) was presented as an exploitation film through its poster art, music-video advertisements and images of its teen stars in publicity photos doing daring, adventurous and romantic things. The marketing for Luhrmann’s film played down Shakespeare
and played up (exploited) the teen dimension of the story to get that audience to see the film. Likewise, Franco Zeffirelli marketed his Hamlet (1990) as an action-adventure film by highlighting the revenge theme and Mel Gibson. John McTiernan parodies this exploitation of Shakespeare in his Last Action
Hero (1993) by having the film’s young hero fantasise about Arnold Schwarzenegger in Hamlet with an announcer saying: ‘There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. And Hamlet’s takin’ out the trash!’ Comparing Blaxploitation films to films about Shakespeare may be an extreme comparison to make, but the point is that anything can have exploitative marketing.

Turning to the Blaxploitation films themselves, one can see how these films were marketed by looking at the advertising from three Pam Grier films: Coffy, Foxy Brown and Friday Foster. All three are produced by American International Pictures (AIP), the low-budget masters of exploitation cinema.

The design of all three posters is more or less the same: they feature a large image of Grier, slightly off-centre, and at her feet is a collage of artists’ renderings of various scenes in the picture, some romantic and the others action-oriented. The large images of Grier have her dressed sexily: for Coffy, she is wearing skintight leggings and a halter top, accentuating her breasts; for Foxy Brown, she is in a long yellow dress, but crossing her legs, giving a thigh-high flash of her leg; and likewise for Friday Foster, Grier is standing, wearing a dress slit to her waist and revealing as much leg as is possible. In both the posters for Coffy and Friday Foster, Grier is holding a gun, while for Foxy Brown she is reaching for a small Derringer-like pistol concealed at her ankle. So what do all these images mean? The mixture of
romantic and action scenes indicates that the movies are full of sex and violence. The large picture of Grier suggests not only that the lead character is a beautiful woman whose sexy body you’ll be seeing a lot of, but that she’s armed and dangerous too. The camera around Grier’s neck on the Friday Foster poster looks like an afterthought, as if someone in AIP’s art department finally read the script and realised that the character Grier plays is a photographer. These posters exploit the desires of the movie-going public so that they will pop their money down at the box-office window to see these films.

Exploitation cinema also uses topical subject matter – whatever is in the news. When everyone was
terrified that the Russians were going to drop the atomic bomb on America, AIP and others made lots of movies about radioactive mutations and giant bugs that threaten our way of life. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, race-related violence in places like Watts, as well as militant political movements like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, fuelled the fear that blacks could disrupt and destroy the safe, suburban existences of middle-class whites. Drug addiction started making headlines because it stopped being just a black problem. Whites came into contact with drugs through the hippie movement and Vietnam War veterans who experimented with narcotics in integrated military units. So in these Blaxploitation films drug use is ubiquitous. Blaxploitation films also exploit the sex industry (prostitutes, pimps and bordellos). In many of these films we see the industrial side to drugs and prostitution in great detail. This potentially gives audiences an education in how the whole illegal system operates. This is not to say these are accurate portrayals, although some of the depictions of prostitution that I discuss throughout certainly feel accurate, but they give the impression that, by watching these movies, we will have a better understanding about what we hear on the news.

So Blaxploitation both markets itself into an emerging African-American vernacular film market with
promises of ample sex and violence, and draws on contemporary fears and anxieties that, one assumes,
have a direct relevance for black communities. Film scholar Jesse Algeron Rhines (1996) has noted the following: ‘The film industry hoped simply to make money by indeed exploiting an audience need.

These films were released during the height of the civil rights/black liberation movement, yet their subject matter of sex, violence and “super-cool” individualism was the antithesis of what contemporaneous black political organisations, like SNCC, the NAACP, or SCLC, supported for black
people, hence the name “Blaxploitation”, a term coined by Variety.’ While Fred Williamson states, in Baadasssss Cinema, that the term ‘Blaxploitation’ was invented by political groups like the NAACP, the other ‘origin myth’ of the term (as cited by Rhines) is that it was thought up by a white film critic writing in Variety.

Based on that particular description, the spate of ‘in the hood’ movies that emerged in the early 1990s would also be Blaxploitation films. Movies like New Jack City (1989), Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Menace II Society (1993) attempted to lure young African-American film audiences with their promises of guns and action. Surprisingly, the sex angle is not marketed. There is possibly a gender split in exploitation-film marketing if you consider films like Waiting to Exhale (1995) and Soul Food (1997) as women’s Blaxploitation. I have a problem with this classification – it doesn’t reflect the overall feeling one gets from the films themselves. It also puts contemporary African-American filmmaking into an easily dismissed secondary category of film. The vast majority of Blaxploitation films were not very good movies – at best, some could be considered ‘interesting’. However, the vast majority of contemporary African-American films are quite excellent. Spike Lee and John Singleton are two of the
best American filmmakers working today. Something feels wrong about calling today’s black
filmmakers Blaxploitation filmmakers. It just doesn’t feel accurate.

Jesse Algeron Rhines noted another aspect of Blaxploitation films when compared with today’s African-American filmmakers: ‘The Blaxploitation period was not an example of African-American filmmaking. Much more often than not, whites were in control behind the camera reproducing their own
point of view. In fact, of the hundred or so films featuring significant numbers of African-American characters and/or an African-American-derived storyline and produced during the Blaxploitation period, roughly 1970 through 1974, fewer than one-fifth were under African-American control. Even fewer came from black-owned production houses and fewer still were financed and/or distributed by African-Americans.’ Rhines’ perspective is reflected by the title of his book, Black Film/White Money – in the book he looks at white financial control of black filmmaking opportunities from the very beginning with Oscar Micheaux in the 1920s and 1930s up to Spike Lee today. There is another theme that Rhines alludes to, but doesn’t develop: in spite of white domination of Blaxploitation, either behind the camera or behind the money, there is a distinct difference between the images of African-Americans when directed by white filmmakers and when directed by black filmmakers. I shall be outlining these differences as I go through the films.

And yet, despite white control, many young people went to see these movies, white and black, and
enjoyed them. To finish this ‘introductory’ section, I want to consider the following documentary film made by esteemed British filmmaker Isaac Julien on the Blaxploitation movement.

Baadasssss Cinema (2002)

Director: Isaac Julien

Cast: Larry Cohen (Himself), Pam Grier (Herself), Ed Guerrero (Himself), Gloria Hendry (Herself), bell hooks (Herself), Samuel L Jackson (Himself), Quentin Tarantino (Himself), Melvin

Van Peebles (Himself), Fred Williamson (Himself)

55 mins

Story

Documentary film which chronicles the rise of Blaxploitation cinema in the 1970s from the near collapse of the Hollywood studios in the late 1960s, through to Hollywood’s co-option of Blaxploitation in the mid-1970s, using both archive footage from the time and new interviews with some of the key
actors and directors from the classics of Blaxploitation. Also included are interviews with academics like Guerrero and hooks, who discuss the cultural significance of this period of filmmaking.

Subtext

Coming from such a renowned black filmmaker as Isaac Julien, the film is formally pretty conservative.

Subtextually, however, it seems significant that the first interviews are with such non-Blaxploitation names as Quentin Tarantino and Samuel Jackson (a good few years after Jackie Brown), whose inclusion and placement up front in the film seems a tad disingenuous. While, of course, Tarantino is largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in Blaxploitation cinema, if not for 70s genre filmmaking as a whole, there’s just something a little too commercially contrived about his inclusion.

But the film does give some very interesting background information regarding these films, for example Blaxploitation’s clash with representatives of a variety of African-American communities.

Various speakers in the film recognise that Blaxploitation gave black communities the kinds of heroes they needed at the time, but community leaders, like the NAACP, were afraid that the kinds of stereotyping in which these films indulged could ultimately do more harm than good to black communities. Fred Williamson notes in the film that the term ‘Blaxploitation’ was actually given to these films by groups like the NAACP in order to discredit these films. Julien’s film even goes so far as to argue that one of the reasons for Blaxploitation’s decline by the mid-1970s was because of the pressure the NAACP put on Hollywood and the studios fear of a black backlash against their bigger-budget productions.

Background Information

Originally made for cable TV and broadcast on the IFC (Independent Film Channel) network in the US.

The Verdict

Despite my reservations regarding the film’s commercial conservatism, this is an excellent introduction to Blaxploitation cinema, and for the uninitiated, this is possibly the best place to start. An excellent and fascinating documentary. Rating 4/5.

BAADASSSSS

The term ‘baadasssss’ is synonymous with Blaxploitation: it connotes a rebellious spirit in African-American thinking, of ‘sticking it to the Man’, of misbehaving. Baadasssss-ness permeates African-American culture, from the oral folklore of Brer Rabbit to the ‘toasts’ made famous by the late Rudy Rae Moore, such as ‘The Signifying Monkey’. Being a baadasssss doesn’t just mean being a tough-guy

– not all baadassssses are tough (or guys) – but they are all literally ‘outlaws’ – beyond, or outside of, the law. They work in those liminal spaces between the law, between illegality and vice on the one side and harmless decadence and pleasure-seeking on the other. What these baadasssss characters cannot be
is the law; they cannot be the Man, or his representatives; and while some of the later Blaxploitation heroes, including Shaft, may have a certain baadasssss attitude, they are not real baadassssses, as they’re part of the same system of law and order. They are the Man.

ORIGINAL BAADASSSSSES

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)

Director/Writer: Melvin Van Peebles

Cast: Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback), Simon Chuckster (Beetle), Hubert Scales (Mu-Mu),

John Dullaghan (Commissioner), Rhetta Hughes (Old Girlfriend), Mario Van Peebles (Young

Sweetback)

97 mins

Story

Sweet Sweetback is a male prostitute working in a bordello. He is the star performer of theatrical sex acts, and has been since he was a young boy. The White Racist Cops (WRC) need a token black to take
in for a completely unrelated crime, and Sweetback seems to be a convenient stooge. While out with the WRC, they arrest another black youth on some disturbance charge. While he is in their custody, the cops pistol-whip the young man. This is too much for Sweetback, who beats the cops into a coma. Because
of this, Sweetback goes on the run. But everywhere Sweetback goes for succour, he is betrayed –
sometimes on purpose by his supposed friends, sometimes just because of fate.

Subtext

The film is dedicated to the ‘brothers and sisters who have had enough of the Man’. In this respect we see many of the themes that play out in the Blaxploitation genre. The ‘Man’ – in this case explicitly the WRC, but more generally all white folk – tries to ‘bleed’ Sweetback (as one of the Van Peebles-written songs goes: ‘They bled my brother, they bled my sister, but they won’t bleed me!’). Sweetback was the first film to show WRC and their unapologetic corruption, but while movie audiences might have been
shocked by this depiction in 1971, for some African-American communities this was their reality. As the archetypal black renegade, Sweetback will stick it to ‘the Man’ before ‘the Man’ sticks it to Sweetback. Here, Van Peebles’ character is represented as the metonym for the whole of black America
in 1971. The first cast credit in the film references that the film is ‘starring The Black Community’ –
that the Black Community itself is the real star of the film. It functions as a witness to the realities of contemporary black life; and, as Sweetback himself is played by the film’s director, Van Peebles functions likewise as such a witness.

Van Peebles was a self-taught filmmaker; never having been to film school, much of the aesthetic of

Sweetback was motivated largely by doing the opposite of what (white) Hollywood would have done.

According to Van Peebles himself, the film is a conscious rejection of ‘the technological colonialism of the white aesthetic in cinema’ (i.e. the Hollywood studio films). And, to this end, Van Peebles rejects the label as the father of black cinema and instead sees himself as the father of independent cinema.

At the first screenings of the film, so the Van Peebles self-constructed mythology tells us, while the images shocked some members of the audience, it was recognised by the Black Panthers as the first Black Power film, and an entire issue of the Panther newsletter was dedicated to it. Within all the chapters of the Black Panthers across America, Sweetback became essential viewing. However, the more mainstream magazine, Ebony, while it respected what Van Peebles was trying to do, felt that the cinematic sexual exploitation of his own son in the first few seconds of the film was inexcusable. The Panthers saw this exploitation as a rebirth (the sequence is musically accompanied by the hymn ‘Wade
in the Water’ and, to be sure, this moment functions as Sweetback’s baptism), and part of the film’s radical agenda was to smash down the doors of white-imposed, middle-class morality, which, by extension, the Panthers seem to be suggesting that Ebony was supporting.

Background

Van Peebles found it exceptionally difficult to find funding for an all-black film, so he borrowed $50,000 from Bill Cosby. Van Peebles refused to submit the film to the Motion Picture Association of

America (MPAA), which grants American films their certificates, on the grounds that this ‘all-white jury’ had no jurisdiction over what African-Americans could watch in cinemas. Therefore Van Peebles
self-imposed on Sweet Sweetback an X-rating in 1971. This, with the exception of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), is a certificate reserved only for pornographic films. Noting the racial homogeneity of the review panel, Van Peebles used this to his advantage, advertising the fact that this movie was ‘rated X by an all-white jury’. In other words, for Van Peebles at least, this was the film which contained the truth about the American black experience that the white establishment tried to censor. It was released a few weeks before Shaft.

This was also John Amos’s first film role; he would later go on to play James Evans Sr, father to Jimmy ‘JJ’ Walker, on Good Times and Admiral Fitzwallace on The West Wing.

Soundtrack

Although Melvin Van Peebles is credited with some of the songs in the film, most of the noteworthy parts of the score are by Earth, Wind and Fire. And, with Sweetback, Earth, Wind and Fire really got their first big break.

The Verdict

As I said in the introduction, it would behove an arrogant academic and film buff to admit in a second edition of his first book that he was originally wrong in his critical assumption about certain films. Since the first edition of Blaxploitation Films was produced, I have studied a variety of exploitation cinemas, and the maturity I have gained, together with my viewing of further ancillary films – like Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss, about the making of Sweetback – means that some re-evaluation of this film is required. In other words, I was totally wrong in my initial (and admittedly superficial) reading. Today, looking back at a film made in 1971, there is a naive belief reflected in it that cinema could truly effect revolution; and that naivety is kind of refreshing to experience. Why have we, as movie watchers, lost the belief that we can change the world through art? Sweetback is naive in this respect, in thinking that it could change anything; but, as with other radical filmmakers of the time, Van Peebles’ film is exciting for its naiveté. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song has a purity in its vernacular spirit; it is a film made by the Black Community for the Black Community. And I think it was this vernacular voice which the Panthers responded to so enthusiastically.

And yet the sexual exploitation of thirteen-year-old Mario, on screen for posterity, having his first sexual experience with a much older woman, is reprehensible. That sequence, which is shocking enough, in that it isn’t simulated sex, so turned me off the film, in my initial reading of it, that there was nothing Van Peebles could do later on to redeem himself or his picture in my eyes. The following sequences, which are also of an explicitly sexual nature, left me feeling like I was watching nothing more than a porn film. The film’s political agenda was completely lost on me in that first viewing as I could not get beyond the film’s pornography. On subsequent viewings of Sweetback, having prepared myself for the shock of that opening sequence, I’ve been able to see beyond the pornographic images

(of a child) to the film’s message of Black Power, but that is hard to do. If one can do it, Sweet
Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is one of the most radical films made in the United States. 5/5

Other than this film, Van Peebles has made a number of underground and independent films over the years. The success of Sweetback was unprecedented, causing a sensation even among white filmgoers.

Hollywood suddenly saw the greater potential of the African-American market and, desiring black money, but not the black politics of Van Peebles and the Black Panthers, kept the urban ethos of the films, but removed the potentially volatile political material. Rather than ‘sticking it to the Man’, Blaxploitation cinema gradually became more counter-revolutionary, having the black heroes working
for the Man, rather than ‘sticking it to’ him, as I discuss in the second chapter.

The irony is that Van Peebles’ son Mario is now perhaps seen as a more accomplished filmmaker than
his father, having made New Jack City (1991), Posse (1993) and Panther (1995), the latter based on his father’s novel. In 2003, Mario, in the most fitting homage to his father and the birth of American independent cinema, made a ‘making-of’ docudrama about the struggle to make Sweetback.

How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass/Baadasssss (2003)

Director: Mario Van Peebles

Writers: Mario Van Peebles and Dennis Haggerty, based on the book Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto by Melvin Van Peebles

Cast: Mario Van Peebles (Melvin Van Peebles), Joy Bryant (Priscilla), David Alan Grier (Clyde Houston), Nia Long (Sandra), Paul Rodriguez (Jose Garcia), Saul Rubinek (‘Howie’ Kaufman), Adam West (Bert), TK Carter (Bill Cosby), Terry Crews (Big T)

108 mins

Story

Based on Melvin Van Peebles’ book about the making of his seminal black film, Sweet Sweetback’s
Baadasssss Song, Baadasssss tells the story of Van Peebles’ struggle to make the film. Coming off the moderate success of The Watermelon Man, Columbia offers the upcoming Van Peebles a three-picture deal to make ‘race’ comedies. Instead, motivated by his disgust at the kinds of black stereotypes Hollywood has been perpetuating since the days of DW Griffith, Van Peebles rejects Hollywood in favour of a film which actually reflects the black experience.

For a maverick filmmaker like Van Peebles, the only way he can portray the reality of black America
in 1970 is to produce a film where the black hero gets away at the end. To do this, he says, ‘Fuck studio control’, even ‘Fuck the audience’ in their expectations and demands of a genre film. To make something truly revolutionary, Van Peebles knows that he will have to ‘fuck all the rules’. To this end, he avails himself of the porno industry in LA. Porn films, while lucrative, aren’t worthy of studio or union interference at the time; so, by promising to make a black porn film, he ensures that the white power-brokers – ‘the Man’ – won’t fuck with his film.

But the film also dramatises many of Mario’s issues with his father, and the younger director creates a powerfully personal story wherein he wrestles with his own family demons through playing his own father. Specifically, the film depicts Melvin’s exploitation of Mario’s first sexual encounter, captured forever at the beginning of Sweetback; but also moves towards a familial reconciliation in true Hollywood fashion.

Subtext

Watching Baadasssss was one of the factors which made me re-evaluate Sweetback. Learning about Melvin’s struggle to get the film made, and hearing why the first few sequences feel like a porn film (because these were the first sequences filmed – Van Peebles filmed Sweetback in order – and he needed footage to assure the studios and the unions that this was indeed a black porno, not a revolutionary political film), made me overlook the original’s shortcomings and to try to look deeper into the film for its more radical aspects. While there is little that is radical or provocative in Baadasssss, it does nicely contextualise Sweetback, and perhaps this should be watched before one approaches Melvin’s original.

Background Information

Originally made for cable TV and broadcast on Showtime in the US. The film is certainly a family affair, with Mario playing his father Melvin and Mario’s son Mandela as Melvin’s angelic muse (who
also inspires the poetic refrain from Sweetback, ‘He bled my Mamma, he bled my Pappa, but he won’t bleed me’). Before filming commenced, Melvin told Mario that, if he was going to play him, he shouldn’t play his father ‘too nice’; that is, he needed to tell the truth about making Sweetback and not candy coat Melvin because he was his father.

The Verdict

Mario is certainly a better filmmaker than Melvin, at least technically speaking. But, by that same token, he is also much more conservative and less radical. There’s an irony that this very run-of-the-mill biopic is about such a provocative filmmaker; much like Ron Howard directing a biopic about Sergei

Eisenstein. But, as far as biopics go, this is solid, enjoyable and, most importantly, informative. If nothing else, Baadasssss made me rethink Sweetback and, for that alone, I’m grateful to Mario. 4/5

While baadasssss cinema was largely domesticated after Sweetback, at least one other Black Power film was produced (before Spike Lee, anyway) and, like Van Peebles’ film, it too was produced outside of
the Hollywood filmmaking community.

The Final Comedown (1972)

Director/Writer: Oscar Williams

Cast: Billy Dee Williams (Johnny Johnson), D’Urville Martin (Billy Joe Ashley), Celia Kaye (Rene Freeman), Maidie Norman (Mrs Johnson)

83 mins

Story

Johnny Johnson is a black militant. As he lies in an alleyway dying from a police bullet, he flashes back on his life as a black radical. In terms of the film’s narrative, The Final Comedown explores Johnson’s black militant’s development alongside a cell of liberal white revolutionaries, and the former’s profound distrust of white liberals.

Subtext

There is little plot to The Final Comedown; it is all subtext. As Johnson himself says at one point in the film: ‘If you lived in my skin for one day, you’d blow your fucking brains out.’ This is neither a subtle nor a gentle film. It is, along with Van Peebles’ Sweetback, a quintessential Black Power film. As we flash back into Johnson’s life, we experience a variety of black voices calling for racial revolution in the early 1970s: black militants, Muslims, liberals, apologists, Marxists, Trotskyites, etc. This is a highly didactic film, delivering its message with a sledgehammer.

Background Information

Produced independently by Oscar and Billy Dee Williams (no relation), and distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Oscar Williams also wrote Truck Turner and Black Belt Jones.

The Verdict

While this film is exceptionally heavy-handed, it needs to be to hammer the message of Black Power
home to the audience. While it is perhaps less experimental than Van Peebles’ film, it is equally as revolutionary. It is just a shame that my DVD copy is from an exceptionally poor print, and pan-and-scan at that. This is a film that definitely needs restoring, with commentaries. 5/5

VIGILANTES

Not all of Blaxploitation’s baadassssses were dedicated to the Black Power movements; nor were all of them men. Women, too – most notably Blaxploitation stars like Pam Grier – were also on the cultural
barricades, but their fight was a bit different. As Blaxploitation developed, and despite the introduction of black men in leading heroic roles, Blaxploitation films still often reduced them to cultural stereotypes. Granted, many of the films which feature or challenge the perceptions of black men do so self-consciously, with a sense of irony. Too often, though, these parodies of stereotypes have been mistaken for disseminations of them. Jim Morton, in a survey essay called ‘Am I Black Enough?’ notes
the following: ‘If any group has been served well by Blaxploitation films, it is black women, who more often than not, are shown as tough battlers for justice. Not coincidentally, the films starring women hold up the best.’ In a 1975 issue of Ms magazine, it was noted that the three bankable female stars in Hollywood at the time – that is, female actors who could ‘open’ a movie based solely on their presence in it – were Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli and the Blaxploitation star, Pam Grier.

Pam Grier’s career as an actress is the stuff of Hollywood mythology. Blaxploitation legend has it that Grier was hired at American International Pictures to work on the switchboard, and that she learned the movie business from the ground up, eventually landing herself bit parts in exploitation fare like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Women In Cages (1971), Black Mama, White Mama (1972) and the two Jack Hill-directed AIP ‘chicks-in-chains’ films The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird
Cage (1972) (although director Jack Hill disputes the veracity of the AIP switchboard story). It was after her supporting role as Lisa in AIP’s Scream, Blacula Scream (see below), that AIP decided to give Grier her own vehicle in which to star.

Coffy (1973)

Director/Writer: Jack Hill

Cast: Pam Grier (Coffy), Booker Bradshaw (Howard Brunswick), Robert DoQui (King George), William Elliott (Carter), Allan Arbus (Arturo Vitroni), Sid Haig (Omar), Barry Cahill (McHenry),

Lee de Broux (Nick), Ruben Moreno (Ramos), Lisa Farringer (Jeri), Carol Lawson (Priscilla), Linda Haynes (Meg), John Perak (Aleva), Mwako Cumbuka (Grover), Morris Buchanan

(Sugarman)

87 mins

Story

Coffy is a one-woman vigilante force going after the drug-pushing scum that got her kid sister hooked on smack. As she works her way through the ground-level pushers, she discovers through her best friend, a cop, that the murders she’s responsible for are being blamed on mob boss Vitroni who is moving into LA. To stop the drugs once and for all, she needs to get to Vitroni. First she disguises herself as a Jamaican prostitute and joins super pimp King George’s stable, where Vitroni gets his action. Once she has access to Vitroni, she is able to do mucho, mucho killing. But things become complicated when she discovers that the political muscle behind Vitroni is her own councilman-boyfriend McHenry, who wants Vitroni’s money to pay for his candidacy to the US Senate.

Subtext

While the plot of the film is pure AIP exploitation fantasy, that fantasy is simply a veneer on the reality of the drugs trade and its effect on black urban communities, including how prostitution and police corruption are intricately woven into the crime business. Jack Hill wrote Coffy specifically for Grier, but wanted the character to be a heroine who had no special skills. Coffy wasn’t a karate expert, or a secret agent; she was a just a normal working woman, a nurse, who had had enough of the corruption of her
world and decided to strike back She only has two resources to exploit in this fight: her intelligence and her sexuality. One of the things that exploitation cinema (at its best) does particularly well is to infuse sexuality with intelligence. Coffy is able to intelligently use her own sexuality, often on her own terms, as a means of both narrative progression (moving the story along) as well as being in control of herself and her body. This is not to suggest that Coffy is a proto-feminist film; but neither is it ‘simply exploitative’ in the film’s display of Pam Grier’s body. Taken in combination with the character’s (and actor’s) intelligence, Coffy is able to use her sexuality as a weapon.

In one of the film’s most famous sequences, the catfight amongst King George’s prostitutes, Coffy hides razorblades in her hair so that when her opponent tries to grab her by the hair her hands get all cut up. This defence was suggested by Grier herself, based on her own knowledge of what some prostitutes
actually did for protection.

The Verdict

While this film is pretty sleazy and Grier is at her best in the action sequences, rather than the intimate moments where she is required to act, there’s a grittiness to the film that’s pretty infectious. It is exactly what you expect to get from AIP, Jack Hill and the genre – pure Blaxploitation. It is not the best film Grier made (although Hill actually prefers it to Foxy Brown), but, for what it is, it’s a pretty cool B-movie. 3/5

Foxy Brown (1974)

Director/Writer: Jack Hill

Cast: Pam Grier (Foxy Brown), Antonio Fargas (Link Brown), Peter Brown (Steve Elias), Terry

Carter (Michael), Kathryn Loder (Katherine Wall), Harry Holcombe (Judge Fenton), Sid Haig

(Hays), Juanita Brown (Claudia), Sally Ann Stroud (Deb), Bob Minor (Oscar), Tony Giorgio

(Eddie), Fred Lerner (Bunyon), Judith Cassmore (Vicki), HB Haggerty (Brandi), Boyd ‘Red’

Morgan (Slauson)

94 mins

Story

Foxy’s brother, Link Brown, is in debt to loan sharks to the tune of $20,000. He must raise the money quickly if he is to stay alive. Foxy’s boyfriend, Michael, has just come out of hospital, having had plastic surgery on his face to give him a new identity after he has squealed on mob boss, Katherine Wall, and her lover/second-in-command, Steve Elias. Foxy knows who Michael really is, but no one else does – that is, until Link puts two and two together and figures he has at least twenty grand’s worth of information to sell to Wall and Elias. Needless to say, Michael is shot to hell, and now Foxy wants revenge. Wall also runs her own stable of prostitutes and, as in Coffy, Foxy goes undercover as a prostitute to get revenge on the people who hurt her man.

Subtext

Foxy Brown was originally intended as a sequel to Coffy under its original title of ‘Burn, Coffy, Burn’.

Jack Hill remained pretty bitter about the end result of Foxy, which suffered much more from studio (AIP) interference than he experienced on Coffy (which perhaps explains why he’s happier with the previous film, as it better reflects his own vision). He had little or no control over his sets and locations, or even what Grier wore as costumes.

So, as an unofficial sequel to Coffy, the main image of Foxy Brown is the strong and independent black woman who is going to protect what is hers. Beyond that there are a few other little snippets of sociological insight. For example, when Foxy tells Link he is wasting his life, he asks her what options are open to black men if you’re not nimble enough for basketball, nor big enough for football. Black men only have business opportunities in illegal arenas: drugs, prostitution and numbers running. This position is never challenged. Although Link’s position as a petty criminal is never condoned, the truth of Link’s observation is supported. We do not see black men in any kind of profession other than that of criminal.

