Clifford Thompson
REVENGE OF THE NERD: A LOOK AT BLACK EXPLOITATION FILMS

When the films in the so-called black exploitation or "blaxploitation" genre had their original run, in the early 1970s, I was a boy of eight, nine, ten, living in northeast Washington, D.C. --- an all-black section of a mostly black city. This put me in the group most likely to see these movies. Most of them were rated R, but that did not stop many of my fellow fourth-graders from getting in to see them, either accompanied by older relatives or abetted by lax ticket sellers. I never went myself. My own parents and older siblings did not particularly want me to see such films, and even if they had, I probably wouldn't have gone; I was easily upset by TV and movie images in those days, and I knew the R rating meant blood. So I did homework and other things while the kids who were "bad" (black early-70s-speak for "cool") went to see the likes of Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem.

The "exploitation" aspect of those films has to do with the fact that Hollywood, several years late as usual, witnessed the passions stirred up in the African-American community by the Black Power movement (and by 350 years of oppression before that) --- and saw money to be made. The punchline to the joke is that most of the dollars black moviegoers spent for the thrill of seeing one of their own stick it to The Man ended up in the pockets of white movie industry executives. The exploitation label also refers to those executives' cashing in on the stereotype of the African-American male as criminal. If people in my neighborhood thought about any of this back then, though, they didn't seem to care.

Time has a way of lending a veneer of respectability to many things, and in the case of blaxploitation films, time had some help from the hottest filmmaker of the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino. Owing much to the genre, Tarantino's films helped bring about something of a blaxploitation revival. When Hell Up in Harlem and the rest began to be displayed prominently in my local video store, I realized that I still associated them, all these years later, with the things I just wasn't cool enough to do at one point in my life. I realized, secondly, that as a grown-up man with an adult's tolerance for movie gore and my very own VCR, I was perfectly free to see what I hadn't seen as a kid. And lastly, I realized that I secretly hoped I would find the movies laughable, thereby making it okay that I had missed them. Call it Revenge of the Nerd.

In some cases I got my wish. To begin with, there is Larry Cohen's Black Caesar (1973), starring the former football star Fred Williamson, and its sequel, Hell Up in Harlem, made in the same year by the same director and lead actor. Williamson plays Tommy Gibbs, who has performed small tasks for the mob in New York since his boyhood and now, as an adult, makes his move into the big time, initially as a hit man; his real power comes after he kills three white men to obtain a ledger that lists payoffs made to New York City officials. Cohen's Black Caesar is adequately --- sometimes nicely --- filmed, and Williamson is not without screen presence; but he is up against an inept script, and he is badly overmatched. Scenes meant to be powerful receive no build-up, so that by the time we understand the significance of one sequence, another is already being bungled. An example is when Gibbs shows up at the luxury apartment of his white lawyer and his wife; Gibbs presents them with a check for a large amount of money, in exchange for the apartment and everything in it, plus their immediate departure. Not until the next morning, when the lawyer's maid discovers Gibbs in the bed, do we learn that the maid is Gibbs's mother, that she has worked for the lawyer's family since Gibbs was a boy, and that Gibbs has bought the apartment to give to her. She initially balks at the idea, but does she eventually change her mind? Hard to say: when next we hear of her, she has died, as we learn from the soundtrack (a whole source of hilarity unto itself, particularly in Hell Up in Harlem). Cohen's Black Caesar leaves us hanging in other ways, large and small. Scenes trail off with nebulous bits of dialogue ("I travel a lot"; "I want my clothes back"); plot lines are unresolved, such as those involving Gibbs's father, who abandoned him when he was a boy, and Gibbs's minister-friend, whose preaching is a con until he undergoes a real religious conversion. These two threads are picked up again in Hell Up in Harlem, which would suggest that the films are two parts of a coherent whole, except that the movies make even less sense together than they do separately. Hell Up in Harlem begins with one of the more ludicrous sequences Cohen's Black Caesar, one in which Gibbs is gunned down in the street and then climbs, bleeding, into a nearby taxi (so that's what a black man has to do to catch a cab!). But this time, instead of pushing on --- bullet wound and all --- to kill his nemesis, then wandering, God knows why, to his old neighborhood, where he is beaten and left for dead by a gang of young punks (here endeth Black Caesar), Gibbs contacts his father, who saves him with the help of Gibbs's associates --- never mind that they were all killed in Cohen's Black Caesar!

One could go on about the shortcomings of these two movies, but there wouldn't be much point; to a great extent, one bad movie is like another. Still, bad movies are sometimes interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with aesthetics. What's notable Cohen's Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem is the picture they paint of a society in which mobsters, cops, and elected officials are all part of the same corrupt, dog-eat-dog system, a society in which any attempt to do right is, at best, a waste of time. Given this, it makes sense that Williamson's lines about helping the people of Harlem and driving away drug pushers come off as lip service. No, the passion of Caesar/Hell lies elsewhere, and to find out where, one need only fast-forward to the climax of each movie --- and see Gibbs kill a corrupt, vicious white man in a manner whose significance one is not allowed to miss. In Caesar, he beats a police captain to a pulp with a shoeshine box, after smearing his face with black polish; in Hell, he lynches a district attorney (with a necktie!). This is eye-for-an-eye stuff, nothing more or less; maybe this is what was called for, once.

