Blaxploitaudient: Shaft in Africa

This is the final installment of my 2024 monthly series Blaxploitaudient, in which I have been watching blaxploitation films that I had not previously seen.

After watching Shaft to start this series back in January, I got the idea it might be nice to bookend the series with Shaft movies, meaning I could finish in December with the second sequel Richard Roundtree made to the original film, though there was also a short-lived TV series (seven episodes). 

Then for a while I thought it would be better if I did not revisit too much similar material or too many actors who popped up in too many of the same movies. 

But by the time I had watched my third movie in the series starring Pam Grier, I decided that there was not really any reason to avoid doubling up, and Shaft in Africa was back on for the month of Christmas, to tie a bow on the series, as it were. 

(Quick note: I have only just now realized that in watching Shaft in Africa, I skipped over the first sequel, Shaft's Big Score. I don't know how I missed that that movie was a thing, but it's too late now to go back and do anything about it.) 

Having watched the film, I find it hard to believe it was the last movie starring John Shaft until the character was rebooted in 2000 in the person of Samuel L. Jackson. This is a pretty successful third entry, and they were clearly setting him up to be a James Bond-like figure who could continue to appear in movies as long as the audience was willing to continue forking over their hard-earned dollars. (Which they weren't; this movie flopped.) 

How do I know this was the intention? Well, early on in the film, there's a scene where Roundtree's Shaft is meeting with some kind of gadget guy, and he actually says he's no James Bond. Bond himself had only been around a little more than ten years at that point, but they were a busy ten years, featuring three different actors stepping into the role, including the debut of Roger Moore that very year (1973).

Before we go on, can I pause a minute to talk about what kind of year 1973, the year of my birth, was for blaxploitation? I've mentioned it before in this series, but now that we've reached the end, I can give you an actual percentage of the films I watched for Blaxploitaudient that were released in 1973. And that percentage is 42. That's right, it was five out of the 12. In the order that I watched them: Cleopatra Jones, Black Mama White Mama, Ganja & Hess, Coffy and Shaft in Africa. Because I didn't watch Cleopatra Jones until July, that means that I watched zero 1973 movies in the first half of the series and then five of the last six. Sometimes it just works out that way.

So back to this film's ultimate failure, which led to the launch of the TV show, which was also a failure. Was James Bond the wrong way to go? How James Bond is this, really?

Here are the things John Shaft does in this movie that make him like James Bond, even beyond the gadget scene where Bond is name-checked:

- Travel to multiple continents, not just Africa (the film finishes in Paris);

- Bed multiple women, one of whom is killed (not by Shaft) shortly after their bedding;

- Make various Bond-like quips both to women and villains;

- Evade torture initiated by very Bond-like villains;

- Confuse me on what's actually going on in the plot.

Yes, on that last front, I didn't fully understand what was happening at any given point in Shaft in Africa, though this is typical for me in a spy movie, and I usually just go with the flow. Which worked out fine here. Instead I focused on the glorious use of Africa in this film -- all those scenes were actually shot in Ethiopia -- and details like Shaft bedding a woman in a raised thatch hut, and doing battle with adversaries with wooden sticks. Shaft does get his gun back, but in a number of scenes he doesn't have one, and I thought that was a good way of switching things up and forcing him to rely on his ingenuity.

The plot itself? Shaft is trying to break up some sort of illegal slave trade operation run by a very Euro baddie. Beyond that it may not be important.

In conclusion, this was an enjoyable way to end the series, and I found that Richard Roundtree's charisma -- already high in the previous movie I saw -- just gets better and better as he goes, and he's fully in sync with the intended tone of the film. I'm sorry it was not a hit, as it would seem likely that the target audience would have enjoyed an African excursion. Maybe they too were confused by the plot.

Shaft in Africa ends things with a rating of 3.5 stars, which is very typical of the films I watched this year. Three received higher than that (each of which got 4 stars) and only one received lower than 3 (which was 2.5). So I think my takeaway is that while these films were and are historically important, none of them were what I would consider a brilliant film -- but also none of them were disasters. Ganja & Hess, Coffy and Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song all showed flashes of brilliance, but were overall very good, not great. Those are the ones I might revisit in the future, at which point, maybe I will decide they are great. And then films like Car Wash and the Shaft movies were just a lot of fun.