Foxy Brown also extends and develops an idea from Coffy: the problem of vigilante justice. Foxy’s actions are never challenged, just as Coffy’s weren’t (except by the folk on the other end of her shotgun). Vigilantism is justified and, as Foxy herself notes, ‘It’s as American as Apple Pie.’ I’m not sure whether or not such a comment is actively advocating vigilantism, or whether the comment is meant as an ironic observation about the caprices of American justice. The vigilante attitude of these movies is wish fulfilment, a kind of fantasy, because the blacks watching these movies know that justice is rarely given in the courts, particularly if you are black.

Background

The opening credit sequence was a self-conscious parody of the opening of James Bond movies, set to a great Willie Hutch theme song. When Quentin Tarantino cast Pam Grier in his film adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch, he changed the protagonist’s name from Jackie Burke to Jackie Brown. As well as echoing the name Foxy Brown, Jackie Brown (1996) even used the same font for the title as Hill did for Foxy Brown. Because of all this, the music (‘Across 110th Street’ used over the credits, for example) and the marketing, Jackie Brown feels like an homage to Blaxploitation films.

The Verdict

Foxy Brown is certainly glossier than Coffy, but in that gloss is lost the grittiness that made Coffy so appealing. It is an attempt to build on and expand on the ideas in the earlier film and, in many respects, is ‘a better movie’. But while the production values are certainly higher, the immediacy of Coffy is lost.

What Foxy gains in style, it loses in content. 3/5

A few words about Jack Hill himself are probably appropriate. He worked for AIP from the early 1960s
until the late 1970s and many of his films have been hailed as cult classics by aficionados of exploitation cinema like Quentin Tarantino. His films include Spider Baby (1964), Torture Zone (1968), The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) and Switch blade Sisters (1975). This is in addition to his Blaxploitation films: The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage, Coffy and Foxy Brown. After Sorceress (1980), he stopped making movies to focus on writing books.

If Blaxploitation created any auteurs, then certainly Jamaa Fanaka qualifies as such. What his films
lack in technical sophistication, they more than make up for in baadasssss attitude, particularly in their use of the vigilante theme.

Welcome Home, Brother Charles/Soul Vengeance (1975)

Director/Writer: Jamaa Fanaka

Cast: Marlo Monte (Charles Murray), Jackie Ziegler (Twyla), Ben Biglow (Harry Freeman), Stephen Schenck (DA)

91 mins

Story

Charles Murray is picked up on a minor drugs charge and his genitals are mutilated in the back of the police car by the corrupt and brutal Sgt Freeman. Freeman himself is particularly antagonistic towards the African-American community, ever since he discovered his wife having an affair with a black man.

After three years, Charles is released from prison and tries to re-establish his life, but he refuses to play whitey’s game. His girlfriend, Twyla, has moved in with his best friend. Life does not look good for Brother Charles. His social rage turns to vengeance against the corrupt Harry Freeman, and he uses the only weapon at his disposal – his enormous penis, which can apparently hypnotise white women and grow to monstrous lengths when he is provoked.

Subtext

While the themes of police brutality and the social alienation of the black man are ubiquitous in Blaxploitation cinema, they’ve never been so banally explored as in this film. The one note of interest for fans of Blaxploitation films is the sequence where Charles gets revenge on the District Attorney who sent him to prison: he exposes his penis, which grows sufficiently long to creep across the room and strangle the prosecutor. It’s a crude but effective metaphor that the only weapon the black man has in his arsenal is the myth of the enormous size of his penis. And this is a myth that Van Peebles plays with, too, in Sweetback.

Background Information

Fanaka made this film while a student at UCLA and drew upon location shooting and improvisational
dialogue.

The Verdict

With the exception of the three-minute-or-so sequence where Charles uses his monstrous cock to strangle the DA, there is almost nothing in this film to recommend it. 1/5

Emma Mae/Black Sister’s Revenge (1976)

Director/Writer: Jamaa Fanaka

Cast: Jerri Hayes (Emma Mae), Ernest Williams II (Jesse), Charles Brooks III (Zeke), Malik Carter (Big Daddy)

100 mins

Story

Emma Mae, an ‘ugly’ cousin from Mississippi, comes to stay with her family in Compton. Her cousins
take her to a party where a fight breaks out and Emma Mae shows she knows how to handle herself as
well as anyone from the projects. Jesse, who Emma Mae fancies, gets himself into a bit of trouble, fighting back against the corrupt police. After Emma Mae steps in to defend her man, the two need to
take it on the lam and end up hiding out with a group of black radicals. Their leader, Big Daddy, gets himself arrested, as do Jesse and his friend Zeke, and the now radicalised Emma Mae tries to think of how to get her men out of trouble. At first, she suggests a community car wash to raise Jesse and Zeke’s bail, but when the larger white population appears to be frightened by Emma Mae’s black activism and
avoids their car-wash charity event as a result, her next logical step is to rob a bank. You’d think that with all the work Emma Mae puts into getting Jesse out of prison, he’d show some gratitude, but, instead, he starts sleeping around. The film ends with Emma Mae deservedly kicking the shit out of Jesse.

Subtext

The location footage in Compton gives the film a quasi-documentary quality. When the film keeps to
being a slice-of-life drama about the working poor in the ghetto, told from Emma Mae’s point of view, it is actually quite interesting; but when Fanaka tries to impose a clichéd exploitation narrative onto this story, like Brother Charles it falls apart, although there is an attempt to provide some insight into how black women are used by men in general. Here is not the place to offer a detailed feminist analysis of the film, nor am I the best person to do this; however, such a project needs to be done. What I can provisionally note here, however, is that ‘ugly’ in reference to Emma Mae herself refers to her ‘country’

origins, not her physical beauty (Hayes isn’t unattractive) – and, as such, it offers something of an insight into intra-black class divides.

Background Information

Shot on location in Compton.

The Verdict

While the film is certainly better than Fanaka’s previous film, it is still no great shakes. As mentioned previously, it is at its best when offering up a documentary-like, slice-of-life portrait of 1970s Compton, but loses focus when it tries to tell a story. 2/5

FIGHTERS

Fighters, by which I mostly mean boxers (but not exclusively, as the inclusion of The Black Gestapo indicates), are often cut from a similar cloth to heroes like Sweetback or JJ, and while they may fight for white masters (often the mob), in these films they frequently rebel against them and ultimately fight for themselves and their own freedom.

Hammer (1972)

Director: Bruce D Clark

Writer: Charles Johnson

Cast: Fred Williamson (B J Hammer), Bernie Hamilton (Davis), Vonetta McGee (Lois), Charles Lampkin (Big Sid), D’Urville Martin (Sonny), Mel Stewart (Professor)

92 mins

Story

BJ Hammer is an ex-boxer working the docks to earn his living; but once he’s fired for brawling on the job, he is grabbed by Big Sid, a mob lackey who runs an illegal boxing circuit. BJ falls in love with Lois, Big Sid’s secretary, and all looks well for the now ex-ex-boxer. In the background, Davis, a crusading cop, has sworn to bring down Big Sid and his entire organisation. BJ’s star continues to rise, and he becomes increasingly alienated from the black community. When it is suggested, by his African-American fans, that he has ‘sold out’ and he begins to suspect that his fights are fixed because his opponents are going down way too easily, BJ realises he needs to take action. The mob organises a title fight, with BJ going up against the reigning champ, but this too is fixed; the mob wants BJ to take a dive and Big Sid assures his bosses that he’ll play ball. Unfortunately, BJ has also promised the kids in the neighbourhood that he’ll win this championship bout. He uses this as an opportunity, not only to regain his street cred, but also to clean the mob out of boxing once and for all, at least as far as his career is concerned.

Subtext

With the exception of Black Fist, we don’t see too many black boxing movies in the peak Blaxploitation period. The subgenre doesn’t really take off until after Rocky in 1976, and, of course, there are the Jamaa Fanaka series of Penitentiary films (1979, 1982, 1987). So, with Hammer, it’s worth pointing out the themes of corruption within sport, specifically boxing, and the role of the mob in this corruption –
although, personally, I think Black Fist deals with the issue better.

Background Information

Produced by exploitation legend Al Adamson.

The Verdict

By the numbers but okay standard Blaxploitation fare. It is reasonably well paced and, at times, not badly directed. 2/5

Black Fist (1975)

Director: Timothy Galfas

Writers: Tim Kelly, Richard Kaye and Andrew Maisner

Cast: Richard Lawson (Leroy Fisk), Annazette Chase (Florence), Philip Michael Thomas (Fletch

& Boom Boom), Robert Burr (Logan), Dabney Coleman (Heineken), HB Haggerty (Moose) and Martin the Wonderdog

87 mins

Story

This is kind of a low-rent rip-off of the Fred Williamson flick, Hammer. Leroy Fisk is an unemployed worker who ends up on the professional (but illegal) street-fighting circuit run by the mob. Leroy’s friend, a wino called Fletch, steals corrupt cop Heineken’s ledger, which lists all the street-fighters, whores and Mafiosi who he shakes down, and gives it to our hero. Heineken is also in partnership with the mobster Logan, who happens to own Leroy’s contract. Leroy’s success on the fight circuit is assured, but Leroy eventually wants out with one last fight. This fight promises to be fairly spectacular as it will be a rematch against Moose, the thug who beat him in his first fight. Leroy bets his entire savings on beating his opponent, which he naturally does, but he beats Moose so badly and against the odds that Logan is now in trouble with his bosses. Our street-fighter hero has now not only retired, but uses his winnings to buy his favourite nightclub and start a family with his wife Florence. But when Florence is accidentally blown up in a car-bomb intended for Leroy, the street-fighter takes revenge on the mob once and for all.

Subtext

There’s not much subtext here beyond the ubiquitous themes of white corruption and black economic
servitude, of revenge and ‘stickin’ it to the Man’.

Soundtrack/Background Information

This was an early film role for the PG-comedy-movie star Dabney Coleman as a corrupt cop, and also
an early CV filler for Phillip Michael Thomas, playing two roles. Thomas would gain fame on TV as

Tubbs in Miami Vice in the 80s.

The Verdict

While the film is a bit draggy in places, it’s not a terrible movie. What particularly buoys it up is the acting; Lawson, in particular, is noteworthy for giving a performance better than the material deserves.

But, in addition, some of the dialogue is so naturalistic that it feels as if much of it was improvised on-set and this helps the performances across the board. There’s also a quite stunning fight sequence where Leroy beats up one of Logan’s men, Boom Boom; not that the fight choreography is that spectacular,
but it is filmed in a nightclub’s toilet, presumably using real location footage as cinematographer William Larrabure needs to use a wide-angle lens for the sequence, bringing us up close and personal to the whoop-ass. Throughout this fight, Leroy demands of Boom Boom to ‘Placate me, bitch!’ which has
to be one of my favourite Blaxploitation lines. Not a terrific film, but better than you’d expect. 3/5

Mandingo (1975)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Writer: Norman Wexler, based on the novel by Kyle Onstott and the play by Jack Kirkland

Cast: James Mason (Warren Maxwell), Susan George (Blanche), Perry King (Hammond

Maxwell), Richard Ward (Agamemnon), Brenda Sykes (Ellen), Ken Norton (Mede), Lillian

Hayman (Lucrezia Borgia), Roy Poole (Doc Redfield), Ji-Tu Cumbuka (Cicero), Ben Masters

(Charles), Paul Benedict (Brownlee)

127 mins

Story

This ante-bellum melodrama tells the story of young plantation heir Hammond Maxwell who begins the
film doing his masterly duty of keeping his slave ‘wenches’ off ‘heat’ by ‘pleasuring’ them. Needless to say, such activities, fully sanctioned by his father Warren Maxwell, have an economic benefit to the family insofar as the ‘suckers’ produced can always be sold. But there is one social drawback to young Hammond’s activities – without a proper wife, no ‘human’ children are being produced. So off Hammond goes to see his cousin Charles, whose sister, Blanche, is ready for marrying. While at cousin Charles’s plantation, Hammond is ‘pleasured’ by a young slave girl named Ellen, whose gentle nature
touches something in Hammond.

But everything else, more or less, goes according to plan and Hammond and Blanche are quickly wed. On their wedding night, Hammond makes the unwelcome discovery that Blanche is not ‘pure’.

Since she won’t divulge the identity of her former lover (whom she denies having in the first place) to protect the fact that it was her own brother, Charles, they don’t exactly experience matrimonial bliss. In fact, on their way back to the Maxwell plantation, Hammond and Blanche stop back at Charles’s plantation, so Hammond can buy Ellen.

While on these adventures, Hammond stops at a slave auction and sees one particular ‘buck’ on the
block – a pure-bred Mandingo (a Niger valley tribe), which both he and his father have wanted to breed for years. They’ve had lots of Mandingo wenches but never a pure bred ‘buck’ to act as stud. Hammond
buys Ganymede; Mede for short.

Hammond finds solace in a New Orleans bordello. Whilst there, Mede has an altercation with one of
the house slaves. Hammond cannot believe his luck – not only did he just buy a pure-bred Mandingo; he is a fighting Mandingo too. The entire bordello witnesses the fight Mede has with the house slave, and one patron offers Hammond the opportunity to test Mede against one of his own fighter slaves. Lucky

Hammond: not only does he have a Mandingo who will serve as ‘stud’ for the Mandingo ‘wenches’ on
the plantation, thereby breeding more and more Mandingo slaves for sale; but, furthermore, he can make a ton of money with Mede as a prize fighter.

Then everything goes pear-shaped: Ellen becomes pregnant with Hammond’s baby and she convinces
him that this ‘sucker’ should be given his/her freedom. Blanche, who hasn’t had any sex since their disastrous wedding night, is enraged that Ellen is with ‘sucker’ and literally beats the baby out of her. In Blanche’s increasingly alcohol-riddled mind, Hammond’s affection for Ellen is based on her ability to bear children, and so she herself decides to both get pregnant and teach Hammond a lesson. So she seduces Mede, telling him that, should he refuse, she’ll cry rape.

Everyone is thrilled when Blanche becomes pregnant. But when the baby is born, and the cat is let
out of the proverbial bag, an enraged Hammond kills his ‘prize buck’ by boiling him alive in a pot.

Subtext

What Mandingo tries to be is a revisionist ante-bellum film – revising the romantic notion of the South that Hollywood has propagated. The project here was to depict the South as brutal, exploitative, dirty, degrading, hypocritical and totally dehumanising to everyone, black and white – which the film does, in excruciating detail. As James Kendrick notes in his review of the film, ‘Despite its exploitative nature, Mandingo was one of the first Hollywood movies to take an alternative look at slavery. Until then, there had been a kind of underlying racism in all Hollywood films dealing with slavery. Even classics such as Gone with the Wind (1939) can be seen as inherently racist by their glossing over the subject matter.

Mandingo reassessed the South and showed that it wasn’t all beautiful plantations, green fields and pretty sunsets.’

There are several points in the film where the audience is positioned to be appalled at what they are seeing on screen, not titillated. At the very beginning of the movie, we discover that one of the female slaves is ill, and a veterinarian is called in. He explains that Big Pearl is in ‘heat’, and this is the introduction to the theme that it is the master’s duty to take care of his slaves when they are, in the vet’s words, ‘ripe’. This is meant to appall us, which clearly it does, and position us against the Maxwells.

There is another moment where the racism of the ante-bellum South is challenged by director Richard

Fleischer – a line of slaves is being marched through the countryside, led by a slave fiddler playing

‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. This image is just in the background, as the Maxwells are moving along the
road and they pass this march. The lowered heads of the slaves, the pace of their march and the dirge-like ‘Yankee Doodle’ feels funereal. It draws the audience’s attention to the sad, death-like state of slavery and, by using this American anthem, directly connects slavery to the idealised American patriotism of ‘Yankee Doodle’. That may be reading too much into this image, but I don’t think so.

Fleischer presents a direct anti-slavery message to the audience in another sequence. The soon-to-be-
sold Cicero, the plantation’s one literate slave, is chained up in a cell to prevent his escape, along with the other sold slaves. Cicero delivers a speech about the importance of literacy – that through literacy comes equality, and then true freedom – directly into the camera. The sequence begins with the entrance of the chief house slave Agamemnon into the jail-like cell where these slaves are being held. The camera for most of the scene is over his shoulder as he talks to Cicero through the bars. When Cicero delivers his ‘learn to read’ speech, Fleischer moves the camera inside the cell for the only time in this scene – the rest of the shots are from the other side of the bars. That has to be a deliberate move on the director’s part, in addition to having actor Cumbuka look directly into the camera, as opposed to the Hollywood norm of looking just off to the side.

However, the problem in this film is that, by depicting these atrocities in such detail, the film ends up being exploitative, rather than enlightening. As Kendrick again notes, ‘While it portrays many sensitive aspects of slavery, it never deals with them.’ And, despite what director Fleischer may have intended to do with this material, he was still working for De Laurentiis, who always demanded pure sensationalism in his films.

Background

The film is based on the first of a series of novels by Kyle Onstott, all about the Falconhurst plantation.

Jack Kirkland also produced Mandingo for the stage.

In addition to producing some of Federico Fellini’s films like La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957), Dino De Laurentiis also produced big-budget epics like The Bible (1966), Anzio (1968) and Waterloo (1970). In the 1970s and 1980s he became famous for producing big-budget extravaganzas like King Kong (1976), Orca, the Killer Whale (1977), Flash Gordon (1980), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and the movie that bankrupted him, Dune (1984). More recently, De Laurentiis produced U-571

(2000) and Hannibal (2001).

Soundtrack

Although the score is by Maurice Jarre, blues legend Muddy Waters does a few tracks in a down-home
country blues style.

The Verdict

I am utterly fascinated with this movie. On the one hand, it is so clearly vulgar and exploitative – quite typical of the work of De Laurentiis. It is utterly appalling and culturally irresponsible. And some of the performances are equally bad: Susan George’s performance, in particular, is nothing short of hysterical.

However, on the other hand, there are those moments I noted above, which seem to almost be an internal undercutting of the exploitation project that is on the surface. 4/5, not because the movie is

‘good’; it is just fascinating to watch.

Miscegenation is the intermixing of races, usually referring specifically to the sexual mixing of black and white people. Throughout much of Blaxploitation cinema, miscegenation is a recurring theme.

Many of the black heroes have white girlfriends, or at least sleep with white women (Shaft, Slaughter and Priest in Superfly all do). The African-American pimps often have white prostitutes, who they parade as a sign of status – not only do they ‘control’ a stable of beautiful women, they also control beautiful white women (particularly Goldie in The Mack). But, within white racist America, miscegenation is also a major taboo, and in the case of The Black Six (which I discuss below), we see that violating this taboo results in the death of at least one of the people involved.

While much of Mandingo is focused on the issues of miscegenation rather than boxing, I’ve chosen to place the film here because Mede presents an alternative black figure to BJ and Leroy: Mede doesn’t fight for his freedom, as the other two do. Mede fights to entertain the white masters, in much the same way as the other boxers discussed in this section are required to do, and this is not entirely dissimilar from the sex shows in which Sweetback is required to perform. Mede’s rebellion, such as it is, in sleeping with Blanche, results in his death, and a gruesome death it is.

The Black Gestapo (1975)

Director: Lee Frost

Writers: Lee Frost and Wes Bishop

Cast: Rod Perry (General Ahmed), Charles Robinson (Colonel Kojah), Phil Hoover (Vito), Angela

Brent (Marsha), Wes Bishop (Ernest), Lee Frost (Vincent)

88 mins

Story

In the (very) near future, the People’s Army emerges, a liberal-lefty organisation to protect and serve the black community through a number of initiatives like food banks and detoxification units. Led by the
charismatic medical doctor General Ahmed, the People’s Army find themselves in an uphill battle against the ever-encroaching white mob (and they’re flooding the black communities with drugs) until

Ahmed reluctantly agrees to Colonel Kojah’s plan to form a ‘security force’. Kojah recruits from the more radicalised members of the black community who feel that the People’s Army has been too complacent with whitey. This security force is able to successfully push the mob out of the black neighbourhoods, and in one particularly wonderful sequence, mobster Vito has his balls cut off while in the bathtub and, before he can pass out, witnesses them being flushed down the toilet. As in several Blaxploitation films ( Bucktown, for example; see below), once the bad white guys are pushed out, the Security Force fills the void left behind and a power war erupts between black and white gangsters to control the drugs and prostitution across the city. The Security Force forms into a paramilitary army and requires all members to adopt Africanised names. Meanwhile, Doctor General Ahmed has remained true to the founding principles of the People’s Army and single-handedly fights the entire paramilitary organisation, ultimately bringing down the bad guys.

Subtext

This is one of those films which directly exploits white audiences’ fears about Black Power and feeds into their paranoia. The film seems to be a warning (albeit a largely tongue-in-cheek one) about the inevitable outcomes of black empowerment, positing that the logical end result of Black Power movements is Nazism.

Background Information

Lee Frost, no stranger to controversial exploitation filmmaking, also made one of the first Nazi-sexploitation movies (porn films set in Nazi concentration camps), Love Camp 7 (1969). Charles Robinson, who plays Colonel Kojah, would later star in the long-running American sitcom Night Court.

The Verdict

Clearly this is an absolutely reprehensible movie, more than bordering on the offensive. And yet there is something satisfying about ‘true sleaze’; a kind of sublime wonderfulness when exploitation cinema has absolutely no pretence to being anything other than Grindhouse fodder. Even the AIP Blaxploitation movies had some sense of being ‘better’ than they are, closely mimicking Hollywood films. The Black
Gestapo has no such insincerity – it’s pure trash. 3/5

General Ahmed and Colonel Kojah are fighters of a different breed to BJ, Leroy or even Mede. Instead
of boxers, they are paramilitary men fighting for the betterment of the African-American community.

But what unites them all (with the exception, perhaps, of poor Ganymede) is their active struggle against the corrupt white control of their communities and their bodies.

INDEPENDENT BUSINESSMEN

Rather than using their bodies, although not necessarily exclusively so, the protagonists of this grouping of Blaxploitation films ‘stick it to the Man’ by establishing their own businesses and, in a general sense, they document the problems black independent business people have in trying to work either with, or
independently of, white businesses.

Bucktown (1973)

Director: Arthur Marks

Writer: Bob Ellison

Cast: Fred Williamson (Duke), Pam Grier (Aretha), Thalmus Rasulala (Roy), Tony King (TJ), Bernie Hamilton (Harley), Art Lund (Chief Patterson), Tierre Turner (Steve), Morgan Upton

(Sam), Carl Weathers (Hambone), Jim Bohan (Clete), Robert Burton (Merle), Gene Simms (Josh),

Bruce Watson (Bagman)

94 mins

Story

Buchanan, known by residents as ‘Bucktown’ (actually Kansas City), is a corrupt town. There isn’t a mob problem; they were run out years ago to make the town safe for tourists. Unfortunately, the cops, discovering what a good thing the mob had going with the extortion, pimping, drug dealing and other
miscellaneous criminal activities, have taken over. Enter Duke Johnson, in town to bury his brother who died in mysterious circumstances (at the hands of the police). It turns out that Duke is going to have to wait 60 days for the estate to clear escrow and, in the meantime, he is persuaded by local drunk Harley and local fox Aretha to open his brother Ben’s bar, the Club Alabam. Duke won’t give in to the police shakedown racket and so calls in some buddies to help him wage war against the corrupt cops. Enter Roy and his hired guns, Josh, Hambone and TJ, who quickly resolve Bucktown’s crime problem. Now
you know that history is going to repeat itself and, sure enough, Duke needs to form a one-man army
and fight against those who he thought were his friends.

Subtext

In Bucktown we see a white perspective on equality – that blacks are just as corrupt as whites. Also, there is an implication that black-on-black crime is somehow worse than white-on-black crime, since it is friend against friend and brother against brother and, although this may be stretching the point, it also reflects the divisions between contemporary African-American leaders.

The Verdict

Not a terrible film and there are some good action sequences, but this, like Arthur Marks’ Friday Foster, is rather dull and unimaginatively directed. 2/5

Black Shampoo (1976)

Director: Greydon Clark

Writers: Greydon Clark and Alvin L Fast

Cast: John Daniels (Mr Jonathan), Tanya Boyd (Brenda), Jeff Meoff (Maddox)

82 mins

Story

Not to be confused with Hal Ashby’s 1975 film, Shampoo, Black Shampoo tells the story of Mr Jonathan, a highly successful (and straight) Beverly Hills hairdresser. His new receptionist, Brenda, however, has some skeletons in her closet, not the least of which is her previous involvement with mobster Maddox. Brenda has gone to ground, and Maddox has been searching for her. When he finds
her working at Mr Jonathan’s, since his assumption is that all hairdressers are homosexual, he busts the place up. Mr Jonathan, however, is the wrong man to cross, and he takes the fight back to Maddox, with a chainsaw!

Subtext

The character of Mr Jonathan is probably the most solid representation of the successful independent black businessman in Blaxploitation cinema. His white clientele of Beverly Hills wives, who he

‘services’ beyond doing their hair, can also be seen as an extension of the archetype started with Sweetback. He may be at their sexual beck-and-call, but it is he alone who can satisfy them.

The assumption that Mr Jonathan is gay – unlike in Ashby’s film where the point of the ruse is to distract the Lester Carp character from the realisation that George is ‘servicing’ not only his wife and mistress, but also his nubile daughter – means that he is seen as being of little threat to the mob. But it’s a missed opportunity, for how revolutionary would it have been to have an openly gay action hero?

Background Information

Filmed in two weeks for approximately $50,000, almost always the first take ended up on screen. The
film was designed to ride on the publicity wake of Ashby’s Shampoo, thereby having the Warren Beatty film unintentional y promoting this classic of 1970s exploitation.

The Verdict

While Black Shampoo was never likely to be seriously compared to the Warren Beatty movie, it is a lot of fun (perhaps more so in view of the serious undertones of Hal Ashby’s film). What starts off as a Blaxploitation rip-off of Shampoo ends up as a Blaxploitation rip-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!

And how can you not love a movie that features an assault by a curling iron shoved up the ass? 4/5

The Black Six (1974)

Director: Matt Cimber

Writer: George Theakos

Cast: Gene Washington (Bubba Daniels), Robert Howard (Eddie Daniels), Carl Eller (Jr Bro Williams), Cynthia Daly (Jenny King), Lem Barney (Frenchy LaBoise), Mikel Angel (Snake),

John Isenberger (Moose King), Mercury Morris (Bookie Garrett), Joe Greene (Kevin Washington),

Willie Lanier (Tommy Bunka), Garnett Higgens (Mrs Perkins), Bill King (Postman), Marilyn

MacArthurs (Flora), Doug Carrol (Jeff), Jef Richard (Strawhat)

85 mins

Story

The story is pretty basic, as all good exploitation films are. Young American football star Eddie Daniels is having a relationship with good white girl Jenny King. Jenny’s racist brother, Moose, who is the leader of a notorious biker gang, is appalled at his own family’s miscegenation, so he murders Eddie in cold blood. Meanwhile, the ‘Black Six’, a gang of ex-Vietnam servicemen, are touring on their motorcycles doing odd jobs for local folk and meeting racism at every stop. Their leader, Bubba, was

Eddie’s brother, and a tearful letter from Mamma Daniels propels the ‘Black Six’ to avenge Eddie’s death.

Subtext

The subtext of this film is in your face – at least what a white filmmaker thinks of as in your face. The

‘Black Six’, although on bikes and big and black, are kind and polite. They don’t do anything to encourage the racist attacks they experience but, when push comes to shove, they fight back with everything they can, and ultimately win. At the end of the film, after an enormous battle where the six are up against dozens of white bikers, a title card tells us, in no uncertain terms – ‘Honky, look out…

hassle a brother… and the Black 6 will return!!!’