But there is something more going on, something for the ages, in Barry Shear's Across 110th Street (1972), based on the novel by Wally Ferris. The title, a reference to Harlem's downtown border, neatly sums up one of the aims of the movie --- acknowledging boundaries (between black and white, cop and criminal) while demonstrating where those boundaries lose their meaning. The story begins as two struggling, workaday black friends, a building superintendent (Paul Benjamin) and a dry-cleaning employee (Ed Bernard), with a third friend (Antonio Fargas) waiting in the getaway car, set out to rob members of the white-controlled mob operating in Harlem. In this volatile situation, the robbery turns into a massacre, with cops among the dead; the friends make off with a large sum of money. The crime sets two parallel processes in motion. On one side of the law, a white, not-getting-any-younger cop (Anthony Quinn), under whose jurisdiction the killings would normally fall, is ordered for public-relations reasons to work alongside a younger, black detective (Yaphet Kotto). On the other side, an Italian-American mobster (Anthony Franciosa) is instructed to make an example of the killers and show the blacks in Harlem who really runs the place. So far, so what: the characters all seem poised to carry out the roles they have been assigned by their jobs and by racial stereotypes. But then something odd happens-- the characters turn human on us. As we watch Quinn's detective operate among the residents of Harlem, it becomes clear that it is he, not Kotto, who understands these people's ways --- his experience being more important than his skin color. A conflict emerges between Quinn's street-smart, rule-bending methods and Kotto's by-the-book approach. Meanwhile, Franciosa tries --- without much success --- to look tough in front of the black, heckling mob underbosses in Harlem (led by Richard Ward, an actor with a voice like two hunks of granite making love); as if in compensation for this, Franciosa's pursuit of the killers takes on a particularly nasty edge. Across 110th Street distinguishes itself from the Caesar/Hell movies, in which bad guys do evil things simply because they're bad guys. We learn eventually that Quinn is on the take; his reasons are not so far removed from the motivations of the killers (who finally become sympathetic characters): in a time and place that is tough on everybody, people do what they can to get along. The movie is shot in such a way that the colors are positively lurid, threatening to explode beyond the forms they occupy, just as the story's tensions --- racial and otherwise --- constantly threaten to do. (The only camp value in Across 110th Street is provided by Fargas, who plays straight the kind of character he would spoof sixteen years later in Keenen Ivory Wayans's devastatingly funny I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka!)

Almost as good as Across 110th Street is the movie probably mentioned most often in discussions of the genre, Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly (1972); almost as bad as Black Caesar and its sequel is Jack Hill's Coffy (1973). Almost: what makes Coffy arguably better than the Black Caesar movies is that it is at least sincere about the subject of stopping drug pushers. Man, is it sincere. The title character (Pam Grier), a young nurse, wages a one-woman campaign against dealers after her eleven-year-old sister gets hooked on smack. Some sequences, in which Coffy pumps her policeman-friend or an addict for information about where the drugs come from, take on the feel of a 60 Minutes segment, but Mike Wallace never went after his prey quite like this: by the movie's last frame, the body count Coffy has racked up beats Joe Pesci's total in Goodfellas.

Like Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem, Coffy is interesting for reasons all its own. Make no mistake --- this movie is an example of substandard filmmaking, in terms of acting, writing, and other areas too numerous to list here. (One more does bear mentioning: particularly clumsy and obvious use of stunt doubles, which, again, makes Wayans's I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka! seem less like parody than reportage.) But what's intriguing about Coffy is the war that seems to take place over the film's very soul. On the one hand, the strong, vengeful, taking-matters-into-her-own-hands Coffy comes across as a feminist crusader; on the other, the filmmakers --- in a bald-faced attempt to sell tickets --- put in the movie what is possibly the most misogynistic sequence this writer has ever seen. Several men look on eagerly as Coffy, who has gone "undercover" as a call girl, gets into a fight with a group of jealous fellow prostitutes, every one of whom gets her dress ripped just so --- leaving her breasts to bask in the light of day.

In Super Fly, Ron O'Neal plays Priest, a successful, Harlem-based cocaine pusher who wants to make one last, million-dollar deal so he can retire from the business, "before I have to kill somebody or before somebody ices me." But his (black) partner and the (white) guys higher up in the illegal narcotics food chain have other ideas. Super Fly, unlike the other movies, acknowledges the appeal that the dangerous but lucrative drug trade ("the only game the Man left us to play") can have for blacks with few other options. But mostly it is a well-paced, involving film that builds tension and tells a good story; and the question of whether and how Priest will make it out of the business takes on added dimension, as the film asks --- but does not answer --- another question: what else will Priest do, in a world he has occupied up to now only as a criminal? (Super Fly is notable for two other things: a great soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield, who appears in the film; and the fact that this hard-edged tale is told without a single gun going off.)

Many other films could be discussed here --- Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, Shaft, Friday Foster, and The Mack are just a few --- but the point has been made: movies in the so-called blaxploitation genre, like science-fiction movies, war movies, horror flicks, or romantic comedies, vary widely in quality. That leaves the question of whether these often profitable films really amount to condemnable exploitation or just to good old American supply and demand. Yes, a space alien watching these movies would probably conclude that all American blacks are violent criminals; yes, studios'and distributors'interest in these movies obviously had more to do with dollars and cents than with a desire to promote black consciousness. On the other hand, it could be argued that watching Fred Williamson or Ron O'Neal get even with The Man satisfied a genuine desire, however base, and that the fact that these images actually made it to the screen represented, at one time, a form of progress, however crude. But in the end all of this is probably beside the point. The fact is that for whatever reason, for better or worse, black people flocked to these movies. And in the end, the greatest gesture of respect toward any group is to give them credit --- and responsibility --- for knowing what they need and want.

Clifford Thompson has published essays, reviews, and short stories in The Threepenny Review, Black Issues Book Review, Film Quarterly, The Best American Movie Writing 1999, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Current Biography.