Although I’m hesitant to even use this word in reference to The Black Six, the movie approaches a kind of subtle subtext with the equation between ‘brothers’ (1970s African-American slang for other young African-American men) and brothers in the biological sense. The ‘Black Six’ are brothers at one level, while Bubba and Eddie share parents. The subtext here is that all brothers need to watch each other’s backs – and, when necessary, defend one another against white racists.

Background

The ‘Black Six’ themselves – Bubba, Bookie, Kevin, Tommy, Frenchy and Jr Bro – are all played by
professional American football players. This gimmick of casting football players as the ‘Black Six’ is so transparent that the opening credits not only give us the actors’ names, but also the teams they play for.

The Verdict

Z-grade budget, the football players cannot act to save their lives (and neither can the rest of the cast, and they are presumably professional actors), and a cookie-cutter story aside, The Black Six is at least watchable and enjoyable. Like director Cimber’s other film considered here, The Candy Tangerine Man, the film has a fun, cartoon superhero quality and never takes itself too seriously. The final battle against the motorcycle gang, played at night, using road flares as Molotov cocktails, is visually really cool. 2/5

The irony of including The Black Six in this grouping is that the ‘Six’ are actually unemployed and looking for work. With both Bucktown and Black Shampoo, the story of the struggles of the independent black businessman enters the Blaxploitation zone via the revenge theme – revenge against those who ultimately seek to disrupt the peaceful operations of the business in question. Now, while there is no sense of The Black Six being business men, the similarity between the ‘Six’ and Mr Jonathan and Duke is that these are inherently quiet men who only resort to violence when provoked.

This idea of teaming up a number of real or potential Blaxploitation stars in one film became something of a staple format in the later years of the genre. One assumes the producing logic was that if a Fred Williamson movie could bring in X dollars, a Jim Brown movie Y dollars and a Jim Kelly movie

Z dollars, then a movie starring all three of them would bring in X+Y+Z. And so in 1974, Brown, Williamson and Kelly co-starred for Superfly director Gordon Parks Jr in Three the Hard Way. These three amigos tried their luck again the following year in the Italian-made Blaxploitation western, Take a
Hard Ride (discussed later). But it was in 1983, well past the Blaxploitation sell-by date, that Fred Williamson as director teamed up with not only Brown and Kelly, but also Richard Roundtree for One
Down, Two To Go. (In reality, the film was a vehicle for Williamson and Brown, as Kelly and Roundtree more or less disappear after the first reel.) It was not until 1996 that we had another truly important Blaxploitation supercast: Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas starred not only Williamson, Brown and Roundtree, but also included Pam Grier and Ron O’Neal. Now, to be honest, the script for Original
Gangstas by Aubrey Rattan is not much more than a standard revenge-action piece: the plot involves a new breed of street hood terrorising an African-American community, and the founders of that gang who return home, after 20 years, to teach these young upstarts who the boss is. But, and I have to hand it to him for this, Larry Cohen’s casting of the former Blaxploitation superstars makes this film interesting. The subtext here is a step beyond Rattan’s script – (‘We were outlaws then, fighting the Man, but you’re just hoods ripping people off’) – and it seems to be saying that the then-current spate of

‘hood’ and ‘hip-hop’ action films are nothing in comparison with the original Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Unfortunately, like One Down, Two To Go before it, the movie is more a buddy film featuring Williamson and Brown, and the rest of the cast do not make much more than cameo appearances.

GANGSTERS

The gangster is the quintessential example of the ‘independent businessman’. The figure of the gangster in American cinema is as old as sound pictures; in fact, along with the Hollywood musical, the ‘great American gangster movie’ emerged at about the same time as talking pictures. For Blaxploitation cinema, though, the figure of the black gangster is one pregnant with significance. In these films, black men try to achieve emancipation and autonomy through emulating white business practices, and many
of these films, despite their individual qualities, can be seen as commentaries on white-dominated American capitalism in general, and the problematic role within that system for African-American men
in particular.

Black Caesar (1973)

Director/Writer: Larry Cohen

Cast: Fred Williamson (Tommy Gibbs), Gloria Hendry (Helen), Art Lund (McKinney), D’Urville

Martin (Reverend Rufus), Julius Harris (Mr Gibbs), Minnie Gentry (Mama Gibbs), Philip Roye (Joe Washington), William Wellman Jr (Alfred Coleman), James Dixon (Bryant), Val Avery

(Cardoza), Patrick McAllister (Grossfield), Don Pedro Colley (Crawdaddy), Myrna Hansen

(Virginia Coleman), Omer Jeffrey (Young Tommy), Michael Jeffrey (Young Joe)

90 mins

Story

Black Caesar chronicles the rise and fall of Tommy Gibbs, a Harlem hoodlum who begins as a shoeshine boy, but progresses up the mob’s ladder of success to control most of Harlem. His childhood friends aid him: Joe, a lawyer; Reverend Rufus, an evangelist; and Helen, a nightclub singer. Gibbs’ rise to power is further helped by his acquisition of the ledgers that note all the pay-offs to the cops and higher political officials in New York, including his nemesis, Officer Jack McKinney, a racist cop.

Gibbs’ hubris gets the better of him and he sends Helen, under the protection of his best friend Joe, out to LA for safety. Now, you don’t have to be John Shaft to figure out what happens next: Joe and Helen have an affair, Gibbs’ political ‘friends’ turn on him in order to get the ledgers themselves, and his estranged father returns out of the blue. Gibbs is shot and slowly dies in disgrace in the ruins of his childhood tenement building, being beaten by mocking youths who don’t care who he is, or used to be.

Subtext

There is some address made to uniting Harlem against foreign (that is, white) ownership of businesses (particularly criminal businesses), but while the film makes some homage to the early 1930s Warner Brothers gangster films – like the echoes of Little Caesar (1930) in the film’s title and Reverend Rufus echoing the preacher-from-the-streets of Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) – the film is more a black version of The Godfather (1972) in terms of its aesthetics, and, at one point, Gibbs even walks by a cinema where the title of Coppola’s film can be read on the marquee.

Much of the action of Black Caesar is played out on the streets of Harlem, and Cohen filmed these sequences on the streets themselves, giving the film, as with many of the best Blaxploitation films, an almost documentary-like quality in its depiction of black poverty and social alienation. These Harlem streets are the audiences’ streets, and what makes these films so historically significant is that, at last, in the early 1970s, Harlem audiences saw their own neighbourhoods in a movie: their streets and their heroes. Cohen also refrains from being overly preachy about the social conditions of Harlem, in contrast, for example, with the Pam Grier–Jack Hill films. The film demonstrates, but doesn’t comment upon; it doesn’t condemn or offer solutions.

Soundtrack

Sizzling soundtrack by James Brown.

The Verdict

Like so many of Larry Cohen’s other films, Blaxploitation or not (i.e. It’s Alive [1974] and God Told Me
To [1977]), his ideas here are never fully developed, and his execution is occasionally sloppy. But the gritty vérité style of the film propels it along. There is a great car chase sequence in the film, just after Gibbs has been shot, which was filmed on location on real Manhattan streets. If anyone’s ever been to Manhattan, the chance of having a successful car chase on those streets is well-nigh impossible due to the traffic. So, in this film, the taxi that Gibbs is in stops and starts, never reaching enough speed for the assailants not to be able to catch up with the cab on foot. It is a terrific sequence and has some excellent hand-held camera work in it. That sequence, along with the ‘Sing Mammy’ sequence, makes the film worth watching. 3/5

Hell Up In Harlem (1973)

Director/Writer: Larry Cohen

Cast: Fred Williamson (Tommy Gibbs), Gloria Hendry (Helen), Margaret Avery (Sister Jennifer),

D’Urville Martin (Reverend Rufus), Julius Harris (Mr Gibbs), Tony King (Zack), Gerald Gordon

(DiAngelo), Bobby Ramsen (Joe Frankfurter), James Dixon (Irish), Esther Sutherland (The Cook),

Charles MacGuire (Kap)

94 mins

Story

A sequel to Black Caesar, Hell Up In Harlem actually opens in the last half-hour of Caesar, with the assassination attempt on Gibbs, including the car chase. Although this sequence is abbreviated down to about six minutes, there is new footage showing what other characters were doing. But what is most astonishing about the opening of the film is that Gibbs doesn’t die. In fact, the hoods that attack him at the end of Black Caesar are nowhere to be seen. Instead, although wounded, Gibbs gives his father the ledgers that everyone is after, and his last few loyal soldiers get him to hospital. But District Attorney DiAngelo’s name is in the ledgers, too, and he wants them back, preferably with Gibbs’ head. As Gibbs recuperates, Gibbs Sr takes over the operation. DiAngelo’s strategy is to create a wedge between father and son, thereby dividing and conquering mob-controlled Harlem. Once Gibbs is back to full strength,
he becomes even more paranoid about who is loyal and who isn’t, and is all too ready to believe the rumours he hears about his father.

Subtext

There is one aspect of Hell Up In Harlem that I find particularly dubious: Gibbs, once he is back to full strength, undertakes a daring raid on a mob house in the Florida Keys. He is aided on the inside by the mob’s African-American staff – the maids and cooks. There is something about this sequence that fosters distrust of African-Americans in domestic service, and seems more to be an address to a white audience, warning them not to take their black servants for granted. This idea gets played out again (or ripped-off, depending on your perspective) in John Evans’ Black Godfather (see below); while Evans’

use is more thoughtful, Cohen plays the scene better.

There is another kind of subtext, which again highlights the differences between black-made and white-made Blaxploitation films: in Shaft, the mob uses racial tension to create a surface ‘noise’ and obscure its criminal activities, implying an understanding that race relations are easily exploited by criminals whose interests are not with the residents but their own pocketbooks. Larry Cohen in Hell Up
In Harlem tries to play a similar card, but without the sensitivity or understanding of the issues that Parks has. Here, it is Gibbs who exploits the racial tension in New York in order to move in on white-owned businesses, both legitimate and mob-controlled.

And one final point: in a vague nod to appease the African-American audience, Gibbs kills DiAngelo
by lynching him, in an echo of the ‘Sing Mammy’ sequence from Black Caesar.

Soundtrack

Features songs by Edwin Starr. Interestingly, Starr wasn’t supposed to do the music for Hell; the soundtrack was supposed to be by James Brown again, but AIP fired Brown from the project after the
failure of Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off. Brown got his revenge, however, as he took the songs he wrote and recorded for Hell, and released them as his own album, The Big Payback, which turned out to be Brown’s biggest-selling album.

Background

Cohen himself admits that he was never really dedicated to doing a sequel, but agreed under AIP’s pressure. Subsequently, Cohen didn’t really develop any of the bits which ultimately got stitched together in this film. There are about half a dozen good plots in the film, for about half a dozen different movies. Also, for the first half of filming, Williamson was in LA filming That Man Bolt, and Cohen himself was filming It’s Alive; Cohen would shoot Williamson’s scenes with a body double, and then go to LA to film pick-up shots of Williamson.

The Verdict

While Black Caesar is a solid Blaxploitation film, which raises some interesting issues and was occasionally inventive. Hell Up In Harlem, although containing some decent action sequences, feels rather tired and pushed. It’s too bitty, as per Cohen’s own admission. 2/5

The Black Godfather (1974)

Director/Writer: John Evans

Cast: Rod Perry (JJ), Damu King (Diablo), Don Chastain (Tony Burton), Jimmy Witherspoon (Nate), Duncan McCloud (Lieutenant Joe Sterling), Dianne Sommerfield (Yvonne)

90 mins

Story

JJ Johnson is a two-bit punk who is brought in to gang boss Nate Williams’s organisation to rob a rival gangster’s place. The heist goes wrong, and JJ is shot and sent to prison for four years. Jumping ahead to JJ’s release, the ex-con contemplates the options open to a contemporary black man in America. Tony Burton, the local white mobster, hires JJ to try and remove Nate’s operation and take it over in order to expand operations into the African-American community. JJ creates alliances with the Black Power movement under their charismatic leader, Diablo. Enter Lieutenant Joe Sterling, a corrupt cop trying to siphon off as much juice as he can from playing both sides off of each other. JJ manoeuvres to assume power in the black community and builds himself up as something of a folk hero to the people as he attempts to remove the narcotics from the streets. Nate, meanwhile, finds himself as something of an old-time godfather figure, trying to keep the peace between Tony and JJ. Tony tries to pressure Nate into moving against JJ, but this just pushes Nate and JJ closer together. Added to that, JJ starts wooing Nate’s daughter, Yvonne. JJ is also further consolidating his power with the militants, and together they organise a massive drugs bust on Tony’s cartel. In retaliation, Tony kidnaps Yvonne, murders Lieutenant Sterling and pushes for an all-out war.

Subtext

While much of The Black Godfather is quite typical of the ‘Blaxploitation Mob’ subgenre, and raises the same points about employment opportunities for African-American men in 1970s America, the removal of narcotics from the communities, and black control of black business (even if that business is illegal), there is one sequence in the film which is particularly noteworthy. JJ and Nate raise a new army of black domestics, all of whom have access to the major centres of white power and influence, and are mostly invisible to the white elite. This army is effectively a massive information network, which enables JJ and Nate to have access to information Tony cannot access; but further, and more significantly, it recognises the invisibility and ubiquity of black domestic labour.

Soundtrack/Background Information

Nate is played by Blues great, Jimmy Witherspoon.

The Verdict

It’s an okay Blaxploitation flick, but too story-heavy to really be interesting. Everything in the film revolves around pushing the complicated plot forward, so the film never stops to take a breath for any over-the-top moments of exploitation fun. And anything interesting the film wants to say (with the exception of the use of black domestic workers) has already been said again and again. Even the use of the army of domestics was anticipated by Larry Cohen’s earlier Hell Up In Harlem. 2/5

Trouble Man (1972)

Director: Ivan Dixon

Writer: John DF Black

Cast: Robert Hooks (Mr T), Paul Winfield (Chalky), Ralph Waite (Cockrell), Paula Kelly (Cleo), Julius Harris (Big)

99 mins

Story

Mr T fixes troubles: he’s the community ‘godfather’, pool-hall owner (and shark), bail bondsman, a community charity, keeps cops in his pocket and offers community protection. He even holds a private
detective’s licence. When two friends and small-time gangsters, Chalky and Cockrell, come to him with the problem that their weekly gambling parlour is being robbed, T offers to help. This turns out to be a frame-up. Chalky and Cockrell are trying to move in on T’s businesses in the first instance, but their sights are set even higher – on Mr Big’s whole operation comprising the city’s crime syndicates.

Subtext

Director Ivan Dixon was something of an African-American pioneer: an actor who worked in film, television and on Broadway, he more or less gave up acting after starring in the TV series Hogan’s
Heroes for a number of years and dedicated himself to producing positive images of black America.

While much of Trouble Man is typical Blaxploitation, Dixon and writer Black create a character more in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane than Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft. In T’s world, the law is something which bends, and (minor) criminality is something of a moral grey area.

Dixon’s vision of the world permeates the film and resists moral absolutes. A wonderful example of ambivalent cinema.

Soundtrack

Marvin Gaye did the soundtrack.

The Verdict

While this is not the greatest Blaxploitation film ever made, it certainly holds 100 minutes of interest.

Dixon keeps the action moving and Hooks is charismatic. A fun time-waster. 3/5

As the gangsters discussed in this section demonstrate, Tommy Gibbs, JJ Johnson and Mr T are also all something of folk heroes to the African-American communities they serve. Vernacular cinema is inherently ambivalent; it often walks the fine line between endorsing and condemning criminal activity.

These gangster Blaxploitation films likewise walk that line, condemning the gangster for his illegality whilst also recognising him as a folk hero. And, in this sense, the gangster, the vigilante and the original black radical heroes of Sweet Sweetback and The Final Comedown all have this baadasssss ambivalence in common.

PIMPS & DRUG DEALERS

Perhaps Warner Brothers regretted losing Gordon Parks to MGM with the Shaft series of films, as the following year they came out with their own version of a Blaxploitation film, Superfly (1972), and hired Parks’ son, Gordon Parks Jr, to direct it. Unfortunately, Gordon Jr died in a plane crash over Kenya in 1979 and only directed four films: the Blaxploitation flicks Three the Hard Way (1974), Thomasine &
Bushrod (1974) and the black/Puerto Rican Romeo and Juliet film, Aaron Loves Angela (1975). Given the strength of Superfly, Gordon Jr’s death was a huge loss to African-American filmmaking.

Superfly (1972)

Director: Gordon Parks Jr

Screenplay: Phillip Fenty

Cast: Ron O’Neal (Youngblood Priest), Carl Lee (Eddie), Sheila Frazier (Georgia), Julius Harris (Scatter), Charles McGregor (Fat Freddie), Nate Adams (Dealer), Polly Niles (Cynthia), Yvonne Delaine (Mrs Freddie)

93 mins

Story

Youngblood Priest is a pusher – a coke dealer. He seemingly has it all: money, women, a nice place to live, and respect on the street. After an attempted mugging, Priest begins to question what he has been doing to himself but, more importantly, to his people. As Eddie, his partner in crime, notes, ‘It’s a rotten game, but it’s the only one the Man lets us play.’ Priest wants to escape from this life of crime, drugs and white women who use him just for sex, and wants to spend his quality years with his woman. His
plan is simple: to make one last big score with 30 kg of coke, which he can cut and make $1,000,000 in four months. Then he’s out. But nothing is ever that simple. Priest’s runner, Fat Freddie, gets caught by the police and turns evidence. The corrupt cops turn out to be the biggest drug dealers in New York and don’t want to lose Priest as a dealer. The local black militants want to run Priest out of business and take over for themselves. Even Eddie doesn’t think they should retire when they are making so much money.

Subtext

Like Sweet Sweetback and all the films discussed in this chapter, Superfly is ultimately about being against ‘the Man’: a rebellion against the white dominant culture that has no place for African-Americans. Both the cops and the mob are seen to be keeping the black man in Harlem, pushing drugs
to other blacks, effectively killing each other off. As Priest says towards the end of the film, ‘No motherfucker’s gonna own me!’

There is also a difference in how films like Cotton Comes to Harlem (discussed in the next chapter), Sweet Sweetback and Superfly represent the black outlaw as folk hero, and how white filmmakers in this genre represent them, i.e. as criminals (cf. Black Caesar, above). In the black Blaxploitation films, it is the Man who creates the socio-economic conditions whereby crime, or rather being ‘outside the law’, is the only avenue open to young black men, whereas the Blaxploitation films made by white filmmakers
represent a life of crime as exciting and enticing for young African-Americans.

Also, like in many of these films, there is a documentary quality to Superfly, a kind of reality to the on-location street scenes. The film has a gritty and immediate feel to it; these are authentic Harlem street scenes.

Soundtrack

Curtis Mayfield did the score and, frankly, it is the best Blaxploitation score of the lot; even better than Isaac Hayes’ theme to Shaft.

The Verdict

Although amateurish in places, Superfly is one of the best of the Blaxploitation flicks. Ron O’Neal and Carl Lee give absolutely terrific performances. The cinematography and direction by Parks Jr demonstrate the lessons learnt from his father’s days as a news photographer, capturing the feel of the streets with documentary precision. There is one really terrific sequence, demonstrating Priest’s distribution of the coke, using montages of photographs (done by Parks Jr himself), while Mayfield’s

‘Pusherman’ plays in the background. It is truly breathtaking filmmaking. 5/5

Superfly TNT (1973)

Director: Ron O’Neal

Screenplay: Alex Haley

Cast: Ron O’Neal (Youngblood Priest), Roscoe Lee Browne (Dr Lamine Sonko), Carl Lee (Eddie), Sheila Frazier (Georgia), Robert Guillaume (Jordan Gaines), Jacques Sernas (Matty

Smith), William Berger (Lefebre), Dominic Barto (Rand), Charles McGregor (Fat Freddie), Nate

Adams (Dealer), Polly Niles (Cynthia), Yvonne Delaine (Mrs Freddie)

83 mins

Story

Superfly TNT finds Priest living in Rome, but still feeling listless and aimless. That is until he meets Dr Sonko, a diplomat from the fictional African nation of Umbia who is trying to raise money and weapons to back a rebel army against the white colonial government. Priest accompanies the weapons to Umbia
but is quickly taken captive by the colonial government. He is tortured and humiliated, but ultimately is victorious in obtaining his freedom, although the fate of Umbia is never revealed.

Subtext

This is one of the most intelligent, perceptive and political of the Blaxploitation films. Not surprising, since the screenplay is by black activist and author Alex Haley ( Roots and The Autobiography of
Malcolm X). Early on in the film, at a poker game, one of the players, an African Muslim, asks Allah for luck. Priest asks if he is a Black Muslim, referring not to the religion but to the movement founded by Elijah Mohammed. The player is confused and has never heard of the Black Muslim movement.

Perhaps this moment in the film is intended just as a bit of light comedy, but to me it also implies that, regardless of how seriously African-Americans (and deservedly so) take their political groups and cultural identities, those groups and identities may have no currency outside of the United States. As important and influential as the Black Muslim movement has been to African-American culture over the
past 40 years, it seems to have had little impact on the rest of the world, including, most importantly, the African world. This sentiment is echoed later on in the film when Priest and fellow American ex-patriot, Jordan Gaines, a writer also living in Rome, discuss the problems of contemporary African-American
cultural politics and their disillusionment with the current black leadership back in the States.

Priest is ‘born again’ as an African-American – he goes to Africa to see what Sonko has been telling
him. What we get, visually, is a static close-up of Priest, smiling and looking more or less in our direction, intercut (that is, as an eye-line match – implying what he is looking at) with a montage of images from Africa. But these images juxtapose images of Africans living their lives (fishing, markets, fetching water, craftsmen) with icons of the colonial past (guns, colonial villas/fortresses). This is also the only sequence of the film to use music with lyrics in it, by the African jazz band Osibisa, and the final lyric of the song, spoken loudly and punctuated with a shot of Priest turning away and beginning to walk out of shot, is, ‘We are calling you.’ Here the message of the sequence seems to be addressing an African-American audience directly – calling the audience back to discover the real, not the mythical or idealised, Africa. The film seems to posit the argument that Priest, who initially has no direction and is still little more than the ‘Pusherman’ of the first film, regains his true identity as a black man and human being by returning to Africa, and that the audience should follow his lead. Throughout the first part of the film, or at least up until that moment, he is simply referred to as ‘Priest’, but upon returning to Rome and finishing the deal he set up (guns instead of coke) he announces that he has a new name, ‘Mustapha Priest’.

Finally, unlike some of the white-made Blaxploitation films discussed below, particularly Slaughter, the torture and degradation that Priest experiences at the hands of his white captors is not exploitative.

Instead, these scenes of torture are ideological: what these white soldiers do to Priest is what white colonial governments have long been doing to the black bodies of Africa.

Background

Filmed on location in Rome and Senegal.

The Verdict

This is probably the most intelligent, and certainly the most political, of all the Blaxploitation films, perhaps even trying to outdo Sweetback’s provocative agitprop. Superfly TNT, along with Sweetback and Ganja & Hess, makes up a Blaxploitation trinity which tried to rise above the purely exploitative and have these African-American filmmaking opportunities actually mean something. 4/5

It is a shame that O’Neal never achieved the film status of, say, Richard Roundtree, or even of Fred Williamson and Jim Brown. The intensity of his performances reveals him to be a really gifted actor who has not done much with his screen roles. His film credits post-Superfly reveal a steady stream of bit parts and supporting roles in minor action/exploitation films, like his role as a detective in Puppet
Master 5: The Final Chapter (1994). His one Blaxploitation role of note, outside of Youngblood Priest, is a bit part in Larry Cohen’s homage to the genre, Original Gangstas (1996) – but that is not much more than a cameo, in spite of his name being on the opening credits. O’Neal died early in 2004 from
pancreatic cancer.

The pimp, the dude in the bad threads and enormous hat who lives off the women who sell their bodies on the street, seems like an odd choice for a hero. But as Darius James notes in his book on Blaxploitation attitude, ‘Just as the oils and pastels of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec had celebrated the prostitute, the Blaxploitation film was a class of art with the pimp as subject. These films drew on and elevated the black underground’s oral tradition of the trickster’s tale and the hustler’s toast’ (James, 1995: 97). I particularly like James’s connection between the pimp and the oral tradition’s use of trickster figures – folkloristic characters that move between two worlds, neither gods nor men, good nor evil, black nor white, like Brer Rabbit in the Uncle Remus stories. They are neither heroes nor villains, but represent the permeability of life, of the processes of change. James notes that, in the early 1970s, black kids wanted to emulate these trickster figures – sticking it to the Man, having lots of money in their pockets while never seeming to do a ‘normal’ job, and having gorgeous women at their beck and
call. For many theorists of the post-civil rights black youth culture, the pimp was the emblem for emulation. And this emulation is nowhere better embodied than in the classic Blaxploitation film, The
Mack.

The Mack (1973)

Director: Michael Campus

Writer: Robert J Poole

Cast: Max Julien (Goldie), Don Gordon (Hank), Richard Pryor (Slim), Carol Speed (Lulu), Roger

E Mosley (Olinga), William Watson (Jed), George Murdock (Fatman), Juanita Moore (Mother),

Paul Harris (Blind Man), Kai Hernandez (Chico), Annazette Chase (China Doll), Junero Jennings

(Baltimore Bob), Lee Duncan (Sergeant Duncan), Stu Gilliam (Announcer), Sandra Brown (Diane)

110 mins

Story

After his release from prison, Goldie returns home and begins to put his life back together as a pimp; a

‘mack’ according to the local vernacular. He doesn’t just want to be a pimp, he wants to be the best pimp there is. He runs into conflict with his own brother, who has become a powerful black militant while Goldie was in prison. Goldie wants to control the streets but his brother wants to clean them up.

In fact, everyone wants a piece of Goldie: his mother wants him to go to church; his girlfriends want him to be their pimp; the cops are just begging him to break the law again so they can bust, if not kill, him; and the mob wants him back working for them. As Goldie gains more and more power on the streets, more and more people are lining up to help in his downfall.

Subtext

The Mack, in many respects, echoes the contemporary literature of Iceberg Slim, the pimp turned novelist whose books, like Pimp – The Story Of My Life, are now seen as major contributions in the field of African-American literature. As such, the film provides exceptional insight into, and detail of, the pimp business. As Goldie himself notes, ‘Anyone can control a woman’s body; you need to control
their mind.’ But the film goes beyond the business end of the trade and explores the subterranean community within the world of prostitution. For example, we see the ‘Players’ Picnic’, a Sunday social outing where the local Los Angeles procurers gather in a park, play baseball, eat barbecue and have fun with one another. The sequence is a tad surreal, with the children playing and couples arguing – the whole scene feels like the height of normalcy, and yet these are pimps and prostitutes. But that is the point. These ‘underworld’ figures, so parodied in other Blaxploitation films like those noted above, are still just regular folk who have families and enjoy going to company picnics. This sequence has an overriding sense of community to it, a sense of family and security. The people who work in the sex industry are not presented as deviant or pathetic – quite the contrary. They are presented as real people who have real lives. The movie is dedicated to ‘the players who helped make this film and who appeared in it’, i.e. the sex industry workers (pimps predominantly) who advised and appeared in the film, which gives the movie a further sense of authenticity and respect.

I’ve already mentioned that, in the movie, everyone wants something from Goldie, and that these people are trying to pull him in different directions. These influences on Goldie show us what the film is trying to say. His brother wants him to be a militant, his mother wants him to be a good Christian, his friends want him to be a mack, the cops want him to be a criminal, and the mob wants him to be a junky again. The roles that Goldie has available to him – militant, Christian, pimp, criminal, junky – are, in many respects, the only options black men felt were open to them in the early 1970s. These are differing, and often conflicting, signals as to what a man is to do with his life, and Goldie is likewise caught up in these dilemmas. I’m not surprised that many black men, and probably a number of non-black men too, identified with Goldie in this film.

Another theme the film plays with is that of brothers. I’ve noted already how Goldie is placed in opposition to his own brother; where Goldie wants to rule the streets, his brother wants to clean them up. But this kind of polarity also has a further symbolic dimension, as we already saw with The Black
Six, whereby brothers are not just brothers (i.e. blood kin), but also ‘brothers’ (i.e. all black men). By the end of the movie Goldie and his own (blood) brother come to a tacit understanding. This idea can be
extended to suggest that the movie is asking that all ‘brothers’ need to get together and come to an understanding with one another.

There is even an attempt to understand racism in this film. When the two corrupt and racist cops confront Goldie, they point out that their hatred of him is based on envy. They envy him his money, his women, his cool, his attitude and his freedom. Okay, so this is a pretty juvenile attempt at the sociology of racism, but bear in mind that The Mack is one of the few films considered here that even attempts to explain it.

Finally, what stands out most about The Mack are the details we get about the business of pimping.

As we follow Goldie in his quest to be the best pimp on the Sunset Strip, we also learn how the industry operates. Goldie’s professionalism and his refusal to exploit his stable (beyond living off the avails of prostitution) show us the virtues in a good pimp – honesty, stability, no drugs, no abuse, etc. Even though this may be more fantasy than reality (and The Mack does glamorise the sex industry), we still see more gritty detail about these characters’ lives than in any of the films already discussed.

Background

The soundtrack for The Mack was one of the first scores composed for the movies by Alan Silvestri, who would be nominated for an Oscar for Forrest Gump (1994) and is today considered one of Hollywood’s top composers. Immediately following his score for The Mack, Silvestri composed the themes to both Starsky and Hutch and CHiPS. And, of course, there is the blistering theme song by the late Willie Hutch.

The Verdict

There is an awful lot to The Mack – certainly more than in most Blaxploitation films. At the centre of the film’s success, though, is Max Julien’s performance as Goldie – he gives a much better than average performance (considering most of the performances in these films). Richard Pryor, in a rare straight performance, is as good as Julien. In fact, most of the performances in this movie are pretty good and, despite the film’s shortcomings in terms of budget, the crew more than make up for it with an intelligent script and the location shoots. 4/5

It is a shame that none of the major production folk on The Mack went very far in the film business. For example, this is the only credited screenplay for Robert Poole. Director Michael Campus made a few low-budget films in the 1970s, including ZPG (1972), The Education of Sonny Carson (1974) and The
Passover Plot (1976). He disappeared from the film world for a number of years, only to return as producer of a few minor television credits, including Code Name: Wolverine (1996), based on a story by Frederick Forsyth. Max Julien, however, fared slightly better, acting in a small handful of 1970s flicks, including Superfly director Gordon Parks Jr’s Thomasine & Bushrod (1974), which he also wrote. Julien also co-wrote the script for Cleopatra Jones (1973). But that’s about it.

Willie Dynamite (1974)

Director: Gilbert Moses

Writer: Ron Cutler

Cast: Roscoe Orman (Willie Dynamite), Diana Sands (Cora), Thalmus Rasulala (Robert Daniels),

Joyce Walker (Pashen)

102 mins

Story

Willie Dynamite is a Super Pimp; he organises his stable along Fordist principles of assembly-line capitalism, and thinks that all New York pimps should follow his lead. Willie, like any good capitalist, welcomes competition as he feels he has the right product to corner the market. If he cannot control the market, this will be a failure of his product, not himself. But Willie meets his match in Cora, the girlfriend of DA Robert Daniels, a crusading woman of colour, former call-girl and junkie herself, now trying to get the girls off the streets. Cora and Willie clash over the fate of a pretty young girl named Pashen; Willie wants her to earn for him, while Cora wants to develop her potential outside of the sex industry.

Subtext

The film is largely an indictment of runaway American capitalism, with pimping standing in for big business. The pimps and drug dealers of the film stand in as representatives of the business world in what, politically, is a pretty brave film for its day.

Background Information

Universal Pictures produced the film as a big-budget competitor to The Mack. Roscoe Orman went from this film to playing Gordon on Sesame Street. The music is by JJ Johnson, who also did the music for Black Belt Jones.

The Verdict

Excellent film, with some remarkable performances, not the least of which are from Orman and Sands.

There are some really interesting sequences where Cora is trying to persuade Pashen to give up the game: director Moses inserts shots of some of the older prostitutes who are all wane and wasted and look much older than their years to punch home the point. This is a surprisingly mature film for the Blaxploitation period. Be that as it may, it’s all a little too polished and big-budget for a proper Blaxploitation film; but I still think Willie Dynamite is a lost classic of 1970s American cinema. 5/5

The Candy Tangerine Man (1975)

Director: Matt Cimber

Writer: George Theakos

Cast: John Daniels (The Baron)

90 mins

Story

The Baron is the kind of pimp Goldie aspires to be – truly the greatest pimp in the world (so long as that world is the Sunset Strip in LA). He drives around in a supped-up Rolls Royce, complete with machine-guns in the headlights (if James Bond were a pimp, this is what he’d drive). Naturally, the racist and corrupt cops of the LAPD are hassling him, but that’s okay because, no matter what the world throws at him, it never violates his overriding professionalism on the job. When one of the girls’ husbands shows up out of the blue and wants to take her home, the Baron beats the living snot out of him, as well as the goons he hired for the job. When hubby calls him a ‘motherfucker’, without even batting an eyelid he
replies, ‘The only mother I ever fucked was yours, and she was a lousy lay.’ This cat is cool. So cool, in fact, that when he bumps into Floyd, another local pimp who is showing off his latest acquisition, a sweet young girl named Heather, Baron notices that she is way too young to be hustling on the streets, so he plays pool for her (and wins, naturally) and, rather than putting her on the streets to make him some money, buys her a bus ticket back home.

But come the weekend, the Baron drives his Rolls outside the city, changes his flashy clothes to a basic suit and tie, gets into an old family car, and returns to the suburbs where his wife and two kids wait for him, unaware of his real job, with supper on the table and a lawn that needs mowing. While the Baron is playing ‘happy families’, Floyd decides that he wants revenge for losing Heather, and goes after the Baron’s stable. Come Monday night, and with the Baron’s return, all hell breaks loose.

Subtext

Most of the insider knowledge in The Candy Tangerine Man is redundant after The Mack and Willie
Dynamite, but there is one particular facet not apparent in these other films: ‘the Choice.’ According to this film, ‘the Choice’ is part of the pimp world’s code of honour: the girls choose the Mack they want to work for and the other players respect that decision. Floyd violates that code by trying to punish Baron for Heather’s choice.

Background

Like The Mack, this film was credited as featuring ‘the actual “hookers” and “blades” [pimps] of the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.’ This helps to create a sense of authenticity about the information conveyed.

The Verdict

Like the other Matt Cimber film considered here, The Black Six, The Candy Tangerine Man should not be as enjoyable as it is. Both films are Z-grade, with amateur acting and a paint-by-numbers script, but somehow it all comes together for an enjoyable 80 minutes or so. I love the idea of a Super Pimp, who returns to his mild-mannered existence at the break of day; and his Rolls is seriously cool, too. There are also a few sequences of some rather intense violence, including a hand forced into a garbage disposal unit. 2/5

Screenwriter George Theakos only wrote three screenplays, all of them for director Matt Cimber. In addition to The Black Six and The Candy Tangerine Man, the two collaborated on Lady Cocoa (1975), a Blaxploitation flick starring diva Lola Falana in the title role. Matt Cimber fared a little better, going on to direct more Z-grade dreck, including the now infamous adaptation of James M Cain’s The Butterfly (1981) starring Pia Zadora, and Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold (1984), a soft-core rip-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). When Cimber parted company from writer Theakos, he started writing his own screenplays and the films started getting even worse, clearly demonstrating that whatever quality The Black Six and The Candy Tangerine Man had was due more to the screenplays than the direction.

PARODIES

The late, great Rudy Ray Moore is about as baadasssss as you can get: he is the comedy version of Sweetback, a true folk hero to African-American audiences. What his films may lack in technical sophistication, they more than make up for in their baadasssss-ness, their ‘sticking it to the Man’ – albeit more in the spirit of parody of the genre than a considered representation of it.

Dolemite (1975)

Director: D’Urville Martin

Writers: Jerry Jones, Rudy Ray Moore (story)

Cast: Rudy Ray Moore (Dolemite), D’Urville Martin (Willie Green), Jerry Jones (Blakeley), Lady Reed (Queen Bee), Brenda DeLong, Terri Mosley, Marilyn Shaw, Lynell Smith, Vera Howard, Joy

Martin, Jana Bisbing, Brenda Banks, Pat Haywood, Pat Jones (Dolemite Girls)

90 mins

Story

Dolemite, imprisoned on a trumped-up stolen furs and narcotics rap, is sprung secretly from jail by his business partner/friend Queen Bee and the warden to catch those actually guilty of orchestrating the guns and drugs traffic in LA. (The warden now believes Dolemite’s protests of innocence because, since he has been behind bars, the drugs and narcotics traffic has actually increased.) The only people who know why Dolemite is out of jail are himself, Queen Bee, the warden and an unknown undercover FBI
agent who doesn’t reveal his identity until the final act of the movie. Dolemite’s business rival is the chief suspect, Willie Green.

Once out of prison, Dolemite takes command of his stable of prostitutes, Queen Bee having been running them for him in his absence. However, he has lost his nightclub to Willie Green. Dolemite buys it back. Also, while Dolemite was in prison, Queen Bee sent the entire stable to karate school, to prepare them for the big climax fight sequence.

Subtext

As one can very quickly tell from the above précis, the plot is only a formality for this film. In actuality, it is a star vehicle for stand-up comic Rudy Ray Moore, whose ‘toasts’, an African-American form of
oral poetry, had already made him well known through sales of his comedy albums. And, as a star vehicle for Moore, the man himself delivers, giving two of his most famous toasts during the film,

‘Shine and the Great Titanic’ and ‘The Signifying Monkey’.

Today it is almost impossible to appreciate the impact of Moore on black youth of the 1970s; his obscenity-laden speeches were memorised verbatim by school kids and repeated in the playground at every available opportunity, much in the same way that other kids could recite verbatim Monty Python
sketches. ‘The Signifying Monkey’ was certainly Moore’s most famous toast, a street-savvy fable about a wise-arse monkey who gets in trouble with the local lion by shooting his mouth off. However, the other toast Moore does, ‘Shine and the Great Titanic’, is perhaps even more interesting. In this recitation, a black steward on the Titanic is the first to realise that the ship is going down and tries to warn both the crew and the passengers; but, because of his colour, no one takes him seriously. The context within which Moore recites these is also interesting. He delivers ‘The Signifying Monkey’ in his nightclub as part of his act, as Moore often did in real life. But when he recites ‘Shine and the Great Titanic’ he is on the street, stopped by some local men who want him to prove he really is Dolemite. It is this sequence, rather than the one in the nightclub, where we get to see his audience interact with the story more clearly – making interjections, laughing and generally being responsive to an excellent storyteller. It is also here that we can see directly, and hear through their comments, how this street audience identifies with the lowly black steward who is smarter, faster and downright luckier than all the rich white folk who don’t pay attention to him.

The Verdict

Dolemite is a difficult film for the uninitiated: on the surface, it is perhaps one of the worst-made films ever, and worthy of being included as a classic of ‘bad cinema’ along with the collected works of Ed Wood Jr. However, as with Moore’s other films, the ‘joke’ is in its badness, for Dolemite is sending up the already-getting-long-in-the-tooth Blaxploitation genre. He is the anti- Shaft: overweight, ungainly, with every piece of action so over-the-top that it underlines the absurdity of much of the genre. While his follow-up film, The Human Tornado, is more successful as a film, the roots of his parody are laid down in this anti-Blaxploitation flick. 1/5.

Dolemite was Moore’s debut film, but since then he has recreated the character in a number of other films (some recognised as sequels, others not) like The Human Tornado (discussed below) and, more recently, Big Money Hustlas (1999). There is also a Dolemite documentary, The Legend of Dolemite (1994), where Moore explains the traditions of his comedy and where the Dolemite character comes from. But beyond this particular character, Moore also appeared in a number of post-Blaxploitation films, including Petey Wheatstraw (1978), The Disco Godfather (1979) and B*A*P*S (1997). A whole book could, and needs to be written on the Rudy Ray Moore phenomenon, and this tiny section does not
do justice to either him or his work in the way it deserves.

The Human Tornado (1976)

Director: Cliff Roquemore

Writer: Jerry Jones

Cast: Rudy Rae Moore (Dolemite), Lady Reed (Queen Bee), JB Barron (Sheriff Beattie)

85 mins

Story

Dolemite travels to LA to help Queen Bee against some white Mafiosi moving in on her territory. But,
before he can help, Dolemite is caught in flagrante delicto with the wife of the redneck Sheriff Beattie, who shoots his adulterous spouse and pins the murder on our hero. With both the mob and a gang of
rednecks wanting to kill Dolemite, he has a lot of butt to kick before the film ends.

Subtext

As I noted previously, Moore’s persona as the ‘signifying poet’-cum-action hero is a conscious parody of the Blaxploitation genre. The visual absurdity of this portly comic performing some pretty mundane kung-fu moves while all the young women swoon over his masculinity is pretty hysterical.

Background Information

Most of Moore’s lines are in rhyming couplets – and it’s pretty remarkable what he can get to rhyme with ‘motherfucker’.

The Verdict

While none of Moore’s films are brilliant, The Human Tornado does deliver more of the goods than its predecessor, Dolemite. There is a slightly larger budget and a greater emphasis on genre parody in this follow up, I presume due to the confirmation that Moore could handle the transition from recording artist and burlesque entertainer to film star. And you cannot go wrong with any movie where rats gnaw a guy’s pecker off! 2/5.

THE MAN

What the last chapter dealt with were those Blaxploitation films which sought to ‘stick it to the Man’; that is to overturn authority and reject the white-dominated power structures in America. These were films of rebellion and, at their best, of black power and emancipation. But there is another major section of Blaxploitation cinema, one which sought to represent the struggles of black America from within the system. In other words, instead of ‘sticking it to the Man’, these films show black people as the Man.

COPS

In many of the Blaxploitation films discussed so far in this book, we’ve seen repeated images of black men and women ‘hassled’ by the police. Law enforcement in these films tends to show police officers as corrupt and brutal, if not downright racist. While this second group of Blaxploitation films doesn’t necessarily show police officers in a better light, what they do portray are African-Americans working within law enforcement to try to make a better country for all.

Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970)

Director: Ossie Davis

Screenplay: Arnold Perl and Ossie Davis, based on the novel by Chester Himes

Cast: Godfrey Cambridge (Gravedigger Jones), Raymond St Jacques (Coffin Ed Johnson), Calvin

Lockhart (Rev Deke O’Malley), Judy Pace (Iris), Redd Foxx (Uncle Bud), Emily Yancy (Mabel),

John Anderson (Bryce), Lou Jacobi (Goodman), Eugene Roche (Anderson), JD Cannon (Calhoun),

Mabel Robinson (Billie), Dick Sabol (Jarema), Cleavon Little (Lo Boy), Theodore Wilson (Barry),

Maxwell Glanville (Caspar)

97 mins

Story

Reverend Deke O’Malley has a dream – unfortunately, unlike Martin Luther King’s dream, Deke’s dream is to scam the good people of Harlem out of their money with a bogus Back-to-Africa exodus.

Whilst he is speaking at a Harlem rally one summer afternoon, a daring hold-up occurs and the thieves make off with $87,000 of Deke’s, or rather the people of Harlem’s, money. On the case, tracking down
the identity of the thieves, are Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, Harlem’s toughest detectives.

But the good Reverend O’Malley is being less than cooperative. Was this an inside job? Why is O’Malley’s lovely wife, Iris, so eager to give evidence against him? Was it the mob? Was it the local black militants?

Subtext

Cotton Comes to Harlem was a new kind of independent Black cinema – daring, bold, inventive –
which did not reduce the people of Harlem to stereotypes, or just white folks’ servants. This was not the glorified Uncle Tom African-American of Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby: friendly representations of blacks which would not upset white America. This was black people living, breathing, loving, and, yes, fighting, killing and stealing, to and for black people.

Co-screenwriter and director Ossie Davis, although keeping fairly close to Chester Himes’ novel on
which the film is based, adds one particularly crucial turn of phrase. Everyone in the film seems to be familiar with Reverend O’Malley’s catchphrase (although he, too, might have appropriated it from elsewhere in contemporary African-American popular culture), ‘Black enough for ya?’ The phrase is used aggressively, both to white authority figures and to other blacks, as an expression of defiant African-American identity. This defiance even plays with some of the traditional black stereotypes; during the initial car chase after the hold-up, for example, ‘Digger Jones and Ed Johnson’s pursuit is foiled by smashing into a watermelon truck. A silly slapstick gag, but the image of these tough black detectives, dripping with bits of watermelon, has a terrific irony to it.

But beyond that catchphrase and the slapstick, Davis shows the people of Harlem in a new light.

Even though we may know that the story we’re watching is fiction, we are equally aware of its documentary feel. The film has a kind of street theatre aspect to it – the extras in the background watch with amusement as the drama is played out in the foreground. Davis also adds other documentary-like
aspects to the film, showing the audience not just ‘crime and punishment’ Harlem-style, but also the protection of the community by black militants, the work of black Christian aid groups, and even Swahili classes for adults. All these details give the African-American culture of Harlem a life and veracity that had been absent from cinema screens. Black people, almost for the first time, were able to see their lives on screen as they understood them, in a way to which they could relate.

Much less subtly, Davis adds an extended sequence towards the end of the film that is not in the Himes novel, where Billie the dancer performs her ‘Cotton Comes to Harlem’ dance. Davis moved the
dance from Himes’ Cotton Club (the mob-owned Harlem nightspot for jazz in the 1930s and 1940s) to
the Apollo Theatre, the Harlem landmark that showcased the very best in live black music. Tired of the same old numbers she is required to do, Billie decides to perform something relevant to the African-American community – a dance number about slavery, and cotton’s role within the economics of indentured human traffic. Ironically, she dances with a bale of cotton that Reverend Deke, Jones and Johnson, the mob and everyone else in the film, think contains the missing money. The lyrics to her number are: ‘When cotton comes to Harlem / We’re gonna kick cotton’s ass!’, i.e. African-Americans
are not going to be held as subservient to the white masters any longer.

The Verdict

Cotton Comes to Harlem is a truly great piece of African-American filmmaking: it is fast, funny and smart, with knowing winks to the intelligence of its audience. The performances are uniformly great; in particular, Cambridge and St Jacques embody two of my favourite literary characters very much in the
spirit their author intended. 5/5

This wasn’t the first Himes novel to reach the big screen: Charles Martin had directed a film version of Himes’ If He Hollers, Let Him Go! (1968), also starring Raymond St Jacques. Both St Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge returned to play Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones a few years later in Come Back,
Charleston Blue (1972), based on Himes’ novel The Heat’s On, this time directed by television director Mark Warren. Cotton Comes to Harlem director Ossie Davis went on to direct a few small experimental films about Africa in the 1970s, but today is probably best known as an actor (he did the voiceover commentary on the trailers for Spike Lee’s films), and died of natural causes in 2005.

Another attempt to put Himes on the big screen happened almost 20 years later, with Himes’ first crime novel A Rage in Harlem (1991), the feature-film-directing debut of director/actor Bill Duke. Duke later went on to direct, among other films, Hoodlum (1997), in which he recreates the ‘spirit’ of Himes’

novels more successfully than he did in A Rage in Harlem.

Across 110th Street (1972)

Director: Barry Shear

Screenplay: Luther Davis, based on the novel by Wally Ferris

Cast: Anthony Quinn (Captain Mattelli), Yaphet Kotto (Lt Pope), Joseph Attles (Mr Jessup), Paul Benjamin (Jim Harris), Ed Bernard (Joe Logart), Norma Donaldson (Gloria Roberts), Antonio

Fargas (Henry J Jackson), Anthony Franciosa (Nick D’Salvio), Betty Haynes (Mrs Jessup), Gloria

Hendry (Lauralene), Evelyn Keyes (Cameo), Gilbert Lewis (Shevvy), Frank Macetta (Don

Gennaro), Charles McGregor (Chink), Tim O’Connor (Lt Hartnett), Nat Polen (Lt Reilly), Richard

Ward (Doc Johnson), Marlene Warfield (Mrs Jackson), Burt Young (Lapides)

97 mins

Story

Three young black petty thieves disguised as cops hit a Mafia ‘bank’. Two police officers, forming the archetypal buddy-cop combination – a white, seasoned street cop, Captain Mattelli, who is almost due
for retirement, and an up-and-coming college-educated African-American, Lieutenant Pope – are investigating the hit. Meanwhile, the mob is also pursuing its own line of enquiry, and the big boss, Don Gennaro, sends his no-good son-in-law Nick D’Salvio, to take care of business. Meanwhile, the three
thieves – Jackson, Logart and Harris – think they’ve got away with it, until they start getting hit themselves, one at a time.

Subtext

The film raises the issue of black authority (Lt Pope) being imposed upon by a more senior but less formally educated officer (Captain Mattelli). When Mattelli first shows up at the crime scene, his assumption is that he is in charge. His entire perspective changes when he finds that his authority has not only been supplanted, but by an African-American and less senior officer at that. Pope’s replacing Mattelli is political: amidst the racial tensions of early 1970s Harlem, ‘downtown’ feels that it is more politically advantageous to have a black officer in charge of the investigations. Unfortunately, the black residents of Harlem are more apt to trust an outsider like Mattelli, with whom they at least know where they stand (as little more than animals, in fact, to this racist cop), than an unknown, young, black man.

They cannot take Pope’s authority seriously, since he is so like them – an outcome completely contrary to the NYPD’s intentions. The film also raises issues about the police becoming so preoccupied with small-time hoodlums, usually the black perpetrators of street crime, that they never go after the big fish who create the criminal environment in the first place – possibly because of police corruption, possibly because of the complexity of mob involvement, but also because the mob, like the police, is white.

Soundtrack

Terrific soundtrack by Bobby Womack.

The Verdict

Although a largely routine thriller, Across 110th Street clearly reveals its origins as a novel – the three strands of the narrative (the cops, the robbers and the mob) never fully integrate successfully. That being said, the film moves quickly, has an intelligent, if transparent, script and terrific performances by all. 4/5

Detroit 9000 (1975)

Director: Arthur Marks

Writer: Orville Hampton

Cast: Hari Rhodes (Sgt Jesse Williams), Alex Rocco (Lt Danny Bassett), Vonetta McGee (Ruby),

Scatman Crothers (Reverend Markham), Herb Jefferson Jr (Ferdy), Ruby Challenger (Clayton)

106 mins

Story

Clayton is a black candidate for Governor of Michigan. At a fundraiser, hosted by the Reverend Markham, the perpetrators of a daring heist steal all the money and jewellery raised at the event.

Lieutenant Danny Bassett, who has been passed over for promotion too many times, is assigned to crack this high-profile case and is teamed up with Sgt Jesse Williams, a black cop on his way up. The skeleton in Bassett’s closet is his racist wife, who is hidden away in a sanatorium. The key to the case is Ruby, the proverbial whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, who knows not only Detective Williams, but also those responsible for the crime. While all the leads point to Ruby’s pimp, Ferdy, the investigation reveals a high-level conspiracy orchestrated by Clayton himself in order to secure the nomination.

Subtext

In the Metro Detroit area, blacks outnumber whites by approximately nine to one. At the time of making the film, political control of the city was predominantly held by whites in positions of power. Detroit
9000 explores the social effects of turning the racial tables on this white hegemony. How would you like it, White America, the film seems to be asking, if we treated you like a visible minority group (which, in Detroit, you actually are)? The ‘9000’ of the title is, apparently, police code for ‘officer in trouble’. And so, Detroit 9000 seems to be pointing a socially aware finger at white America, suggesting that white officers will truly be ‘in trouble’ if the racial imbalance at city hall doesn’t get rectified. And yet, the film also seems to point out the problems inherent in Black America’s lack of support for African-American politicians in the mid-1970s.

Background Information

Director Arthur Marks also directed Friday Foster and Bucktown. The DVD release of Detroit 9000 is presented by Quentin Tarantino as part of his Rolling Thunder Pictures releases.

The Verdict

Detroit 9000 is a surprisingly dull film. While there are some interesting parts to the movie, it’s not one of the best Blaxploitation films made, although the Detroit location footage is interesting. 2/5

Get Christie Love! (1974)

Director: William A Graham

Writer: George Kirgo, based on the novel The Ledger by Dorothy Uhnak

Cast: Teresa Graves (Christie Love), Harry Guardino (Captain Casey Reardon), Louise Sorel (Helena Varga), Paul Stevens (Enzo Cortino), Byron Chung (Ykari), Debbie Dozier (Amy), Bill Henderson (Sergeant Stoner Martin), Lynne Holmes (Celia Jackson), Richard Hurst (Sergeant Tom

Farrell), Lee Paul (Max Loomis), Davis Roberts (Myron Jones), Tracy Roberts (Gwen Fenley), Andy Romano (Sergeant Seymour Greenberg), Titos Vandis (Spiliolis)

90 mins

Story

Christie Love is an LA police detective often going undercover to get to those places only a black woman can go. She is charged with finding out where Enzo Cortino, a notorious drug smuggler, keeps
his ledger – only his mistress, Helena Varga, knows. Christie’s cover is blown (actually, as far as an undercover cop goes, she’s pretty pathetic) and she needs to find another way to get to Helena. Helena frequently goes to Miami to visit her ‘nephew’ whom everyone (that is, both the police and Cortino) believes is the child she gave birth to ten years earlier. In fact, the kid really is her nephew but she encourages this misunderstanding to protect her real son, whom she gave up for adoption, and whom she wants to protect from Cortino. Of course, Christie finds all this out and uses it to blackmail Helena into helping her get Cortino.

Subtext

There are a couple of themes worthy of note in this film. The first one is the role of black cops in the war against drugs. The film seems to imply that African-American police officers have a particular interest in stopping the drugs traffic, as it is African-American communities that are most often devastated by narcotics. In addition, as Get Christie Love! makes less explicit, not only are drugs destroying black neighbourhoods, the profits from the drugs are going into white folks’ pockets.

Christie herself is not at all like the other Blaxploitation women we have seen – indeed, she’s rather passive. She may rail against orders she disagrees with and play at being a ‘naughty little girl’ to subvert the authorities, but ultimately she is, like the other characters in this chapter, the Man. However, Christie can go places the Man cannot – she can get information and access that only a black woman
can get. I doubt the producers intended this subtext but by being a) a woman and b) black, Christie is doubly invisible and dismissible, which enables her to go where a white male police officer could never go. There is a kind of Richard Wright’s Invisible Man quality about Christie.

Background

Tarantino makes reference to this made-for-TV movie in Reservoir Dogs (1992).

The Verdict

As far as early-1970s American television goes, this is not a bad example, and it is clearly inspired by the success of such series as Police Woman with Angie Dickinson. Be that as it may, as a made-for-TV
movie it is fairly tame, the action is routine and dull and, to be frank, Teresa Graves never had the chops to be a movie star. 2/5

Produced by ABC as a Movie of the Week, a television series was developed into 22 hour-long episodes, which also starred Graves. (CBS’s less successful Blaxploitation television venture, Shaft, only lasted seven 90-minute episodes. Blaxploitation never really made it on television.) Not long after Graves’ star began to rise she found God and her constant objections to the scripts eventually dissuaded casting directors from calling her. She died in 2002 in a house fire.

DETECTIVES

According to Van Peebles, and his own mythology, the success of Sweetback caused such a commotion in Hollywood that MGM quickly rewrote the detective B-movie they were getting ready to film in New

York and made the hero African-American. Of course, that film was Shaft. As good a story as Van Peebles’ version of events is, it isn’t true. Ernest Tidyman’s novel Shaft, which was first published the previous year, in 1970, was always conceived as a black story. Blaxploitation films revised images of what it meant to be a black man. Although very few of them challenged the model of the more traditional Hollywood movie hero, the real revolution effected by these Blaxploitation heroes was in breaking the race barrier. Regardless of whether these men were much the same as movie heroes from
previous eras, they differed in one central way… they were black.

Although Shaft was neither the first nor the best of the Blaxploitation films, when one thinks of the entire genre, one of the first images that springs to mind is of John Shaft, the super-cool private detective immortalised by Richard Roundtree. Roundtree was originally a male model while also a member of New York’s respected Negro Ensemble [Theatre] Company. But it was his appearance in Shaft in 1971 that made him famous. With the exception of the Shaft sequels, Roundtree’s film career has never lived up to its early promise, and he seems to prefer making cameo appearances in low-budget action films. That being said, he has appeared more recently in films like Seven (1995), George of the Jungle (1997), and in Tim Reid’s African-American saga, Once Upon A Time… When We Were
Coloured (1996). It may be due to Roundtree’s desire to get away from his John Shaft persona that he resisted the draw to do more Blaxploitation films; but, other than the Shaft series, Roundtree’s only other, even quasi-Blaxploitation film was Charley One-Eye (1972), one of the few Blaxploitation westerns.

Shaft (1971)

Director: Gordon Parks

Screenplay: Ernest Tidyman and John DF Black, based on the novel by Ernest Tidyman

Cast: Richard Roundtree (John Shaft), Moses Gunn (Bumpy Jonas), Charles Cioffi (Vic Androzzi), Christopher St John (Ben Buford), Gwenn Mitchell (Ellie Moore), Lawrence Pressman

(Sergeant Tom Hannon), Victor Arnold (Charlie), Sherri Brewer (Marcy), Rex Robbins (Rollie), Camille Yarbrough (Dina Greene), Margaret Warncke (Linda), Joseph Leon (Bryan Leibowitz),

Arnold Johnson (Cul), Dominic Barto (Patsy), George Strus (Carmen)

96 mins

Story

John Shaft, the ‘black private dick, who’s a sex machine with all the chicks’, is hired by Harlem mobster Bumpy Jonas to find out who kidnapped his precious daughter Marcy. At first Shaft does not
want to take Bumpy’s job because of what Bumpy’s business dealings (drugs, gambling and extortion)

are doing to the people of Harlem. Shaft is convinced, sort of, by Bumpy’s reply to this objection – hate him, that’s fine, but his daughter is completely innocent and, since he cannot go to the police, Shaft is his only hope to get his daughter back. There is a nice reference here to the fact that, despite the stereotypical images of mobsters in general, and black mobsters in particular, Shaft recognises that, beyond their criminality, these people have families too. Unbeknownst to Shaft, the kidnapping was mob-related and is one of the first incidents in a war between Bumpy’s crew and the Italian Mafia. The police, particularly Shaft’s antagonistic friend, Vic Androzzi, are concerned that this fighting, although insiders know it is mob-related, could be seen by outsiders as blacks against whites, and the local black militia are gearing up to exploit this into an all-out race war.

Subtext

Shaft is perhaps the American cinema’s first black hero. Although he is preceded by literary creations like Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson in Chester Himes’ Harlem novels, African-American movie audiences hadn’t seen a black hero on screen until Shaft. And yet, despite his clearly heroic image, giving attitude to the Man, and being the focus of the film’s attention, he still cannot get a taxi in New York; a phenomenon that most African-Americans could probably relate to.

Background

Isaac Hayes’ now-classic theme song won the Oscar in 1971 for Best Song, and Hayes was also nominated for Best Dramatic Score. In addition, the film’s editor, Hugh Robertson, was the first African-American film editor to be nominated in his category for editing Midnight Cowboy (1969), winning the BAFTA for the same film.

The Verdict

Risking blasphemy here, I don’t think that Shaft is a particularly good movie. Today, the film has a kitsch quality about it, and its role in the history of African-American representation in film is quite important. But this is a movie whose reputation is greater than its actuality. Most of the sequences are of Shaft wandering around New York City to Hayes’ really kick-ass score, and when the action does kick
in, the film has a bit of life to it. But those moments are too few and far between. In the documentary Baadasssss Cinema, Quentin Tarantino bemoans the disappointing use of Hayes’ signature theme tune; he notes that the ‘Theme from Shaft’ plays distractedly over the opening credits as Shaft walks rather matter-of-factly out of the New York subway and posits that, if he had the ‘Theme from Shaft’ with which to open a film, it would have a more ‘POW’ opening to reflect that music. He has a valid point.

3/5

White screenwriter and novelist Ernest Tidyman created Shaft, which originally appeared as a best-selling novel in 1970. The same year that Shaft was produced, Tidyman won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for The French Connection, and also wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s High Plains
Drifter (1973). Tidyman is also one of the very few white people to have received the NAACP Image Award, specifically for his creation of the John Shaft character. He died in 1984.

Despite the negative and stereotypical connotations Blaxploitation films may have, there are a number of unsung heroes in the African-American filmmaking world who need recognition. On the DVD of Shaft, there is a short ‘making-of’ documentary by editor Robertson, and although it isn’t the most informative of DVD extras, what is demonstrated in its behind-the-scenes footage is the presence of a large number of African-Americans in all sorts of roles – from director down to various stagehands.

There is a history here that has not yet been written, and one that needs exploring more fully than I can in these pages. The problem is that within Film Studies the role of the director is so privileged that any other role on a film shoot is seen as secondary, if not totally irrelevant. This is a shame, since a number of creative and talented African-Americans have worked hard in this industry, and some, like Robertson, have been recognised by their peers. But no one knows who they are outside of their immediate circles.

When MGM bought the rights to the novel Shaft, they put a comparatively low budget of $1,125,000
behind it (Roundtree received $12,500). When the film succeeded well beyond anyone’s expectations,
the inevitable sequel was prepared by reuniting much of the same cast and crew (although this time, Roundtree was estimated to have received $50,000).

Shaft’s Big Score (1972)

Director: Gordon Parks

Screenplay: Ernest Tidyman

Cast: Richard Roundtree (John Shaft), Moses Gunn (Bumpy Jonas), Drew Bundini Brown (Willy),

Joseph Mascolo (Mascola), Kathy Imrie (Rita), Wally Taylor (Kelly), Julius Harris (Bollin), Rosalind Miles (Arma), Joe Santos (Pascal), Angelo Nazzo (Al), Don Blakely (Johnson), Melvin

Green Jr (Junior Gillis), Thomas Anderson (Preacher), Evelyn Davis (Old Lady)

101 mins

Story

The film opens with Cal Asby, a Queens insurance broker and friend of Shaft’s (actually Shaft is, shall we say, ‘dating’ his sister), removing $250,000 from his own safe and depositing it in a coffin at the funeral parlour he also owns. Upon his return to the insurance office, the whole place blows up with him inside. Kelly, Cal’s partner, is in debt to loan sharks for the same amount of money, and Cal was in the process of buying him out. But because the explosion happened before the buy-out occurred, Kelly is
still in trouble with the mob. Clarinet-playing and propriety-obsessed Mafioso Gus Mascola is putting pressure on Kelly to pay up but, in the meantime, wants to use him to take care of Shaft, who is naturally nosing around and asking questions about who blew up his friend. Since it doesn’t look likely that Kelly is going to find out where Cal put the money, he asks help from Bumpy Jonas, and offers an alliance against Mascola. Of course, our man Shaft is caught in the middle yet again.

Subtext

Shaft’s Big Score is fairly light on subtext – it is more concerned with being a well-plotted and exciting action movie. Be that as it may, there are a couple of interesting touches. For example, the first shot of Shaft, in his bedroom, shows copies of Essence and Ebony on his night table – both magazines aimed at the African-American market. ( Essence’s presence is something of an in-joke because director Parks was one of the co-founders of the magazine.) Androzzi’s role is replaced in this movie by a black detective, Captain Bollin, and this gives Shaft the opportunity to express his distrust of black cops, echoing a theme already introduced in Across 110th Street. Shaft calls Bollin a ‘black honky’, since he is working for the Man. Furthermore, we also see, in no uncertain terms, the police brutality against African-Americans, particularly by black cops, indicating a further dimension whereby black police officers need to be twice as brutal to black folk in their custody since they are twice as likely to be accused of showing lenience to other blacks. And yet, despite being a ‘private’ detective, Shaft is ultimately working for the police as well, albeit indirectly.

Other elements of subtext worthy of notice include Cal’s working to improve the Harlem community,
while his partner, Kelly, seeks only to improve himself financially. That juxtaposition between community service and serving oneself is also reflected in the juxtaposition between acceptable vices, like numbers running (which the police tend to leave alone), and unacceptable vices, like drugs, loan sharking and prostitution (which the police definitely want to close down).

Soundtrack

Although Isaac Hayes does contribute one song to the soundtrack, the score itself is by Gordon Parks, and the songs are sung by OG Smith.

The Verdict

Shaft’s reputation as a classic movie seems beyond the film’s reality. However, when people talk about Shaft in such glowing terms, perhaps they are referring to Shaft’s Big Score. This is the movie that Shaft wants to be. It is a better, tighter and more assured film – a great genre picture with some excellent characterisations. With a bigger budget behind him and more confidence following on from Shaft, director Parks really pulls out all the stops and proves himself as a gifted action director. 4/5

Gordon Parks, the director of Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score, was a photographer for Life Magazine for 20
years before turning to filmmaking. It was his breakthrough first feature The Learning Tree (1969), based on his novel about growing up in Kansas, with which he made his mark. The Learning Tree was the first film by a major studio (Warner Brothers) to be directed by an African-American filmmaker. In addition to the two Shaft films, Parks also directed non-Blaxploitation films like The Super Cops (1974) and the biopic Leadbelly (1976). Parks also appears in cameo roles in Shaft (as a landlord) and Shaft’s
Big Score (as a croupier), and has a cameo in Shaft (2000) as Mr P, one of the customers in the Lennox Lounge. Parks died in 2006 at the ripe old age of 94.

Shaft in Africa (1973)

Director: John Guillermin

Screenplay: Stirling Silliphant

Cast: Richard Roundtree (John Shaft), Frank Finlay (Amafi), Vonetta McGee (Aleme), Neda Arneric (Jazar), Debebe Eshetu (Wassa), Spiros Focas (Sassari), Jacques Herlin (Perreau), Jho Jhenkins (Ziba), Willie Jonah (Oyo), Adolfo Lastretti (Pino), Marne Maitland (Colonel Godner), Frank McRae (Oziot), Zenebech Tadesse (The Prostitute), AV Falana (Ramila’s Son), James E

Myers (Williams)

112 mins

Story

Shaft is kidnapped by Africans and awakens to find himself naked in some kind of training camp. He
has been abducted by these Africans to help them stop a twentieth-century slavery cartel working between Ethiopia and France, which ‘hires’ young African men for menial jobs in Europe and keeps them in debt and in poor living conditions. So Shaft goes undercover as an African, gets contacted by the recruiters and tries to work his way to the very top of the slave ring to end this horrid business.

Subtext

With the success of their two previous Shaft films, MGM put even more money into the third, but now the budget was much too large to leave in the hands of an African-American director. So they trotted out English director John Guillermin, hacked out a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, and changed Shaft from being an action hero to a black spectacle. The production values of this film are distinctly higher, but by graduating Shaft from B-to A-movies, he loses that vernacular edge he had in the first two films.

While the film clearly condemns modern slavery, it presents its arguments in a largely patronising way, drawing attention to the ‘simplicity’ and ‘quaintness’ of the Africans. Even the semi-nod to depicting the obscene living conditions that migrant workers find themselves in feels more like exploitation than discourse.

Rather than a steady girlfriend like in the other two movies (he was never monogamous, but he always had a regular partner), here Shaft is given a series of female conquests (including the Emir’s daughter, Aleme, who Shaft needs to get to before her scheduled clitoridectomy, and the sexually insatiable white girlfriend of slave trader Amafi). All this feels and looks like the worst kind of stereotype of the black, sexually predatory male.

Soundtrack

Johnny Pate score, with theme song sung by the Four Tops – a far cry from Isaac Hayes!

The Verdict

By turning Shaft from a B-into an A-film, the franchise loses its soul. Shaft in Africa just doesn’t know what it wants to be: it’s no longer an urban cop film, so what is it? At times it feels like an epic, at other times a (patronising) social-consciousness film. Perhaps it’s a throwback to the old adventure movies Hollywood used to trot out, but with a more ‘modern’ sensibility. Regardless of what Shaft in Africa is, it doesn’t really work. 2.5/5

Shaft in Africa director John Guillermin began his directing career in his native Britain as director of a number of B-pictures. The most famous of his early films were I Was Monty’s Double (1958) and two Tarzan features, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959) and Tarzan Goes to India (1962). His big break came with the George Peppard classic of the mid-1960s, The Blue Max (1966). But it was his film following Shaft in Africa that made Guillermin, at least for a short time, an A-list director. This was The
Towering Inferno (1974), which he co-directed with producer Irwin Allen from a script by Silliphant.

Guillermin’s star was still rising when he was hired by producer Dino De Laurentiis (see the discussion of Mandingo above) to direct his epic King Kong (1976). From there, Guillermin went on to direct the Agatha Christie murder mystery Death on the Nile (1978). After this, however, his career took a definite turn for the dubious, directing the Conan/Tarzan rip-off Sheena (1984), and by the mid-1980s the best he could get was the De Laurentiis sequel King Kong Lives (1986).

Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, on the other hand, is something of a minor Hollywood legend. This
is particularly surprising, considering some of the utter crap he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. Silliphant first came to proper fame when he began writing episodes for the television series Naked City and Rawhide in the mid-1950s. But it was in the 1960s that he wrote many of his classic screenplays, including Village of the Damned (1960), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Charly (1968) and Marlowe (1969). He wrote The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Swarm (1978) for producer/director Irwin Allen, and The Killer Elite (1975) for director Sam Peckinpah. He also penned the Dirty Harry movie The Enforcer (1976) and one of the better Charles Bronson flicks, Telefon (1977). But before we ascribe too much cult status to Silliphant, he was also one of the people chiefly responsible for the script for the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling film, Over the Top (1987). And this from the man who won an Oscar for his In the Heat of the Night screenplay.

After these three Shaft movies, the character went to the small screen in a short-lived television series

– but at least Roundtree kept the role. Independent filmmaker John Cassavetes directed one of the episodes. Roundtree also did a Shaft-like film for Israeli filmmaker Menahem Golan, Diamonds (1975), which Golan advertised as ‘Diamond Shaft.’ It would take another 25 years before Shaft was back where he belonged, on the big screen.

Shaft (2000)

Director: John Singleton

Screenplay: Richard Price and John Singleton and Shane Salerno, based on the novel by Ernest Tidyman

Cast: Samuel L Jackson (John Shaft), Vanessa L Williams (Carmen Vasquez), Jeffrey Wright (Peoples Hernandez), Christian Bale (Walter Wade Jr), Busta Rhymes (Rasaan), Dan Hedaya

(Detective Jack Roselli), Toni Collette (Diane Palmieri), Richard Roundtree (Uncle John Shaft), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Jimmy Groves), Josef Sommer (Curt Fleming), Lynne Thigpen (Carla

Howard), Philip Bosco (Walter Wade Sr), Pat Hingle (Judge Dennis Bradford), Lee Tergesen

(Luger), Daniel von Bargen (Lt Kearney)

100 mins

Story

Rather than a reworking of either Tidyman’s original novel or a remake of Gordon Parks’ landmark films, Shaft is more properly ‘Shaft – the Next Generation’. This John Shaft is an NYPD homicide detective, called out to a high-class nightspot to investigate the murder of an innocent black youth by, apparently, Walter Wade Jr, a cocky rich racist. Wade makes and then skips bail, and flees to Switzerland. Two years later, Shaft has been transferred to narcotics. While on a routine bust, Shaft comes into contact with the local Dominican drug lord, Peoples Hernandez. Peoples gets taken in on a
dubious concealed weapons offence and placed in the holding pen. Meanwhile, Shaft gets word that Wade is about to return surreptitiously to the States and goes to meet him. Arrested for jumping bail, Wade is placed in the same pen as Peoples. Once again, despite having jumped bail the first time, Wade makes bail and, in defiance, Shaft quits the force. He realises that the only way he is going to be able to put Wade away is on his own terms. Enlisting the help of both his former partner, Carmen Vasquez, and his uncle, John Shaft (the detective from Parks’ original film), Shaft (NYPD) tries to find the one witness to the murder who disappeared immediately after her initial statement – Diane, a waitress who was on her break when she saw the crime. Wade is also after the one person who can give the testimony that will put him away and he enlists the help of Peoples. They plan to find and eliminate Diane, and if Shaft happens to get killed along the way, neither of these criminal masterminds is going to shed any tears.

Subtext

There is not a lot of subtext to this film, and that is one of the major problems with the movie: whereas the earlier Blaxploitation films, and even Singleton’s other films, could discuss social and cultural issues through the action genre (like Boyz N the Hood), Shaft is just a genre movie. That being said, there is a millennial awareness of ethnic sensitivity issues and an active zero tolerance for racist comments. Tay, the young black youth murdered by Wade, responds to Wade’s racist jibes by cutting two holes in a white table napkin, walking over to Wade’s table, and placing the napkin on his head like a Klan hood. Shaft tells off a fellow officer for making a, seemingly, innocent racist comment.

Singleton’s point here, particularly with the latter example, is that there are no innocent racist comments.

The Verdict

Both critics and fans heavily slammed the film upon release, which I think is a little unfair. Although it has a lack of subtext and has way too much plot, the film doesn’t offer much more than its glossy surface and that glossy surface is pretty cool. There are some terrific performances here (particularly Jackson’s) and there are some great action sequences. This is a really good B-movie. And yet, because of the changes to American filmmaking in the intervening 30 years, B-movies today both look and feel
like A-pictures; and as such, this just doesn’t feel like Blaxploitation anymore. 3/5

Sheba, Baby (1975)

Director/Writer: William Girdler

Cast: Pam Grier (Sheba Shayne), Austin Stoker (Brick Williams), D’Urville Martin (Pilot), Dick Merrifield (Shark)

90 mins

Story

Sheba Shayne is a Chicago PI who returns home to Louisville, Kentucky to help her father’s business,
the Shayne Loan Company, from being muscled in on by black gangsters led by Pilot. Pilot himself is
largely responsible for the exploitation of the black community; however, he himself is under the thumb of another mobster, called Shark.

Subtext

The film does represent the problems of black-on-black violence, saying that African-Americans have
enough to contend with in terms of their cultural and economic emancipation without also having to deal with other African-American’s trying to pull them down.

Background Information

Writer/Director Girdler also directed the Blaxploitation horror film Abby. This is one of the very few Blaxploitation films rated PG by the ‘all-white jury’ that is the MPAA.

The Verdict

Awful film. While the acting is uniformly terrible here, the cast do their best with the dreadful dialogue.

But what, ultimately, is the point of a PG-rated Blaxploitation film? Without the language, the violence, or even seeing Pam Grier naked, Sheba, Baby is pretty redundant. 1/5

John Shaft may rail against ‘the Man’ but, even as a ‘private’ detective, he is still ultimately working for Him. Shaft is cut from an entirely different cloth than Sweetback, the epitome of baadasssssness; while Shaft may choose not to conform to authority, he must ultimately succumb to it. And by the time we get to Shaft in Africa, not only is he working for ‘the Man’; he’s actually working for a government. With John Singleton’s Shaft, despite the inclusion of Roundtree as the ‘original’ John Shaft, Singleton’s Shaft is a full-blown cop. Shaft may be a rebellious cop, and he may even quit the force, but his actions are exclusively to serve law and order.

AGENTS, SPECIAL AND OTHERWISE

While some Blaxploitation heroes were joining the police force to make a difference, and others were
hanging their shingles as private detectives, still other heroes had their sights set even higher. James Bond had been on cinema screens for about a decade by the early 1970s, and the role had been synonymous with Sean Connery for most of that time, despite George Lazenby’s single attempt at the
role in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1968). With Diamonds are Forever (1971), however, Connery announced that he was retiring as Bond. Into the void left by Connery’s departure, Blaxploitation cinema tried to find a ‘soul brother’ who could take over the super-spy genre. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the first post-Connery Bond film, Live and Let Die (1973), Roger Moore’s first outing in the role, draws so heavily on Blaxploitation images. But what Live and Let Die does with its black and African-American characters, locations and themes seems highly regressive in comparison with what Blaxploitation cinema had been attempting; it was like Sweetback never ran. Put differently, you can view Roger Moore’s first Bond film as putting Blaxploitation spy films in their place. What it seems to be saying is that there is only room for one super-spy franchise out there, and that spy is white and British.

Slaughter (1972)

Director: Jack Starrett

Writers: Mark Hanna and Don Williams

Cast: Jim Brown (Slaughter), Stella Stevens (Ann), Rip Torn (Hoffo), Cameron Mitchell (AW

Price), Don Gordon (Harry), Marlene Clark (Kim), Robert Phillips (Frank), Marion Brash (Jenny),

Normal Alfe (Mario Felice), Eddie Lo Russo (Little Al), Buddie Garion (Eddie), Roger Cudney (Gio)

91 mins

Story

Captain Slaughter is a Green Beret hero just back from ‘Nam. His father is blown up in a car-bomb incident and Slaughter wants to find out who did it and why. The FBI, also investigating the murder, co-opts Slaughter to go to Mexico and destroy the mob that killed Slaughter Sr. The mob, it seems, has been digitalising its operations, putting its books and records onto cards which can be read by something called ‘a computer’. This is 1972, remember. Daddy Slaughter had discovered the location of this ‘computer’ and that is why he was killed. Now it is time for Slaughter’s revenge. Meanwhile, the ambitious mobster Hoffo resents the problems this is causing for his own bid for Mario Felice’s empire, and is even more resentful that his girlfriend, Ann, has been sleeping with Slaughter. In fact, Ann herself has been co-opted by Felice to seduce Slaughter, but unfortunately finds herself falling in love with him.

Subtext

Slaughter is white-made Blaxploitation to a ‘t’. The rest of the main cast is white and middle-aged, and the only real African-American character in the film is Slaughter himself, fulfilling a kind of black James Bond role.

The most interesting subtextual strand of the film, again from a very white perspective, is its – and, one supposes, the audience’s – fear of black masculine sexuality, particularly the black man’s desire for the white woman. Black masculinity is displayed in a rather fetishistic way. We are supposed to want to be like Slaughter (the tough action man who is a hit with all the ladies) and yet he is rejected because he is different (i.e. black). This contradiction is demonstrated by the framing of Brown’s muscular body, naked from the waist up, while that body is being humiliated and destroyed in scenes of violence and
torture. Slaughter puts the exploitation back into Blaxploitation as it exploits white male fears of black male desire for white women. Okay, so that may sound like a lot of pseudo-intellectual bibble-babble, a lot of bogus psychoanalysis, and maybe it is; but, when compared to the representations of other black action heroes in this genre, a) they may sleep with white women, but these women are never the main
attraction for them, and b) the films don’t dwell on their humiliated and beaten bodies. For the difference between white and black Blaxploitation films like this, look again at Superfly TNT.

Soundtrack

Scorching Billy Preston theme song.

The Verdict

Fun, B-grade action film. Very much a product of AIP – hammy acting, low budgets, but made with a
lot of infectious energy. And Brown makes for a charismatic leading man. 3/5

The 6’2” American Football Hall-of-Famer, Jim Brown, was romanced by Hollywood while still playing for the Cleveland Browns. He was cast in a small but significant part in Rio Conhos (1964), directed by Gordon Douglas. From there he did a number of action, war and western films, including
his role as Jefferson in Robert Aldrich’s classic The Dirty Dozen (1967). It was in Slaughter and Black
Gunn (both 1972) that Big Jim Brown became another Blaxploitation icon.

Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (1973)

Director: Gordon Douglas

Writer: Charles Johnson

Cast: Jim Brown (Slaughter), Ed McMahon (Duncan), Judy Brown (Norja), Tony Brubaker (Pratt), Fuji (Chin), Jackie Giroux (Mrs Duncan), Gloria Hendry (Marcia), Gene LeBell (Leo), Eddie Lo Russo (Arnie), Russ Marin (Crowder), Brock Peters (Reynolds), Don Stroud (Kirk)

94 mins

Story

A failed assassination attempt on Captain Slaughter at a picnic accidentally kills Slaughter’s best friend, Ed. Some unseen hand hires Mr Duncan, another mob boss, to take care of Slaughter and thereby avenge the carnage in Mexico (in Slaughter). Complicating matters, the police get Slaughter to break into Duncan’s fortress/mansion to steal a list of all the dirty cops and politicians who give the mobster protection from the law.

Subtext

This is a much ‘blacker’ film than Slaughter, in so far as more African-American characters are represented. Rather than the miscegenation theme that ran through the first film, Slaughter is given a proper African-American girlfriend, Marcia, to rescue and protect and whose death makes this adventure ‘personal’ (much in the same way that Slaughter wasn’t just helping the FBI close down Felice’s operation, but also avenging his father’s death).

As I think is becoming obvious, not all Blaxploitation heroes are ‘sticking it to the Man’. The hero
may rail and utter clichés like, ‘Don’t push me, man,’ but ultimately the power structures that oppress African-Americans are supported by these films, and by the hero himself. And, like the contrast between Superfly and Black Caesar, the differences between black-and white-made Blaxploitation is whether or not the detective hero (in this case) is working outside or inside the law. Those films made by African-Americans (like Shaft or Cotton Comes to Harlem) tend to portray their detective heroes as working on the very perimeter of the law, and frequently crossing over that ‘thin blue line’ to do their job properly; whereas in the white-made Blaxploitation films (like Slaughter and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off) the rebellious black action hero is tamed, or leashed, by actually working with law enforcement.

Soundtrack

Music by James Brown.

The Verdict

This is a fairly dull film, even by sequel standards. The action sequences are exciting, but too few and too far between. It is watchable, but not extraordinary. 2/5

Jim Brown was frequently teamed with Fred Williamson in other films, like Three the Hard Way (1974) and One Down, Two to Go (1984). But it was the inspired casting of Brown and Williamson, along with Pam Grier, Ron O’Neal and Richard Roundtree, in Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas (1996) that made this film a true homage to Blaxploitation. Brown also parodied his own Blaxploitation image in Keenan Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (discussed later). Most recently, Brown appeared in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! and as the voice of Butch Meathook in Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers (1998).

That Man Bolt (1973)

Directors: Henry Levin and David Lowell Rich

Writer: Charles Johnson

Cast: Fred Williamson (Jefferson Bolt), Teresa Graves (Samantha Nightingale), Ken Kazama (Spider)

103 mins

Story

Jefferson Bolt is a special agent, James Bond-style. He is hired to take a suitcase of counterfeit American dollars from Macau to Mexico, by way of Los Angeles. But, as is the way in these films, once Bolt discovers he’s been set up with a case of ‘almost perfect’ fake bills, he hunts down those responsible for this. This journey takes him to further ‘exotic’ locations such as Las Vegas and Hong Kong.

Subtext

The ‘subtext’ to this film is how Universal tried to use it as a non-Blaxploitation Hollywood action movie and attempted to make Williamson into a bona fide movie star. It doesn’t belong in a list of Blaxploitation films, per se, as it is more of a mid-budget spy thriller, but it does demonstrate the increased box-office potential Williamson was demonstrating in the wake of other Blaxploitation films, such as Black Caesar and Hammer.

Background Information

Writer Charles Johnson also wrote Hammer and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off. A pre- Christie Love Teresa Graves has an extended cameo. One of the film’s villains, the kung-fu master Spider, played by Ken Kazama, would appear the following year in The Streetfighter with Sonny Chiba.

The Verdict

That Man Bolt delivers the goods in terms of a mindless action spy thriller. It’s no James Bond movie, but a fun watch, and the location settings give the picture some exoticism. Worth checking out. 4/5

Truck Turner (1974)

Director: Jonathan Kaplan

Writers: Michael Allin and Oscar Williams

Cast: Isaac Hayes (Truck Turner), Yaphet Kotto (Harvard Blue), Alan Weeks (Jerry), Annazette Chase (Annie), Nichelle Nichols (Dorinda), Sam Laws (Nate), Paul Harris (Gator), Charles

Cyphers (Drunk), John Kramer (Desmond), Scatman Crothers (Duke), Dick Miller (Fogarty), Bob

Harris (Snow), Jac Emil (Reno), Stan Shaw (Fontana), Wendell Tucker (Wendell)

91 mins

Story

Mack ‘Truck’ Turner is an ex-football player who now works as a bounty hunter. He and his partner Jerry must bring in a big-time pimp by the name of Gator. Gator is killed in the attempt and, out of revenge, his girlfriend Dorinda, a big-time madam in her own right, puts a price on Turner’s head.

When her own bounties do not pay off, and her killers are killed, in steps Super Pimp Blue, who makes her an offer she cannot refuse. Blue brings in a gang of professional killers to do the job: firstly killing Turner’s boss, Nate, then Jerry, and finally his cat! Now, for Turner, it’s personal!

Subtext

The opening credit sequence is better than the rest of the film: director Kaplan begins by showing pictures of corporate LA juxtaposed with Skid Row LA. Gradually the images focus on ‘down-and-out’

Los Angeles, specifically the world of bail bondsmen. At least at this level, the film demonstrates some kind of social consciousness, whereby we, the audience, are positioned to recognise that the relatively glamorous world of Turner is nothing like the reality of where real people are living in certain parts of LA. There is also the sense – and I have no way of knowing how real or authentic this is – that we are getting an insight into at least the mythology of the pimp and the organisation of his ‘stables’ – his collection of working women.

Soundtrack

Isaac Hayes also did the soundtrack.

The Verdict

The first half of the film, where Turner and Jerry are partnered together and bicker like an old married couple, is terrific. When Jerry takes a back seat to the action and is replaced in the narrative by Turner’s girlfriend, Annie, just released from prison, the film begins to sag. There are still some good action sequences and the film is watchable, but the movie does not live up to its early promise. 3/5

It’s a shame that Isaac Hayes did not do more movies in the 1970s. Although known primarily as a composer and performer – and, of course, as an Oscar winner for his Shaft score – he is also a highly charismatic actor. During this period of Blaxploitation, he made, in addition to Truck Turner, the Italian Blaxploitation film Three Tough Guys (1974) with Fred Williamson, but it was not until 1981 when John Carpenter cast him as ‘the Duke of New York’ in Escape from New York that Hayes got another decent film role. Hayes is now well known to many as the voice of Chef in South Park. We lost Isaac Hayes in 2008 to a stroke.

After he left AIP (where he also made the low-budget exploitation classics Night Call Nurses [1972]

and Student Teachers [1973]), director Jonathan Kaplan went on to make the critically and commercially successful films The Accused (1988), Unlawful Entry (1992) and Bad Girls (1994).

Kaplan was also one of the producers/directors for the NBC television series ER.

Black Belt Jones (1974)

Director: Robert Clouse

Writer: Oscar Williams

Cast: Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones), Gloria Hendry (Sydney), Scatman Crothers (Pop Byrd), Eric

Laneuville (Quincy), Alan Weeks (Toppy), Andre Philippe (Don Steffano), Vincent Barbi (Big Tuna), Mel Novak (Blue Eyes), Malik Carter (Pinky), Eddie Smith (Oscar), Alex A Brown

(Plummer), Clarence Barnes (Tango), Earl Jolly Brown (Jelly), Jac Emil (Marv the Butcher), Wayne Musgrove (Brother Blake), Ray C Davis (Bogart #3), Leroy Wofford (Brother Parris

Johnson), Earl Maynard (Junebug), Nate Esformes (Roberts), Esther Sutherland (Lucy), Sid Kaiser

(Ellis), Doug Sides (Millitant), Marla Gibbs (Bartender), Henry Kingi (Billboard worker), Ted Lange (Militant), James Wheaton (Eulogising Minister)

87 mins

Story

Pinky is running a ‘drug’ store out of his pool room. Unfortunately, he has also been skimming a little juice off the top and this gets him in trouble with the local mob. But rather than break Pinky’s legs, or some other Scorsese-esque punishment, mobster Big Tuna makes Pinky an offer he cannot refuse. It seems that Don Steffano wants part of a major real estate deal, and the only thing in his way is Pop Byrd’s Karate School. If Pinky can persuade Pop Byrd to sell then his debt is cancelled. Naturally, Pop Byrd won’t sell and is killed instead.

Enter Black Belt Jones, a special agent attached to either the LAPD or the FBI (it’s never made entirely clear), to try and sort out the rampant crime in the ghetto. Seems Jones has an ‘in’ to this neighbourhood as he was the superstar graduate of Pop Byrd’s dojo. Also onto the scene comes Pop Byrd’s daughter, Sydney, who is equally proficient in karate and one day hopes to try out for the US

Olympic team. She and Black Belt hit it off and take the fight to the mob to keep the school open.

Subtext

There are a couple of interesting things to note in Black Belt Jones. The first occurs early on in the film: Pinky’s drug den/pool room is ‘visited’ by the local black militia led by Ted Lange (later to play Isaac on The Love Boat). Seems the militia is not too keen on Pinky selling drugs to his own people right on their doorstep. Its inclusion, although a frequent trope of Blaxploitation cinema, echoes the social realities of contemporary African-American urban life – there is tension between black militants trying to clean up their streets and African-American profiteers who, although not controlling the local drugs traffic, are certainly key points in its circulation.

We also see the importance of karate within African-American popular culture in this film. More than
just a really cool way to kick the shit out of someone, karate is shown to give black youth a number of opportunities, including a safe place to hang out (at least until Pinky’s boys try to muscle in), physical exercise, mental and physical discipline, and self-respect. This is why the good guys are so willing to defend Pop Byrd’s dojo – they know what it means to the community. The dojo and Pinky’s pool hall
offer contrasting opportunities for kids within South Central LA; the former a positive influence, the latter a negative one.

The third and final point that I think is interesting in the film is the character of Sydney.

Blaxploitation women are something of a contradiction: on the one hand they are super-strong and independent, often more than capable of protecting themselves; and yet, on the other hand, they are almost always subservient to the men in the film. Sydney can certainly hold her own, even against Jones. It is nice to see women as the physical equals of men, even if only for a moment. There’s a great moment in Black Belt Jones which underlies this duality: Jones and Sydney have just finished lunch when he receives a call regarding new information about Pop Byrd’s death. Naturally, Sydney wants to
come along with him, but Jones rebukes her, noting that she needs to stay back and ‘do the dishes’.

Sydney picks up a handgun off the table and shoots four rounds into the plates by the sink and says to Jones, ‘They’re done.’ The problem is that, when the inevitable romance develops between the two, Sydney suddenly becomes ‘girly’, taking a decidedly secondary role in the hysterical final battle at a car wash where everyone involved is overcome with soap suds.

Background

Warner Brothers’ attempt to cash in on the Blaxploitation craze, along with Superfly.

The Verdict

Black Belt Jones is classic kitsch. By 1974, even the exploitation filmmakers knew that this golden goose was pretty much cooked. Director Clouse keeps the film light and jokey, never taking itself too seriously. It is a lot of fun and often laugh-out-loud hysterical. Kelly’s kung-fu whoops sound more like Curly Howard of the Three Stooges than Bruce Lee. At times, the film even becomes positively surreal, as in the attack on Don Steffano’s headquarters by Jones’s specially trained army of kung-fu bikini girls; that alone is worth the rental price, and some of the martial-arts action is really stunning. 4/5

Pam Grier was not the only super-chick in Blaxploitation. If you mention Grier, who made about 11 of
these films, you must also mention Tamara Dobson, who only made two: Cleopatra Jones and its sequel, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975). Although less prolific than Grier, Dobson’s characterisation of Cleopatra Jones made just as much of an impact on the Blaxploitation psyche.

Dobson died in 2006 from pneumonia and multiple sclerosis, the latter of which she was diagnosed with in 2000.

Cleopatra Jones (1973)

Director: Jack Starrett

Writers: Max Julien and Sheldon Keller

Cast: Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones), Shelley Winters (Mommy), Bernie Casey (Reuben), Brenda Sykes (Tiffany), Antonio Fargas (Doodlebug), Dan Frazer (Crawford), Bill McKinney

(Purdy), Stafford Morgan (Sergeant Kert), Michael Warren (Andy), Albert Popwell (Matthew

Johnson), Caro Kenyatta (Melvin Johnson), Esther Rolle (Mrs Johnson), Keith Hamilton (Maxwell

Woodman), Jay Montgomery (Jimmy Beekers), Arnold Dover (Art), Angela Gibbs (Annie)

89 mins

Story

Meet Cleopatra Jones, described by the bad guys who hate her as ‘ten miles of bad road’. She is America’s newest superhero crime fighter. When the film opens, Cleo is in Turkey watching the destruction of an opium poppy field by a United Nations force. The drug field belonged to Mommy, a
sadistic lesbian drug baron. In retribution, Mommy uses her corrupt police connections to arrange a shakedown on the inner-city charity Cleo has founded with her friend Reuben, which helps kids get off smack. When this shakedown fails to stop Cleo, Mommy declares all-out war on her.

Subtext

With the exception of the rather obvious ‘drugs are bad’ message of the film, Cleopatra Jones, like the Pam Grier vigilante movies, 1creates a black woman superhero for audiences to look up to. She takes
care of the black community but, unlike Grier’s heroines, is entirely sanctioned by the Man – she works for an unnamed agency and her badge simply reads ‘Special Agent to the President’. In fact, Cleo is better than the Man, and perhaps the film has the subtext that black women would be better at policing black neighbourhoods than white male cops.

Background

Made by Warner Brothers ( Superfly, Black Belt Jones) to regain their African-American market share in response to the success of the Shaft series and AIP’s films. Max Julien, who gives a great performance in The Mack, discussed above, wrote the film for his then girlfriend Vonetta McGee, although the part ultimately went to Dobson.

The Verdict

Cleopatra Jones is one of my favourite Blaxploitation films, largely because of its silliness and sense of fun. It has a real comic-book quality to it that is completely charming. The cast of supporting characters, particularly Antonio Fargas’s Doodlebug, and Shelley Winters’ Mommy are such over-the-top
performances that they fuel much of this movie’s enjoyment. And how often do you see Shelley Winters
doing an action fight scene?

Cleopatra Jones feels like it is trying to be the ultimate Blaxploitation film: we have the themes of revenge, the drug pushers and the pimps, the outlandish clothes, the corrupt cops and even a couple of kung-fu brothers, Melvin and Matty. But rather than feeling contrived, Cleopatra Jones comes off as more of a parody of the genre, and one even more successful than Keenan Ivory Wayans’ overly self-conscious I’m Gonna Git You Sucka! (1988) or Dolemite. 4/5

Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975)

Director: Charles Bail

Writer: William Tennant

Cast: Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones), Stella Stevens (Bianca Javin/Dragon Lady), Ni Tien (Mi

Ling Fong), Norman Fell (Stanley Nagel), Albert Popwell (Matthew Johnson), Caro Kenyatta

(Melvin Johnson)

96 mins

Story

Cleo travels to Hong Kong to try to find Matthew and Melvin Johnson, the kung-fu brothers, who have
been undercover trying to stop the Asian heroin trade. In HK, Cleo teams up with a band of Chinese private detectives led by Mi Ling. Cleo soon runs afoul of Bianca Javin, the Dragon Lady, the biggest drugs baron in Hong Kong. The film climaxes in a spectacular fight sequence in the titular casino.

Subtext

Very much a film which tried to bring Blaxploitation into the mainstream. This is not really a Blaxploitation movie: the increased budget, as with That Man Bolt, means that any grittiness is lost, and the Hong Kong locations and focus on kung-fu action make this more a big-budget martial-arts film than a Blaxploitation flick.

Background Information

Co-produced with Run-Run Shaw.

The Verdict

While perhaps slightly less fun than the first movie, Casino of Gold still delivers the wonderful silliness one expects from this franchise. Norman Fell (who is always a delight to see on screen) appears as Cleo’s main contact, top and tailing the film. Dobson’s costumes are even more over-the-top, as is the action. But, as I noted previously, the increased budget and Hong Kong locations, while they may have increased the film’s overall marketability, diminish its Blaxploitation credentials. 3.5/5

Friday Foster (1975)

Director: Arthur Marks

Writer: Orville H Hampton

Cast: Pam Grier (Friday Foster), Yaphet Kotto (Colt Hawkins), Godfrey Cambridge (Ford Malotte), Thalmus Rasulala (Blake Tarr), Eartha Kitt (Madame Rena), Jim Backus (Enos Griffith),

Scatman Crothers (Noble Franklin), Ted Lange (Fancy Dexter), Tierre Turner (Cleve), Paul

Benjamin (Senator David Lee Hart), Jason Bernard (Charles Foley), Ed Cambridge (Lieutenant Jake Wayne), Julius Harris (Monk Riley), Rosalind Miles (Clorils Boston), Carl Weathers (Yarbro)

90 mins

Story

While on assignment to photograph the elusive African-American millionaire, Blake Tarr, Glance
Magazine’s rookie photographer Friday Foster witnesses Tarr assassinated by three gunmen. When her best friend Clorils falls down dead in the middle of a fashion show, Friday realises that Clorils is somehow involved. With Colt Hawkins, a with-it private eye (one of Yaphet Kotto’s few good-guy roles
in Blaxploitation movies), she investigates the murders and they are drawn into a web of intrigue that implicates the elite of African-American politics, including Tarr, Senator David Lee Hart and the Reverend Noble Franklin.

Subtext

The red herrings in this mystery are quite dense, but once these fish have swum away, what remains is a somewhat interesting dimension regarding black politics in the mid-1970s. The Reverend Franklin’s retreat, Jericho, is the setting for what at first seems like a sinister power grab by Senator Hart, but is in reality a unity conference of all the black leaders in the United States. This meeting is sabotaged by an army of blackface-painted, fake-Afro-wearing whities, funded by a white Southern (and, of course, racist) businessman, Enos Griffith (intentional echoes of the racist filmmaker DW Griffith?), who feels threatened by any kind of black unity. In one go, according to Griffith’s plans, he can wipe out the whole of America’s black leadership. And, just in case you missed it all the way through the movie, Friday notes at the climax of the film that black folks can stick together when it is necessary.

Background

The screenplay is based on a 1970s comic strip.

The Verdict

Like director Arthur Marks’ Bucktown and Detroit 9000, Friday Foster is dull and pretty lifeless. The film features an array of cameo performances that are all wasted, including Jim Backus, Godfrey Cambridge, Thalmus Rasulala, Scatman Crothers and, most appalling of all, the great Eartha Kitt.

Everyone in this film looks bored. By 1975, Blaxploitation’s star was truly on the decline. 1/5

Leaving Blaxploitation Films once and for all after Friday Foster, Grier turned her attention to more high-profile projects. The first of these was Drum (1976), the disastrous sequel to Mandingo (discussed above), where she tried to distance herself from her Blaxploitation persona by having herself listed in the credits as ‘Pamela’ Grier – the extended name seemingly indicating an extended acting range. She
also appeared in such late-1970s films as Greased Lightning (1977) with her then-boyfriend, Richard Pryor, and on television in Roots: the Next Generation (1979), the sequel to Roots (1976). Most of the films she made in the 1980s and 1990s were fairly forgettable, like Tough Enough (1983) and Steven Seagal’s debut film Above the Law (1988). But in interviews Grier has said she is most proud of some of the supporting roles she’s done in films like Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981) and Mario Van Peebles’

Posse (1993).

More recently, film-buff filmmakers have been casting her in roles directly intended to echo her Blaxploitation persona. As well as Jackie Brown and Original Gangstas, Tim Burton cast her in Mars
Attacks! as the ex-wife of Jim Brown. Grier is still working as hard as she ever did for AIP. Recent projects include a documentary about herself for the Lifetime Cable network in the States, the cult hit Jawbreaker (1999) and two films for John Carpenter: Escape from LA (1996) and Ghosts of Mars (2001).

I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to see those Blaxploitation films which sought to include African-Americans within the law, as cops or special agents, or even as photojournalists, as attempts to integrate black cinema into the Hollywood mainstream. With the exception of Superfly and Willie
Dynamite, the baadasssss attitude of the films in the first chapter do not seem to have been attractive to studio producers; and Superfly appears to be the biggest anomaly here, as Willie himself is presented as an anti-hero who is ultimately redeemed on the right side of the law. With greater studio involvement in Blaxploitation, with films like the Cleopatra Jones movies and Bolt, not to mention the Shaft series, the heroes had to be kosher. I guess it is hard to ‘stick it to the Man’ when ‘the Man’ is signing your pay cheques. Far be it for me to criticise this, however; as Fred Williamson has already been quoted as saying, at least black actors were getting pay cheques!

GENRE FILMS

Is Blaxploitation a genre? Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure; on the one hand, as we’ve seen so far, many Blaxploitation films, particularly those in the ‘Baadasssss’ category, where marginal characters ‘stick it to the Man’, display a variety of styles and themes but are unified by that anti-hero rebellion against society. On the flip side to the argument, one could just as easily argue that Blaxploitation was an American film movement from the first half of the 1970s, which drew in a variety of different genres
like the cop thriller and the spy movie. In this chapter, I want to explore three other genres: the horror film, the kung-fu movie and the western, all three of which have been ‘Blaxed’ to some degree in this period.

HORROR

Even before I first saw Shaft or Black Belt Jones, I had seen American International Pictures classics like Blacula, and Blaxploitation horror first got me interested in this genre. Probably because I have been, since the womb, a devout horror fan.

Blacula (1972)

Director: William Crain

Writers: Raymond Koenig and Joan Torres

Cast: William Marshall (Mamuwalde/Blacula), Vonetta McGee (Luva/Tina), Denise Nicholas (Michelle), Thalmus Rasulala (Dr Gordon Thomas), Gordon Pinsent (Lieutenant Jack Peters),

Charles McCauley (Dracula), Emily Yancy (Nancy), Lance Taylor Sr (Swenson), Ted Harris

(Bobby McCoy), Rick Metzler (Billy Schaffer), Ji-Tu Cumbuka (Skillet), Logan Field (Sergeant Barnes), Ketty Lester (Juanita Jones), Elisha Cook Jr (Sam)

93 mins

Story

Prince Mamuwalde (Marshall) is cursed by the legendary Count Dracula to live for eternity as a vampire when the prince’s mission to stop the slave trade runs into a snag in Transylvania. Jump forward 200 years and two gay interior designers from Los Angeles buy up the furniture from Castle Dracula, including Mamuwalde’s coffin, and take it all back to the States. Needless to say, the African prince awakens hungry and begins to acclimatise himself to California life in the early 1970s. As ex-sanguinated bodies start piling up, Lieutenant Jack Peters (Pinsent) and Dr Gordon Thomas (Rasulala), begin to suspect that there may be a vampire on the loose in the city. Meanwhile, Mamuwalde meets Tina (McGee), Dr Thomas’s girlfriend’s sister, who appears to be the reincarnation of the ancient Prince’s wife, Luva, murdered by Dracula, and she succumbs to Blacula’s charms.

Subtext

What makes Blacula a cut above most of the Blaxploitation films of the time is that Mamuwalde is not really a villainous character; his curse was imposed on him by white aristocracy (Dracula). Slavery creates monsters, and Blacula is the legacy of that history. While Mamuwalde does kill, and needs to kill to survive, he is presented as more of a tragic figure than a monster, and it is the white hegemony that sees him as a de facto monster. Like many other Blaxploitation heroes, Mamuwalde ‘sticks it to the Man’, specifically the police; while Dr Thomas, as a kind of Black Van Helsing, ‘works with the Man’, teaming up with Lt Peters to catch Blacula.

Background

Blacula’s Blaxploitation pedigree is right on screen: stars like Marshall and McGee appear in a number of these films, and the almost ubiquitous Rasulala is always great to watch. Perhaps the strangest bit of casting is that of the Newfoundland-born Gordon Pinsent, a Canadian actor better known for doing small independent films than exploitation flicks. The opening credit sequence is pretty funky too, with a great score by Gene Page, the arranger of most of Barry White’s hits, and the composer for H.R.Pufnstuf (1969) and Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970). The film also won the Best Horror Film 1972 award from the Academy of Horror Films and Science Fiction Films.

The Verdict

Like so many Blaxploitation movies, Blacula is more interesting to talk about than to actually watch. It is certainly a curiosity but, despite the smoking Gene Page soundtrack and cool opening credit sequence, everything else is pretty run of the mill. That said, of the few Blaxploitation monsters discussed in this section, Mamuwalde demonstrates the distinct baadasssss attitude we demand of these films. 2/5

It is hardly surprising that, even with a medium-sized hit like Blacula, AIP would quickly produce a sequel, which they did the following year.

Scream Blacula Scream (1973)

Director: Bob Kelljan

Writers: Raymond Koenig and Joan Torres

Cast: William Marshall (Mamuwalde/Blacula), Don Mitchell (Justin), Pam Grier (Lisa), Michael

Conrad (Sheriff Dunlop), Richard Lawson (Willis), Lynne Moody (Denny), Janee Michelle

(Gloria), Barbara Rhoades (Elaine), Bernie Hamilton (Ragman), Arnold Williams (Louis), Van

Kirksey (Professor Walston)

93 mins

Story

When the local Mama Loa (voodoo queen) dies, who is going to succeed her remains a bit of a mystery.

On the one hand is Lisa, her faithful and devout apprentice, while on the other is her ambitious son, Willis. Through a unanimous decision, sweet Lisa gets the nod, and a furious Willis decides he will have his revenge. Through another disgraced voodoo disciple, he obtains some very powerful bones that he uses in a ritual. No awards for predicting the next step: the bones are actually those of Mamuwalde, and the vamp returns to life. He turns Willis into his vampire minion and then falls in love with Lisa. It is through his discovery of Lisa’s voodoo that Mamuwalde finds an opportunity to end his suffering and he convinces Lisa to conduct a ritual that will release his tormented soul. Unfortunately, LAPD’s finest cock everything up, and the old vamp has to be staked the traditional way.

Subtext

There is little in the way of subtext to this film. It is, more or less, a faithful version of Universal’s or Hammer’s Dracula – as opposed to Bram Stoker’s. The one vaguely interesting note is the space given to exploring voodoo. While not ethnographically accurate, it does at least recognise that belief traditions not based on the Judeo-Christian Bible are not automatically evil. However, the voodoo angle is better played out in Sugar Hill (discussed below).

The Verdict

This is a pretty poor outing even for AIP. It is not so much that we’ve seen it all before, or that it doesn’t offer anything new to black culture, or even Blaxploitation cinema; it is just boring. Television director Bob Kelljan paces the film at a tortoise’s crawl, making 90 minutes flow like 120. 1/5

Blackenstein, the Black Frankenstein (1973)

Director: William A Levey

Writer: Frank R Saletri

Cast: John Hart (Dr Stein), Ivory Stone (Dr Winifred Walker), Joe De Sue (Eddie Turner/The Monster), Roosevelt Jackson (Malcomb, the servant), Nick Bolin (Bruno Strager), Andrea King (Eleanor), Bob Brophy (Sadistic Orderly), Don Brodie (Capt Tucker), James Cousar (Lt Jim

Jackson), Cardella Di Milo (Herself), Yvonne Robinson (Receptionist), Andy-C (Comedian), Karin

Lind (Mrs Wayne), Liz Renay (Nelson’s Bed-mate), Gerald Soucie (Nelson)

87 mins

Story

Dr Winifred Walker returns to LA two years after completing her PhD in physics. She goes to see her
old mentor, Dr Stein, at his gothic-like mansion/laboratory in Beverly Hills. She is hoping that the Nobel Prizewinning scientist can help Eddie, her fiancé who has lost both arms and both legs in Vietnam by stepping on a landmine. It seems that Dr Stein has perfected a DNA formula that allows for the reattachment of limbs even from different donors. Dr Stein readily agrees to help, and Dr Winnie becomes his lab assistant. However, Dr Stein’s butler, Malcomb develops a crush on Dr Winnie and, while assisting with Eddie’s limb-replacement therapy, sabotages the DNA formula. This sends the now-monstrous Eddie on a murderous rampage, with a particular preference for buxom women (white
and black).

Subtext

Believe it or not, there are actually some interesting dimensions to Blackenstein. For example, before being taken on as one of Dr Stein’s experiments, we see Eddie in a veteran’s hospital. The conditions are appalling and his simple request for some ice cream is met with scorn and verbal abuse by a sadistic orderly. This reflects, in quite a daring way for 1973, the treatment of Vietnam veterans, particularly black veterans. The subtext of Eddie’s later becoming, quite literally, a monster could be that the Vietnam War made monsters of men. In fact, the sadistic orderly is the monster’s first victim on his rampage.

There is also a potentially racist reading to the film: the sabotaged DNA formula that Eddie is injected with causes him to become more primitive, growing in stature and developing (somehow) a big
square afro! Monstrous Eddie is then presented stereotypically as the animalistic black man, particularly in his desire for white women.

In terms of baadasssss-ness I’ve been demanding of Blaxploitation, Blackenstein is not entirely a million miles from the Sweetback: both have been ‘created’ by the white man, and their respective rampages can be seen as black rebellions in search of total emancipation. While Eddie, in Blackenstein, tries to be compliant to white America, being the good little soldier going off to Vietnam, we see very clearly what it has got him: absolutely nothing. The Blackenstein monster’s rampage, despite the limits of the horror genre and the story this film is trying to tell, can be seen as ‘sticking it to the Man’ who literally created him. So perhaps it’s not inappropriate to have Dr Stein as a white man.

Soundtrack

Strangely enough, this flick has a really cool blues soundtrack featuring Cardella Di Milo.

The Verdict

First of all, one pet peeve of mine: Dr Stein is white. Why, then, is this film called Blackenstein – which is the name of the scientist, not the name of the monster? Other than that, this is not even a B-grade picture. There is a certain degree of crap tolerance one needs when exploring Blaxploitation films, but this one challenges even that level. This is not the worst I have ever seen, however. The final half hour or so, when the monster is on his rampage and becomes fascinated with the intestines he likes to pull from his victims’ abdomens, is worth a look. 1/5

Abby (1974)

Director: William Girdler

Writers: William Girdler and Cornell G Layne

Cast: Carol Speed (Abby Williams), William Marshall (Bishop Garnet Williams), Terry Carter (Reverend Emmett Williams), Austin Stoker (Detective Cass Potter), Juanita Moore (Mama

Potter), Charles Kissinger (Dr Hennings), Elliott Moffitt (Russell), Nathan Cook (Taft Hassan), Nancy Lee Owens (Mrs Wiggins), Bob Holt (The Demon’s Voice), William P Bradford (Doctor

Rogers), Claude Fulkerson (Benny)

89 mins

Story

Bishop Garnet Williams, PhD, is off to Nigeria to study Yoruba religious folklore. On an archaeological dig, he discovers a sealed box with the image of Eshu, the Yoruba trickster god, on it. As all horror-movie archaeologists must do, he opens the box and, Pandora-like, releases the trapped spirit of the god.

Back in the States, Bishop Williams’s daughter-in-law, Abby Williams, has not only just received her
marriage-counselling licence, but also, unwittingly, the god itself; Eshu possesses young Abby and makes her do things that would make most good church wives blush. Abby’s husband, Reverend Emmett Williams, is at his wit’s end and calls Daddy in Africa to come and exorcise his daughter-in-law.

Subtext

Obviously, Abby is a Blaxploitation rip-off of The Exorcist but, before I deal with that issue, there is one rather interesting aspect that is Abby’s unique contribution to the ‘possession’ genre. Rather than having the demon possess a little girl, as in The Exorcist, Eshu possesses an adult woman, albeit a rather childlike and innocent one. Abby has adult relationships and responsibilities that, in her possessed state, get subverted. For example, as a licensed marriage counsellor, Eshu-by-way-of-Abby is able to tell one pathetic couple that their real problems have nothing to do with ‘communicating’ or ‘sharing their feelings with one another’, but that one or the other of them is lousy in bed. Eshu, as trickster figure, like the pimps in other Blaxploitation films, is able to play around with the social roles we take for granted and bestow greater truths than we mere mortals can. The voice of Eshu may be subversive and
disruptive but, unlike the Devil in The Exorcist, what it says is ultimately true. Another example of this comes when Abby’s elderly neighbour, Mrs Wiggins, comes to visit. Eshu once again tells it like it is: Mrs Wiggins is a hypocrite who invented her widowed status to cover up the fact that, not only was she never married to Mr Wiggins, but that he buggered off in the middle of the night after a one-night-stand with her. For a minister’s wife, having such a demon inside can be disruptive indeed – particularly in such a hypocritical and pandering culture as the one director Girdler depicts.

The horror film is highly ambivalent, as is Blaxploitation, which makes a film like Abby doubly ambivalent: on the one hand, Abby Williams, filled with the baadasssss spirit of Eshu, is able to rebel against the white Christianity of her husband and father-in-law; on the other, it is that same white Christianity and patriarchy which ‘cures’ Abby, returning her to her original subservient role. The question is ultimately whether or not Abby’s rebellion/possession (by an African spirit/god) is sufficiently baadasssss to offset the film’s conclusion.

The Verdict

Regardless of any analysis of the film, Abby is not a good movie – by any stretch of the imagination.

Granted, the copy of Abby I watched was heavily bootlegged, making the actual watching difficult. But beyond that, and apart from a few comic moments like the possessed marriage counsellor sequence, or
the Mrs Wiggins scene, the movie is fairly dull. No outright gore or wretch-inducing sequences, no gratuitous sex or nudity, and even the profanity is fairly tame. 1/5

Abby is probably most noteworthy for the cultural phenomenon it created when it was first released in 1974. After only a few weeks in theatres, Warner Brothers threatened to sue AIP on the grounds that they had ripped off their blockbuster, The Exorcist. Although the two films differ in many respects, there are whole sequences of dialogue directly lifted from the earlier picture. In fairness to director Girdler, he knew what he was doing. As he noted a few years later in an interview: ‘I know what my
other pictures were. I know what was bad about them. I also know that they were pretty good when you
consider how inexpensively they were made. Anybody should be able to make a good movie if they spend $20 million the way they did on The Exorcist. Comparatively speaking, for what we spent on it, Abby was probably a better picture than The Exorcist.’ Girdler was, in many respects, a true maverick filmmaker – like Melvin Van Peebles. He consciously ripped off other films on fractions of their original budgets to prove, in part, that Hollywood was wasting money on movies that could, for what
they ultimately delivered, be made much more cheaply.

A few more words about Kentucky filmmaker William Girdler are in order here. He had his start producing and directing two drive-in splatter movies, Asylum of Satan and the vaguely Ed Gein-inspired Three on a Meathook (both 1972). Although neither of these films did terribly well at the box office, they did succeed as audition films for Samuel Z Arkoff at AIP. While at AIP, Girdler did three Blaxploitation flicks – Abby, The Zebra Killer (1974) and Sheba, Baby (1975) with Pam Grier.

However, my real affection for Girdler stems from what he did after he left Blaxploitation filmmaking: some of the first horror pictures I saw at the cinema as a child in the 1970s were his and, although they were utterly dreadful films, I still feel a certain nostalgia for that period of innocent movie-going.

Girdler made the Jaws rip-off, Grizzly (1976), Day of the Animals (1977) and perhaps Tony Curtis’s lowest career point, The Manitou (1978). And I still remember seeing these movies, at the ages of 8, 9
and 10, and thinking that life just didn’t get any better. William Girdler died in 1978, aged 30, in a helicopter accident in the Philippines, not long after finishing work on The Manitou. He is buried in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

Blaxploitation produced some other horror films, and while copies were unavailable to me at the time
of writing, they are worth noting in passing. Lee ( The Black Gestapo) Frost’s dubious classic The Thing with Two Heads (1972) sees a dying racist, played by Ray Milland, having his head grafted onto the body of black football star Rosey Grier (Pam’s cousin), a convict on death row. Samuel Arkoff’s AIP
produced both Sugar Hill (discussed below) and The Thing with Two Heads, as well as Blacula, Scream
Blacula Scream, Blackenstein and Abby. However, in the immediate post-Blaxploitation period, Blacula director William Crain tried to do it on his own with another classic monster in blackface, Dr Black, Mr
Hyde (1976). In this film, Bernie Casey plays a doctor who discovers a formula to regenerate dying liver cells. Unfortunately, after trying the formula on himself, he turns into a murderous albino with a taste for human blood.

Ganja & Hess (1973)

Director/Writer: Bill Gunn

Cast: Duane Jones (Dr Hess Green), Marlene Clark (Ganja), Bill Gunn (George), Sam Waymon (Reverend Williams), Leonard Jackson (Archie)

110 mins

Story

Highly convoluted story about a medical doctor who contracts a strange disease causing him to crave
human blood through being stabbed by a cursed dagger. Hess has learned to mollify his desires by feasting at blood banks, rather than taking lives, but his own life becomes complicated when he hires the highly self-destructive George to be his assistant. After George commits suicide, Hess falls in love with his assistant’s widow, the seductive Ganja. The two marry, but Hess has infected Ganja with his bloodlust.

Subtext

The investors in this film were expecting a Blaxploitation vampire movie, but what director Gunn presented them with, at least in his director’s cut, was a high-art meditation on contemporary black identity informed by rediscovery of historical rituals and cultural throwbacks to early African belief traditions. The equation made between vampiric blood-as-communion and Christian rituals is made explicit through this dark and dreamlike film. Ganja and Hess, as vampires (although the film never really uses this term), demand that the audience consider what resurrection without Christian redemption might mean. The idea that vampirism is a disease is not wholly original, but having that disease be African in origin, and having it so radically alter both Hess and Ganja’s contemporary identities, is a provocative idea, particularly at the height of the Black Power movements in the early 1970s.

Background Information

The film was heavily re-cut down to a more Grindhouse-friendly length of 78 minutes and re-titled

‘Blood Couple’. The cinematographer was James Hinton, who was one of the first black directors of photography recognised by the Hollywood studios; Hinton died in 2006 at the age of 90. The film’s chief star, Duane Jones, is probably best remembered as Ben, the protagonist in Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead (1968). Jones died in 1988.

The Verdict

Ganja & Hess is a difficult film, and I’m not one particularly partial to art films, which this categorically is. There are times when the beauty of the film is haunting, to be sure. But too often it is overly ponderous and heavy handed. If one is looking for a ‘Blaxploitation horror movie’, this is not going to satisfy you. However, it marks a significant point after Sweetback in Black independent cinema. 4/5

Sugar Hill (1974)

Director: Paul Maslansky

Writer: Tim Kelly

Cast: Marki Bey (Diana Hill), Larry Johnson (Langson), Robert Quarry (Morgan), Richard Lawson (Valentine), Charles Robinson (Fabulous), Zara Cully (Mama Maitresse), Don Pedro

Colley (Baron Samedi), Betty Anne Reese (Celeste), J Randall Bell (Professor Parkhurst)

91 mins

Story

Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill owns a voodoo-themed nightclub with her lover and partner Langston. Mob boss Morgan wants the club and murders Langston to get it, thinking Diana will be a pushover. Diana is not a pushover, however, and, instead of signing the club over to Morgan, consults with the voodoo priestess, Mama Maitresse, on how best to get revenge. Maitresse summons the voodoo god Baron Samedi, who
helps Diana raise an army of zombies to do her bidding. Meanwhile, the zombies’ victims’ bodies keep
turning up and Detective Valentine, suspecting that the supernatural may be involved, consults with a voodoo expert in the guise of Professor Parkhurst, little suspecting that the person controlling the zombies is his ex-girlfriend, Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill.

Subtext

Basically, Sugar Hill is Foxy Brown with zombies. But the evocation of New Orleans raises several new subtextual issues that are largely limited to this film. Firstly, despite its being a solid six years after George Romero changed the zombie world forever with Night of the Living Dead, Sugar Hill’s zombies are not the gut-munching quasi-cannibalistic monsters we might expect, but are closer to the Haitian/

Louisianan zombie of voodoo lore. So we have a black horror film rooted in the cultural discourse of
black folk religion. Secondly, and this I find particularly interesting, the voodoo expert that Detective Valentine consults at the university, Professor Parkhurst, is white (and an anthropologist), so constantly lurking in the background here is white authority determining the understanding of black folk religion.

Finally, in payment for Baron Samedi’s services, Diana gives him Celeste, Morgan’s truly annoying blonde girlfriend; the film ends with a laughing Samedi carrying off the screaming Celeste, evoking the horror of miscegenation. So for a mediocre Blaxploitation horror film, Sugar Hill is particularly dense in its subtext.

Background Information

Writer Tim Kelly wrote the much underrated Black Fist, as well as this film, and this is Maslansky’s only stint as director; however, he would go on to produce all of the Police Academy movies. Charles Robinson, who has a small role in this film (and a larger one in The Black Gestapo), would later go on to star as Mack Robinson in the TV series Night Court and Zara Cully is perhaps best known to fans of American television in the 1970s as George Jefferson’s manipulative mother on The Jeffersons.

The Verdict

Sugar Hill is an okay Blaxploitation horror film, offering nothing terribly spectacular other than a disembodied chicken-foot attack, which is weird if not downright cool. 3/5

Like Abby, Sugar Hill evokes black folk religion as a means of empowerment against two different manifestations of ‘the Man’s’ power – the Christian church and the law, respectively. Even Ganja &
Hess, by having the vampire virus originate in Africa, further liberates black America from the strictures of white America. Although Eshu is defeated in Abby, Diana’s revenge in Sugar Hill is completed, and the vampires of Ganja & Hess are likewise undefeated. So, again, we see the baadasssss-ness of these Blaxploitation monsters, ‘sticking it to the Man’; and, although they may ultimately be vanquished in the films (but, significantly, not always), their spirit of rebellion lives on.

Tales from the Hood (1995)

Director: Rusty Cundieff

Writers: Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott

Cast: Clarence Williams III (Mr Simms), Joe Torry (Stack), De’aundre Bonds (Ball), Samuel Monroe Jr (Bulldog), Wings Hauser (Strom), Tom Wright (Martin Moorehouse), Anthony Griffith

(Clarence), Michael Massee (Newton), Duane Whitaker (Billy), David Alan Grier (Carl), Brandon

Hammond (Walter), Rusty Cundieff (Richard), Paula Jai Parker (Sissy), Corbin Bernsen (Duke Metger), Roger Guenveur Smith (Rhodie), Art Evans (Eli), Rosalind Cash (Dr Cushing)

98 mins

Story

Tales from the Hood is an anthology film – four short horror stories with a framing narrative. The framing narrative, entitled ‘Welcome to My Mortuary’, tells of three gang-bangers, Stack, Ball and Bulldog, who are summoned to Mr Simms’ Funeral Parlour. They have been told that Mr Simms has found a stock of drugs – or, as everyone in the film refers to it, ‘the shit’ – in his back alley and the boys arrive to pick it up. Whilst there, they are told stories about the various corpses lying in state at the parlour.

The first of these stories, called ‘Rogue Cop Revelation’, is about Clarence, a young and naïve African-American rookie cop, who witnesses the brutal beating of Martin Moorehouse, a black activist.

Moorehouse has been making complaints against various Los Angeles police officers after witnessing
them selling drugs in black neighbourhoods. Once the police identify Moorehouse, they beat him into
unconsciousness, inject him with heroin, stash more drugs in his car and drive it, with Moorehouse inside, off the pier. One year later, Clarence has resigned from the force and found solace in a whisky bottle. He is haunted, not only by the memory of what he saw his fellow officers do, and which he did nothing about, but also by the ghostly voice of Moorehouse calling him to action. On the anniversary of his death, Moorehouse tells Clarence to lure the officers responsible to his gravesite. As they desecrate his resting place by urinating on it, Moorehouse rises from the dead as a zombie and goes after the brutal cops, killing them one after another.

The second story, entitled ‘Boys Do Get Bruised’, is about Walter, a frightened little boy who is being terrorised at home by an abusive stepfather, Carl, whom Walter draws as a monster. His schoolteacher, Richard Garvey, is concerned about him, particularly when he discovers that Walter believes, through a kind of sympathetic magic, that if he draws pictures of those who hurt him and then destroys the pictures, the real person will be destroyed too. This magical belief turns out to be literally true.

The third story, ‘KKK Comeuppance’, tells the story of Duke Metger, a former Klan member, who is
running for state governor – a character modelled on real-life Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke. His base of operations is a former plantation house that was the site of a massive massacre of slaves upon emancipation. An old voodoo woman, taking pity on the lost souls of the massacred slaves, had channelled their souls into a series of small dolls that she had made – dolls which have never been found. One by one these dolls begin emerging and attacking Metger, driving him insane.

The final story is called ‘Hard Core Convert’, although ‘A Clockwork Gangsta’ might have been a better title. Jerome Johns, a hard-core gang-banger, is shot down, but his life is saved by the quick response of the LAPD. He is given life imprisonment for the murders he has committed. While in prison, he is given the opportunity to join Dr Cushing’s new rehabilitation programme – a high-tech behaviour modification programme – where his own gang-banging actions are placed in juxtaposition with the actions of the Klan and other extreme right, neo-Nazi organisations. He is made to confront the actions of his past life.

We return to the frame narrative for the finale, the not-terribly-surprising revelation that Stock, Ball and Bulldog are actually dead and, through these stories, are being asked to confront their own lives before being finally committed to Hell itself.

Subtext

All five of the narratives in Tales from the Hood at some level deal with the concepts of justice and personal responsibility. These are discourses that other Blaxploitation horror movies seem to avoid. And yet, in keeping with the Blaxploitation ethos of baadasssss-ness, each of these stories further reflects that spirit of rebelling against ‘the Man’.

In ‘Rogue Cop Revelation’, the subtext brings to the fore a revenge fantasy against police brutality
and corruption. In fact, this is one theme that plays through most Blaxploitation films, as we’ve seen.

There are all kinds of revenge scenarios against corrupt and racist cops, from Superfly through Coffy to Dolemite. The difference here is that the agency of revenge is a zombie – albeit a heroic zombie. ‘Rogue Cop Revelation’ pushes the envelope further than these other movies. For example, during the severe beating of Moorehouse, the soundtrack brings up Billie Holiday’s pre-civil rights anthem ‘Strange Fruit’, with its powerful imagery of lynched African-Americans hanging from trees. This use of the music brings the historical treatment of blacks into the present day, thereby presenting the argument that not enough has changed since civil rights. Perhaps this is what Crain was trying to bring up in Blacula, although I’m not sure he succeeded as profoundly as Cundieff does here. There are other social commentary touches, too – the last of the cops to die is Clarence’s partner and he is crucified, quite literally, with used syringes (a rather nice ironic touch). But the big, and completely unsubtle, commentary that Tales from the Hood brings out in this story is that, once all the corrupt police officers are dead, the zombie Moorehouse turns on Clarence and admonishes him with, ‘Where were you when I needed you, brother?’ Clarence, although he didn’t turn a blind eye to Moorehouse’s ultimately fatal beating, and did try to stop it, would never have broken the police code of silence – he would never have ratted out another cop. Zombie Moorehouse’s admonition is directed not only at Clarence, but at
the audience, demanding that they interrogate their own sense of personal responsibility, whether cop or civilian.

In ‘Boys Do Get Bruised’, the serious issue of child abuse is raised and the theme of justice, which
runs throughout the film, is made crystal clear: Walter cannot be safe within his own house and his mother is powerless to protect her child, so it takes the supernatural agency again, in the guise of the magical drawings, to punish the ‘monster’. This time the secondary theme of personal responsibility is taken from the perspective of the teacher, Richard Garvey, who must choose how involved he wants to
be in what is clearly a case of child and spousal abuse. Yet, unlike Clarence in ‘Rogue Cop Revelation’, Garvey gets involved and is well and truly bloodied by the bully Carl.

The themes of justice and personal responsibility are perhaps clearest in ‘KKK Comeuppance’ –
racist scumbags who use the American government as a podium for their vile ideas need to be eaten alive by small dolls. I think that is fairly obvious. In the final assault on Metger, he literally wraps himself in the American flag like a security blanket. Metger is privately unapologetic for his racist views. He may claim, in front of the cameras, to be trying to overcome the history of American racism, but at no point does he take any personal responsibility for his, or his race’s, atrocities towards blacks.

Through the supernatural agency of the dolls, Metger is made to confront this past and his own culpability.

In the gangsta story ‘Hard Core Convert’, any subtlety is thrown right out the window and we are directly confronted with the film’s didacticism. Upon entering Dr Cushing’s programme, Jerome is placed in a cell next to a tattooed neo-Nazi. The Nazi is quick to point out that they are one and the same: they both enjoy killing black people. The film asks: what is the difference between the two? That connection is made even clearer when Dr Cushing puts Jerome into a kind of virtual-reality machine,
bombarding him with juxtaposed images of gang violence and Klan and Nazi atrocities, all to the sound of a gangsta rap track. Just in case anyone in the audience missed the point, Dr Cushing screams over the blaring soundtrack: ‘Cain was the first murderer! He murdered his own brother! How many brothers
are you going to murder?’ Jerome is next put into a sensory deprivation experiment, where ghostly images from his life, particularly the victims of his murders, come back to haunt him. These demand that he confronts his past actions. When Jerome balks and says that he wasn’t responsible, Dr Cushing again underlines the themes in a big, bold, felt-tipped pen. ‘Who is responsible?’ she asks.

Likewise, when we get to the concluding sequence of the framing narrative and the boys not only discover that they are dead, but on their way to Hell, they, like Jerome, are still voicing their innocence, insisting that they, too, are not responsible.

All of the stories in Tales from the Hood reflect the kind of baadasssss attitude of rebellion which I am arguing is the backbone of Blaxploitation cinema: zombie Moorehouse embodies the impossibility
of killing the spirit of black activism; Walter’s magical drawings rebel against both the family (which is abusive) and the education system (which is too simplistic); the dolls which destroy Metger are also attacking a political system which seems to reward rich white racists; and even the
medical/psychological experiments inflicted on Jerome by Dr Cushing (who potentially represents ‘the

Man’ as an embodiment of law and order – she works for the prison system) is potentially turning the
tables on a kind of faux-baadasssss myth of contemporary ‘gangsta’ culture, in much the same way that Larry Cohen’s Original Gangstas argued. Even in the framing narrative, the Devil, who is the ultimate baadasssss trickster figure, is able to win the day.

Background

Spike Lee was executive producer. In an interview, producer and co-author Darin Scott said that, in the past few years, if any horror movie had black people in it, the film was more of a comedy than a horror picture. He and co-writer and director Rusty Cundieff wanted to make a horror movie that was both socially relevant and, they hoped, scary too.

The Verdict

They succeeded. The movie is scary in places, particularly the ‘KKK Comeuppance’ story – those dolls
are really creepy. So what if the movie is didactic and less than subtle? Sometimes these issues need to be expressed didactically and unsubtly. These things need to be said, and Tales from the Hood does so very well, with little room for questioning. 5/5

KUNG-FU

Jim Kelly found fame as the International Middle Weight Karate Champion in 1971. His youth and good looks, as well as his skill in martial arts, were quickly recognised by Hollywood and within a year he had a contract with Warner Brothers. As Kelly himself tells it, he was walking on the Warners’ lot when a car pulled up and two men jumped out – one was producer Raymond Chow and the other Bruce

Lee. They needed a last-minute replacement for a black American karate expert for their film Enter the
Dragon and Kelly was perfect for the role. Kelly followed up his success in Enter the Dragon with the classic Blaxploitation film, Black Belt Jones, again directed by Robert Clouse.

Enter the Dragon (1973)

Director: Robert Clouse

Writer: Michael Allin

Cast: Bruce Lee (Lee), John Saxon (Roper), Jim Kelly (Williams), Ahna Capri (Tania), Shih Kien (Han), Robert Wall (Oharra), Angela Mao (Su Lin), Betty Chung (Mei Ling), Geoffrey Weeks (Braithwaite), Peter Archer (Parsons), Ho Lee Yan (Old Man)

94 mins

Story

Mr Han is a renegade Shaolin monk who has become a drugs lord. His only contact with the outside world is a massive private martial-arts competition he holds every three years on his private island off the coast of Hong Kong. Lee is sent by an unnamed British agency to investigate Han’s operation and to compete in the competition, as well as to avenge the death of his sister at the hands of Han’s thugs.

Williams is one of the contestants in the competition, and the only African-American.

Subtext

Although not a Blaxploitation film, Enter the Dragon had an amazing impact on African-American audiences in the early 1970s, and Jim Kelly was one of the reasons for this. Also, Enter the Dragon, as the archetypal kung-fu movie, set the frame for Kelly’s later films, which attempted to recreate the success of the earlier work. Proper academic research needs to be done on why karate was so popular
among black male youths, but, in the absence of such work, allow me a few ideas/guesses/hypotheses:1) The vast number of young black men who had served in Vietnam had come into contact with this art
form and were eager to continue and propagate it in the States; 2) The martial arts give one discipline, structure and spirituality, in addition to enabling one to defend oneself – a major theme in a number of Blaxploitation films – and, therefore, karate gave black youth an active and positive alternative to the drugs and street crime that plagued the inner cities; 3) The martial arts do not depend upon brute strength or size, and therefore create an equality between opponents that does not exist in other forms of street defence; 4) It is non-white – and therefore, perhaps subconsciously (or not), an acceptable forum in which to kick whitey’s ass.

The Verdict

Although I hate the term ‘all-time classic’ – an exceptionally vague term at best – Enter the Dragon really is. Watching Bruce Lee in action, one is caught up in the exhilaration and you can’t help marvelling at his physical abilities. The plot is very basic and serves more to give really cool kung-fu sequences a platform. And yet, whether in spite its narrative simplicity or because of it, the film still works – even in our post-John Woo world of action expectations. 5/5

Black Samurai (1977)

Director: Al Adamson

Writer: B Readick, based on the Black Samurai novels by Marc Olden

Cast: Jim Kelly (Robert Sand), Bill Roy (Janicot), Essie Lin Chia (Toki)

82 mins

Story

Robert Sand is a special agent for DRAGON (it is never explained what DRAGON stands for –
ideologically or acronymically), whose holiday is interrupted so that he can go after the evil Janicot, an international black-magic guru who has expanded his operations to include a modern slave trade. The
mission becomes proverbially personal, when Janicot abducts Sand’s girlfriend, Toki.

Subtext

Again, like The Tattoo Connection/Black Belt Jones 2 and several other films in this section, Black
Samurai is much less a Blaxploitation film than a full-blown kung-fu movie with a black American lead.

Background Information

While the action takes place in Mexico, the film was actually shot in Haiti (where location shooting is even cheaper than in Mexico).

The Verdict

While this is very much a Z-grade exploitation timewaster, it does offer some silly fun. For example, Sand has a souped-up James Bond-style car that has built-in machine-guns, and the finale features kung-fu midgets and Kelly in a jetpack that fires missiles. How seriously cool? 3/5

The Tattoo Connection (1978)

Director/Writer: Tso Nam Lee

Cast: Jim Kelly (Lucas), Sing Chen (Lu), Tao-liang Tan (Tin-ha), Norman Wingrove (George), Bolo Yeung (Lu’s Henchman)

90 mins

Story

Lucas, an ex-CIA agent, is sent to Hong Kong by an insurance agency to recover the North Pole Star, a priceless diamond. Lucas doesn’t know where to start. Bodies keep turning up with the same tattoo design and Lucas, obviously well trained in his field, understands there may be a connection here.

Subtext

The message of the film seems to be: don’t nose around Hong Kong looking for stolen diamonds unless
you are a kung-fu expert with a really big afro.

Background

The UK release of this film on DVD renames it Black Belt Jones 2 because of the casting of Kelly –
despite the fact that, other than this, there is no connection between this film and Robert Clouse’s 1974
movie.

The Verdict

A dreadful movie that is almost unwatchable. Although there are some good kung-fu action sequences,
one could die a happy person without having seen this film. One particularly disappointing aspect to the UK DVD release is that the power of DVD is such that one could have both a dubbed version and a subtitled version on the same disc. There are no such options on this DVD, however, and the menu is
only accessible at the end of the film. 0/5

As not only the Blaxploitation trend died out, but also the kung-fu trend, Kelly found less and less work

– occasionally being teamed up again with the usual Blaxploitation suspects like Williamson and Brown (i.e. in One Down, Two To Go).

TNT Jackson (1974)

Director: Cirio Santiago

Writers: Dick Miller and Ken Metcalfe

Cast: Jeannie Bell (TNT Jackson), Pat Anderson (Elaine), Ken Metcalfe (Sid), Stan Shaw (Charlie)

68 mins

Story

Diane ‘TNT’ Jackson arrives in Hong Kong’s dangerous Yellow Section looking for her brother, who has disappeared without a trace. In her search for information about what has happened to him, she runs afoul of drugs kingpin, Sid, who is trying to increase his worldwide distribution of heroin. She also begins to have a relationship with his right-hand man, Charlie. Unbeknownst to TNT, Charlie is the man who killed her brother, and, unbeknownst to Sid, his girlfriend, Elaine, is actually an undercover and frequently undressed FBI agent.

Subtext

Typically, as with many of these films, TNT Jackson is less a Blaxploitation flick than a kung-fu picture that happens to feature black actors in primary lead roles (Bell and Shaw). In one sequence, TNT visits a kung-fu school for a demonstration of the school’s students’ abilities, and the sequence could have come right out of any Shaw Brothers film as a classic kung-fu movie moment.

Background

The film was co-written by Roger Corman regular Dick Miller and the actor who played Sid, Ken Metcalf.

The Verdict

Needless to say, TNT Jackson is pretty bad, although, as with many of Corman’s turkeys, bad in a hilarious way. My favourite line in the film is TNT’s retort to CIA agent Elaine, ‘Look lady, or whoever you are…’! The plot is thin, and even the kung-fu fighting sequences are pretty poor. 1/5

It is worth inserting in here a few words about one of the stranger deviations in the Blaxploitation genre

– the Filipino Blaxploitation film, of which TNT Jackson is a prime example. In a nutshell, to make exploitation movies as cheaply as possible, a number of movies were made in the Philippines –
including the early Pam Grier classics Women in Cages (1971) and Black Mama, White Mama (1972).

But TNT Jackson director Cirio Santiago’s reputation is greater than Blaxploitation in his native Philippines. His father founded Premiere Productions, the country’s most pre-eminent movie studio, in the mid-1940s. Cirio himself took control of the studio in the 1990s, and was named as president of the Philippines Film Development Funds, designed by President Ramos to raise Filipino filmmaking to global status. Through director Santiago and producer Roger Corman, who produced a number of these

Filipino Blaxploitation films, several American filmmakers got their start, including Joe Dante and Jonathan Demme. Santiago also produced the Jack Hill films The Big Bird Cage and The Big Doll
House, and directed the Blaxploitation film Savage! (1973). Savage! is rather an odd film, since the movie seems to be almost quasi-Marxist in its orientation, with a Filipino government mercenary being captured by Marxist rebels and converted to their cause. Santiago died in 2008 from complications due to lung cancer.

None of the films discussed in this section – Enter the Dragon, Black Samurai, The Tattoo
Connection or TNT Jackson – are really Blaxploitation films, despite how they may have been marketed. More properly, they are straightforward kung-fu films which happen to star black American
actors. Even the Cleopatra Jones movies, specifically Casino of Gold, more properly belong in this section than above, as very few of the Blaxploitation themes and motifs are evident (apart from having black actors in the leads). The exception to this is Black Belt Jones, which is why I discussed it in chapter two rather than here: while the film has an obvious kung-fu focus, it is still rooted within the Blaxploitation genre/period in a more solid way than any of the films in this section.

WESTERNS

The term ‘cowboy’ actually refers to African-American men who were hired, particularly after the American Civil War, to work on the cattle ranches of the West. So the idea of seeing black people in westerns is not as immediately anachronistic as one would assume. A colleague of mine recently made
the quip that all American presidents since Kennedy have had official photographs taken of themselves wearing a cowboy hat and wondered whether, when newly elected president Barack Obama had his done, Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks’ 1974 old West parody which featured a black sheriff) would immediately spring to mind. Apart from being an incredibly racist remark, the comment further reflects an unawareness of the historical meaning of the term ‘cowboy’, and also of several western films made in the Blaxploitation era.

Adios Amigo (1976)

Director/Writer: Fred Williamson

Cast: Fred Williamson (Big Ben), Richard Pryor (Sam Spade), Thalmus Rasulala (Noah)

87 mins

Story

A black gunslinger (Big Ben) reluctantly teams up with a conman (Sam Spade) in the Old West, in what
is supposed to be a comedy. There is very little in the plot department here other than the relatively

‘high-concept’ pairing of Williamson and Pryor as cowboys. Rasulala appears as a pilgrim crossing the desert with his two nubile daughters who the heroes meet along the way.

Subtext

While there were some Blaxploitation-western crossover films (see, for example, Take a Hard Ride), this film simply seems designed to cash in on this trend.

Background Information

This was Williamson’s second film as a director, the first being Mean Johnny Barrow earlier in 1976.

The Verdict

While there is very little to recommend this film, part of the problem may have been the viewing conditions under which I watched it: the DVD copy I bought was a dreadful pan-and-scan copy that didn’t seem to be panning or scanning on anything in particular. Furthermore, the images themselves were so dark that it was often impossible to actually ascertain what was happening in the scene. 1/5

Take a Hard Ride (1975)

Director: Antonio Margheriti

Writers: Eric Bercovici and Jerrold Ludwig

Cast: Jim Brown (Pike), Lee Van Cleef (Kiefer), Fred Williamson (Tyree), Catherine (Catherine Spaak), Kashtok (Jim Kelly), Charles McGregor (Cloyd), Leonard Smith (Cangey), Dana Andrew

(Morgan)

103 mins

Story

Mr Morgan entrusts Pike with the task of couriering $86,000 down to Sonora, Mexico to help establish
a utopian community based on equality (including equality between black and white folk). Pike, en route, teams up with Tyree, a gentrified card shark/gunslinger. Little do they realise that they are being closely followed by Kiefer, a greedy bounty hunter, and a mob of racist Christians who think all black men are the Devil, particularly as these particular black men have $86 grand. While on this adventure, Pike and Tyree rescue a woman and her mute Native American guide (who, somewhere, has learned kung-fu). Two other African-American characters, Cloyd and Cangey, also hear about the money and think they, too, can get their hands on it.

Subtext

While this film does recognise African-American involvement in the building of the old West, and doesn’t shy away from addressing prairie racism and hypocrisy, it does so from the overly safe perspective of an Italian-made and produced film intended for the working-class cinemas of the day.

Background Information

Despite the casting of such Blaxploitation stars as Brown, Williamson and Kelly, Take a Hard Ride is very much a late-period spaghetti western and not a Blaxploitation film at all.

The Verdict

Despite not being a Blaxploitation flick, this is not to say the film isn’t a cracker of a spaghetti western.

Margheriti is no Sergio Leone, but there are a couple of decent action sequences. 3/5

Blaxploitation westerns were never as popular as the other kinds of Blaxploitation films – perhaps, and I’m only guessing here, due to the inherently conservative audience of most traditional westerns, and that audience’s discomfort at seeing black western heroes. One film I did try to get a copy of was Boss
Nigger (Jack Arnold, 1975) starring Fred Williamson (who also wrote it) and D’Urville Martin; however, it proved almost impossible to acquire. More significantly, neither Adios Amigo nor Take a
Hard Ride are Blaxploitation films. Like the kung-fu movies discussed above, they seem more to be cashing in on the increased presence of black actors in the mid-1970s than to be part of the Blaxploitation genre/movement.

Some Blaxploitation genre pictures, like the horror films analysed here, do have sufficient baadasssss content, in terms of themes and motifs, to warrant being called ‘Blaxploitation’, whereas the kung-fu and western films have a more tenuous link, mainly because they use certain actors, like Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly, who have Blaxploitation associations. If conclusions are needed here, then
perhaps I can suggest that the Blaxploitation horror films are proper Blaxploitation films, whereas the kung-fu and western films belong to a different category: Blaxploitation-by-association, along with some of the films covered in chapter two, like the Cleopatra Jones films or Across 110th Street.

CONCLUSION: SPOOFING THE GENRE

In theory, a good film parody should include most, if not all, the themes and ideas that make up the genre in the first place. In other words, and by way of a conclusion, I want to examine four Blaxploitation parodies – comedian and filmmaker Keenan Ivory Wayans’ 1988 Blaxploitation parody,

I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Malcolm Lee’s Undercover Brother, Jonathan Kesselman’s The Hebrew
Hammer and Scott Sanders’s Black Dynamite – to see what themes they pick up on and exploit for comic purposes.

I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (1988)

Director/Writer: Keenan Ivory Wayans

Cast: Keenan Ivory Wayans (Jack Spade), Bernie Casey (John Slade), Antonio Fargas (Flyguy), Steve James (Kung Fu Joe), Isaac Hayes (Hammer), Jim Brown (Slammer), Ja’Net DuBois (Ma

Bell), Dawn Lewis (Cheryl), John Vernon (Mr Big), Clu Gulager (Lt Baker), Kadeem Hardison (Willie), Damon Wayans (Leonard), George James (Bruno), Marc Figueroa (Knuckles), Robert

Colbert (Farrell), Hawthorne James (One-Eyed Sam), Anne-Marie Johnson (Cherry), Gary Owens

(Himself), Eve Plumb (Kalinga’s Wife), Clarence Williams III (Kalinga), David Alan Grier

(Newsman), Ariana Richards (Kalinga’s Daughter), Ben Ryan Ganger (Kalinga’s Son), Kim

Wayans (Nightclub Singer), Bobby Mardis (Junebug), Chris Rock (Rib Joint Customer)

88 mins

Story

The movie takes place in ‘Any Ghetto, USA’. A new social disease has been killing off African-American youth – their desire for gold chains has been leading to many young black men ‘OG-ing’ or

‘Over-Golding’, i.e. death by wearing too many gold chains. One such victim is Junebug Spade, who
was indebted to Mr Big, the gold-chain king, to the tune of $5,000. Because his family cannot pay, Mr Big wants Junebug’s widow, Cheryl, instead.

Although he missed the funeral, Junebug’s brother, Jack Spade, just released from the military, arrives on the scene. Jack is appalled at the situation his family is in, even though his mother can more than take care of herself, and offers to help. He hunts down John Slade, a former inner-city vigilante-turned-social activist, who also used to date Jack’s mother. Together they go off to fight Mr Big. But, first, John needs to reunite his former ‘army’: Hammer and Slammer, two big brothers who now run a
greasy spoon restaurant; Kung Fu Joe, a local karate expert; and Flyguy, a pimp finishing off a prison sentence who is about to be released.

Background

In perhaps the funniest scene in the movie, Jack goes to the last remaining black militant in the inner city, Kalinga (played by Clarence Williams III). His wife is played by Eve Plumb, who played middle
sister Jan on the cult 1970s TV show, The Brady Bunch (the theme of which is playing in the background of the scene). Their daughter, played by Ariana Richards, would, in a few years’ time, play granddaughter Lex in Jurassic Park (1993).

The Verdict

Like most of Wayans’ films, this thinks it is funnier than it really is (i.e. Scary Movie [2000]), but as a parody of Blaxploitation it hits enough of the right notes to be successful. 4/5

The cast of I’m Gonna Git You Sucka features four central Blaxploitation actors: Bernie Casey, Antonio Fargas, Jim Brown and Isaac Hayes. The casting of these actors would give any film Blaxploitation echoes, like Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1996). These actors, and others – like Richard Roundtree, Jim Kelly, Yaphet Kotto, Thalmus Rasulala, Scatman Crothers, Julius Harris or William Marshall – bring certain Blaxploitation sensibilities to the films they are in, whether part of the genre or not. These are the faces that populated the genre, and we still associate them with those earlier roles. And it is not just the casting of these actors that intentionally parodies Blaxploitation; it is also casting them in roles that parody the personas they created. Contrast this with the casting of Blaxploitation stars Brown, Williamson, Grier, Roundtree and O’Neal in Original Gangstas, where, although the cast was Blaxploitation, the roles they played (apart from Brown and Williamson) were not.

Mr Big, played by John Vernon, keeps the Blaxploitation motif of having the villains played by fading B-movie actors – Mr Big even notes that Shelley Winters was in Cleopatra Jones. A number of Blaxploitation villains are played by B-movie actors: Stella Stevens and Rip Torn in Slaughter, Ed McMahon in Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off, Allan Arbus in Coffy, and Mr Magoo himself, Jim Backus, in Friday Foster. I’m Gonna Git You Sucka keeps this tradition, even while parodying it.

It is interesting, however, to note that Wayans did not cast any of the women Blaxploitation stars: no Pam Grier, Tamara Dobson, Gloria Hendry, Vonetta McGee, Margaret Avery, Carol Speed or Brenda Sykes. Part of the problem may lie in Wayans’ problematic use of women in most of his films, which
tends towards outright misogyny. In the 1970s, Blaxploitation films did try to present strong black women role models.

The one strong woman in the film, and this, too, has some echo of Blaxploitation films, is Spade’s Mama. She is a tough, no-nonsense woman who, when Mr Big’s punks try to shake her down, beats them up and chastises them for disrespecting her house. This parodies the stereotype of the tough African-American mother figure, not one that really appeared in Blaxploitation films, but her strength does recall certain elements of Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown.

The main plot narrative is that of one brother’s quest for revenge over the death of his sibling – and we have seen this narrative theme frequently in these movies. From Bucktown through Slaughter to The
Black Six, men are avenging the wrongful deaths of their family members. Even Coffy is going after the scum who hooked her sister on junk.

The theme of vigilante justice is embodied in the figure of John Slade. In the past his mission was to clean up the streets the only way he knew how. Now he is rehabilitating inner-city kids (like Casey did in Cleopatra Jones). However, as a vigilante he was censured, not by the police, but by the residents of the ghetto itself, for using excessive violence. This could be another theme of Blaxploitation.

Militants appear frequently in Blaxploitation and they are about as useful as Kalinga. All Kalinga can do is offer Spade any number of African organic bean products, from bean casseroles and sodas to bean ice cream. Black militants are not much more useful in Blaxploitation films, either; they either watch the action around them, like in Cotton Comes to Harlem, or are the pawns of organised crime, as in Black Belt Jones. Even sympathetic militants, like Goldie’s brother in The Mack, don’t serve much of a practical purpose. Beyond this, however, is the further theme regarding the fate of the other members of Kalinga’s People’s Revolutionary Army: it seems that, on the day that they were to bomb a US
government building, the government was hiring and all the revolutionaries got day jobs.

Kung-fu action occurs in two separate contexts in this parody. On the one hand, we have the explicit
reference to the kung-fu tradition in the guise of Kung Fu Joe, one of the members of the army that Slade recruits. Not enough is made of this character, other than that every gesture he makes, from assuming the arrest position for the police, to pushing the button to ring Slade’s apartment, is done like an over-the-top and jerky kung-fu move. However, the other reference is perhaps more interesting. In one sequence, Mr Big’s hoods are threatening Cheryl and Spade. Ma Bell, Spade’s mother, saves the day by coming in and doing her own kung-fu action on the hoods. What is noteworthy about this sequence is Wayans’ obvious use of a stunt double, positioned in such a way as to reveal that the stunt double is not only a man, but has a moustache, quite unlike actress Ja’Net DuBois! This parodies some of the truly appalling continuity editing in Blaxploitation films – like TNT Jackson, for example, where, in one fight scene, Jeannie Bell’s panties change colour from black to white and back again depending on the shot.

Much as Kung Fu Joe echoes the martial-arts tradition in Blaxploitation films, Flyguy represents the
pimp tradition. Flyguy makes specific references to two of Blaxploitation’s pimps: he competes in, and wins, the Pimp of the Year competition, directly quoting the same competition from The Mack; and, as part of the talent competition, he recites a poem, not unlike one of Rudy Ray Moore’s toasts in Dolemite.

Of course, one of the most memorable aspects of Blaxploitation films was the music they produced.

And as a reference to that phenomenon, in one sequence of I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Slade walks out of his apartment, looking seriously cool in a black leather jacket, and we can hear the opening to the theme from Shaft playing. As he walks down the street, the band playing the track is following him.

Music, in Blaxploitation films, follows these cats around wherever they go. In fact, Slade tells Spade that every great hero needs his own theme music. It is worth noting, at least parenthetically, that this is an old joke, going back at least as far as Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), where we see Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn having a romantic boat ride in Central Park and hear soft orchestral
music playing on the soundtrack. The camera pans left, revealing that a rope tied to their boat connects to another boat, which is carrying the orchestra playing the music. A similar gag is used, of course, in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

As Spade is constantly asking Slade to help him learn to be a [Blaxploitation] hero, we see many of
the above-noted themes presented as jokes. We know, for example, that Spade is finally a hero in his own right when he can quip to the others about his qualifications. Just before the final battle, as Spade arrives to join the gang, Slammer asks him what his credentials are for being a black hero. Spade replies that he is an ex-football player, to which Slammer merely gives an accepting shrug. The irony here, of course, is that Brown, who plays Slammer, is an ex-football player. But the gag also highlights the propensity for ex-football players to appear in Blaxploitation films – like The Black Six.

Finally, the one major continuity that exists between Blaxploitation films and contemporary African-

American cinema, which Wayans can be considered a part of, is misogyny. In one sequence of I’m
Gonna Git You Sucka, Mr Big’s hoods again menace Cheryl. Unfortunately for them, Cheryl is suffering from menstrual cramps and, paying a quick homage to Abby, the cramps turn Cheryl demonic. That gag would have been funnier if Wayans had not overplayed his hand by having all women referred to as either ‘bitch’ or ‘ho’ throughout the rest of the film. Because misogyny is ever-present in Wayans’ other films, such as Scary Movie, it is evident that this is Wayans’ perspective on women rather than a comment on Blaxploitation films.

Undercover Brother (2002)

Director: Malcolm D Lee

Writers: John Ridley and Michael McCullers

Cast: Eddie Griffin (Anton Jackson), Chris Kattan (Mr Feather), Denise Richards (White She Devil), Aunjanue Ellis (Sistah Girl), Dave Chappelle (Conspiracy Brother), Chi McBride (The Chief), Neil Patrick Harris (Lance), Gary Anthony Williams (Smart Brother), Billy Dee Williams

(General Warren Boutwell)

86 mins

Story

Anton Jackson, aka the Undercover Brother, is a secret agent working in Los Angeles and a living, breathing stereotype of the typical Blaxploitation hero. He’s enticed to join forces with B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D., a black secret service dedicated to the overthrow of ‘the Man’, a white secret service dedicated to keeping the black man down. The Man’s latest plot is to drug African-Americans
en masse into a lethargic stupor through the distribution of a certain drug via a new chain of fried-chicken franchises headed by General Warren Boutwell. Boutwell, prior to being brainwashed by the Man, was set to become the first black president of the United States, a situation the Man certainly couldn’t have allowed to occur.

Subtext

The film is clearly a parody of Blaxploitation films, having a stereotypical Blaxploitation hero loose in contemporary LA – kind of a black version of Austin Powers. But the problem with parodies is that, to be successful, they need to assume a degree of audience knowledge about the genre (as in I’m Gonna
Git You Sucka and The Hebrew Hammer). If every joke needs to be explained to the audience because they might not ‘get’ the reference, then the film ceases to be parodic and instead becomes merely a straightforward comedy that does not seem to have much to say to contemporary black America.

Background Information

The movie was filmed in Toronto, my hometown, so it was nice to see some familiar locations in the
picture. Director Malcolm D Lee is Spike’s much less talented cousin. The concept of the film came from a series of animated short films distributed on the Internet.

The Verdict

The first time I saw Undercover Brother, I thought it was hysterical; very clever and laugh-out-loud funny. But, like with the Austin Powers movies, because each joke needs to be hammered home in case
the multiplex audiences miss the gag, the movie becomes too tiresome too quickly. Good comedies should stay funny no matter how many times you’ve heard the jokes. This doesn’t work on subsequent
viewings. Worth watching once, but once that initial amusement is over, there’s nothing left to enjoy.

1/5

The Hebrew Hammer (2003)

Director/Writer: Jonathan Kesselman

Cast:

Adam

Goldberg

(Mordechai

Jefferson

Carver),

Judy

Greer

(Esther

Bloomenbergensteinenthal), Andy Dick (Damien Claus), Mario Van Peebles (Mohammed Ali

Paula

Abdul

Rahim),

Nora

Dunn

(Mordechai’s

Mother),

Peter

Coyote

(Chief

Bloomenbergensteinenthal)

85 mins

Story

Mordechai Jefferson Carver, the self-professed ‘certified circumcised private dick’ known as the Hebrew Hammer, is called on by the Jewish Justice League to take down Santa’s evil son, Damien, who
has co-opted Christmas and is using his power to destroy Hanukah. Mordechai calls upon the help of

Mohammed Ali Paula Abdul Rahim, head of the Kwanza Liberation Front, to help in his task (as Kwanza is also at risk from the evil Clause).

Subtext

Billed as the first ‘Jewsploitation’ film, The Hebrew Hammer takes the major motifs and tropes of the Blaxploitation movement and replaces the Black Power ideology (in some of the films) with ‘Jew Power’ ideology. But this isn’t simply a high-concept comedy (as with, say, the Adam Sandler flick You
Don’t Mess with the Zohan [2008] or Undercover Brother). Here, the ‘Jewification’ of Blaxploitation heightens the original Black Power messages through the medium of parody. In one sequence, on the wall of Mordechai’s bedroom, is a poster that reads ‘Kill Gentile’, a parody of the ‘Kill Whitey’ posters of the Black Power movement.

Background Information

Director Kesselman based this film on an earlier short (which focused mainly on the bedroom sequence
noted previously). In addition, not only does the film co-star Mario Van Peebles, but Mario’s father, Melvin, makes a cameo appearance as Sweetback, uttering his immortal ‘They bled my mamma…’ line.

The Verdict

As with any broad style of comedy, not all the jokes work here, but enough do to make this one of the most original comedies in recent years. And as a parody of the entire Blaxploitation genre it is more successful than Undercover Brother. 4/5

Black Dynamite (2009)

Director: Scott Sanders

Writer: Michael Jai White and Byron Minns

Cast: Michael Jai White (Black Dynamite), Arsenio Hall (Tasty Freeze), Tommy Davidson (Cream

Corn), Salli Richardson-Whitfield (Gloria), Tucker Smallwood (Congressman James), Kym

Whitley (Honey Bee), Byron Minns (Bullhorn), Roger Yuan (Fiendish Dr Wu), and James

McManus (Richard Nixon)

90 mins

Story

Black Dynamite is a parodic fusion of several Blaxploitation heroes: he’s a Vietnam vet and former CIA agent (now retired), who has been brought out of retirement to find out who murdered his brother, Jimmy, and to clean up the drugs in the city. Black Dynamite draws upon several different black-interest groups for help, including militants, pimps, prostitutes and community social-service volunteers working to get the orphans off of smack. Needless to say, the corruption goes to the very top, as Black Dynamite encounters corrupt African-American politicians like Congressman James, the Mob, the Fiendish Dr Wu’s laboratory/hide-out on Kung Fu Island, and concludes in a numb-chuck fight opposite

President Richard Nixon himself.

But the drugs are only the tip of the iceberg as Dynamite and his army uncover a devilish plot to introduce a special toxin into Anaconda Malt Liquor that will shrink the penis size of anyone who drinks it, thereby threatening the manhood of the entire black population.

Subtext

Black Dynamite is a quite different form of parody from Sucka, Undercover Brother or The Hebrew
Hammer. The premise of the film is that what we are watching is an authentic mid-70s Blaxploitation film and not a 2009 parody. There is no framing device where we are told that this film is anything other than a ‘proper’ Blaxploitation movie. The success of the parody in this film is that everyone plays it absolutely straight. There is no mugging for the camera as many contemporary comedians (like Eddie

Griffin or Keenan Ivory Wayans) feel the need to do. By playing it straight, the comedy plays with not only the narrative conventions of early-1970s Blaxploitation cinema, but also pokes fun at the low budgets and technical incompetences which many of these films demonstrated. So, for example, Queen

Bee smokes an unlit cigarette, a microphone not only drops into frame but keeps hitting Dynamite’s afro, and there is a multitude of continuity ‘errors’, usually in the fight sequences where dummies are noticeably replacing the actors. In one particularly inspired gag, when the first actor doesn’t take a faked punch well, the film cuts that actor out and replaces him with another, completely different-looking actor.

All the genre stereotypes are here: in addition to Black Dynamite himself, we have Bullhorn, the jive-talking-in-rhyming-couplets pimp who is clearly modelled on Rudy Rae Moore’s Dolemite character; Honey Bee, the film’s madam, modelled on Queen Bee (also from Moore’s Dolemite films); Gloria, the
die-hard do-gooder working to get the orphans off of smack; Cream Corn, the informant/snitch clearly
based on the roles Antonio Fargas would normally play; and the ‘Fiendish Dr Wu’, the mad scientist who has created the formula to shrink African American penises.

Background Information

Actor and stuntman Michael Jai White holds seven black belts in a variety of martial arts and was the sparring partner for Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The Verdict

The only thing really ‘wrong’ with Black Dynamite is that, at times, the editing is a little too tight, a little too fast-paced, reflecting a more recent style of editing and cinematic rhythm than a 1970s rhythm.

Also, the animated final credits and the animated sex sequence in the middle of the film are very funny, but would not have been included in a proper Blaxploitation film, despite the clear reference these sequences make to the adult animated films of Ralph Bakshi (like Fritz the Cat [1972]).

The biggest problem with Black Dynamite is that its parody is so successful you really need to know
your Blaxploitation cinema to enjoy the joke. Both Sucka and Undercover Brother, and to a lesser extent The Hebrew Hammer, depend too much on explanations of the jokes. Black Dynamite doesn’t seem to care. If you know your Blaxploitation movies, great; if you don’t, I guess you might misinterpret the film as one you laugh at rather than with. 5/5

Whatever happened to Blaxploitation films? As anyone can tell from the preceding pages, I feel that Blaxploitation films existed largely between 1970 and 1975. I’ll take that even further, and say outright that only those films that came out between 1970 and 1975 can properly be considered as Blaxploitation. MGM in the States and Orion Home Video in the UK both released many of these films
not too long ago. Both distributors called their series of tapes and DVDs ‘Soul Cinema’ – which I feel is a particularly apt name in lieu of Blaxploitation. Soul Cinema, in addition to its African-American cultural connotation, also directly refers to the kinds of music in the films: soul music – Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Edwin Starr, Billy Preston and, of course, the godfather of soul, James Brown.

As soul music declined in popularity, or, rather, as it was replaced and overshadowed by another musical form, the movies changed with this trend. Disco music altered Blaxploitation films considerably, and those films which some consider to still be part of Blaxploitation, but which feature more disco music on their soundtracks than soul music, bare little resemblance to the early-1970s flicks.

In this category I include the films of African-American director Michael Schultz, specifically Car
Wash (1976) and Cooley High (1975). Both films feature almost all-black casts and were exceptionally popular with African-American audiences, but their tone is different, and not just because they are comedies. These films are gentler, more disciplined, and often had a lower classification certificate than films like Shaft or Superfly. These movies were aimed at a younger, teenaged audience, rather than an adult one.

It is also worth mentioning that many of Blaxploitation’s actors moved on to do more high-profile and (seemingly, at the time) more respectable films – like ‘Pamela’ Grier in Drum (1976). And that, too, certainly added to Blaxploitation’s demise. But, personally, I feel that the changing face of African-American popular music, and how that music helped change cultural attitudes, was, more than anything
else, the real death knell for Blaxploitation films.

Some critics further feel that the development of African-American filmmaking in the late-1980s and
early-1990s can be described as a continuation of Blaxploitation, and again I would beg to differ. First of all, there is no way anyone could pay me enough to accuse Spike Lee of making Blaxploitation films; just because films are made with predominantly black casts and cater to African-American audiences does not mean they can be called Blaxploitation. There are other thematic and cinematic aspects that need to be included. In other words, the Hood films of the 1990s, like John Singleton’s Boyz N the
Hood, the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society (1993) or Ernest Dickerson’s Juice (1993) are neither thematically similar to the early 1970s Blaxploitation films, nor stylistically similar. Again, reflecting the music bias I want to apply here, I would classify these films as Hip-Hop films, more so than Soul Cinema. These labels reflect not only their soundtrack music, but also their style and attitude.

Blaxploitation had its day and left a legacy of talent and films that reflect an approximately five-year period of African-American popular culture. I hope to have demonstrated here that, regardless of the films’ qualities as ‘art’, or even as ‘films’, there are still many interesting and potentially informative aspects to be explored within them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bogle, D, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (Continuum Publishing Group, 2001)

James, D, That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘tude (rated X by an all-whyte jury) (St Martin’s Griffin, 1995) Kendrick, J, ‘Mandingo’ Q Network [website], http://www.qnetwork.com/index.php?page=review&id=515 [last accessed 11 April 2010]

Koven, MJ, La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (Scarecrow Press, 2006) Rhines, JA, Black Film, White Money (Rutgers University Press, 1996)

Schaefer, E, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Duke University Press, 1999) Copyright

First published in 2010 by Kamera Books,
an imprint of Oldcastle Books Ltd,

P O Box 394, Harpenden, AL5 1XJ

This ebook edition first published in 2010

All rights reserved

© MIKEL J. KOVEN, 2010

The right of MIKEL J. KOVEN to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly ISBN 978–1–84243–485–7

Document Outline

- Title Page
- Dedication
- INTRODUCTION
- BAADASSSSS
- THE MAN
- GENRE FILMS
- CONCLUSION: SPOOFING THE GENRE
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Copyright
- Advertisement

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

BAADASSSSS

THE MAN

GENRE FILMS

CONCLUSION: SPOOFING THE GENRE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Copyright

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