Okay, that's a wrap on Blaxploitaudient. Sometime after the start of the new year, I will tell you about the monthly series I have in store for 2025.

Blaxploitaudient: Coffy

This is the penultimate entry in my 2024 monthly series Blaxploitaudient, in which I watch a blaxploitation film I haven't seen each month.

It has not been a great last week for Black women.

They are just about the only voting demographic who did not show significant support for Donald Trump. The others all had their reasons, I suppose. I hope we don't have to examine those reasons through the ashes of a destroyed country. (Really, I'm still fine. In fact, I'm only regularly mentally engaging with the election whenever I sit down to write a new blog post.)

Black women? They supported Kamala Harris, perhaps because she was one of their number. But perhaps also because they can see things clearly in a way others cannot. 

So it felt good to watch a movie in which a Black woman was empowered to seek vengeance against those who would keep her down, of multiple races. She comes up against just about every other demographic -- the demographics that were acknowledged in 1973, I should say -- in Jack Hill's Coffy. 

In the big brawl/food fight that is the "funniest" part of this movie, she may even come up against another Black woman, though I think that's more collateral damage than the target of her righteous fury.

In her third movie in this series, Pam Grier stars as the title character, an emergency room nurse who pulls out a metaphorical spray gun of revenge after her younger sister is hospitalized with her heroin addiction. When riding in a car with the only good man we meet in this movie -- her honest police officer friend Carter, played by William Elliott -- she tells Carter that she wants to get everyone involved with delivering drugs into her poor sister's hands. He counters with the fact that it all leads back to "a farmer in Thailand," and when asked whether she was going to get them too, she responds "Well why not?"

And so she decides to go undercover as a prostitute, which will give her access to the various bad men she's picked out as the first recipients of her punishment. Only, it doesn't take very long for someone to get wise to her plans, putting her in harm's way herself.

Harm's way is a familiar place specifically for Pam Grier in blaxploitation movies. Thinking back to the first time I saw her in this series, Foxy Brown, I remembered being taken aback by the extent of the violence and debasement against her before she finally rises up as the victor at the end. In that movie she is actually drugged and raped. In this movie there is an attempting drugging and raping, intended to be followed by her murder, only Coffy had earlier switched out the dope with sugar, as part of the plan to point dealer King George (Robert DoQui) toward the grave even before she might have a chance to do it herself. Without actually being laid low by heroin, she is able to escape, and take out a couple henchmen with her.

But some of what befalls Coffy before that is even more vile, in a sense, and separates this from some of the other blaxploitation movies I've watched that have one foot clearly on the side of trying to be fun. When the gangster Vitroni (Allan Arbus) first has her in his room one night, having been impressed by her fight when taking on the other jealous prostitutes and covering them in salad and other edible artillery, he is rough with her and uses every combination of expletive and N-word to degrade her. She's supposed to be a prostitute, so she realizes this might be part of his kink -- or at least has to be pretend she thinks this as a form of deference to "her client." When he spits in her face, she's not so sure. And I might have audibly gasped. 

And then there's the uncomfortable stuff that does not have anything to do with her. Coffy is caught trying to kill Vitroni with a gun she smuggled into the room in a teddy bear, but he was wise to her and had his henchmen lurking. She frames King George for the setup -- which might be a bit of a dick thing to do, if King George weren't a monster -- so the same two henchmen pick up George the next day. He thinks it's a friendly visit, until one of the henchmen pulls a gun and they drive out to a remote location. I could not totally believe what I was about to see unfold: George with a noose around his neck, dragged behind their car, first on foot, then struggling on the ground, then just a lifeless corpse crashing into nearby obstructions as the car fishtails around corners. You get one final shot of what's left, though Hill mercifully does not hold it for more than a second.

Films like Coffy remind us that there was a fierce political agenda behind these movies, in addition to trying to give us entertainment. It's hard to imagine someone putting such imagery up on screen without an understanding of the moral responsibility that accompanies it. An image of a Black drug dealer being steadily murdered through a high-speed lynching, or a Black prostitute being spat on and called the N-word, could never be part of any but the most vile people's definition of fun. 

But it must have been a really tough balancing act, because there would be no point to make a blaxploitation film if it couldn't be profitable. You can say that about any film, really. Even in cases where they've wildly miscalculated a film's potential profitability, the desire was there to make money. The genre aspects that fall short of this level of confrontation are there to do that, but these others were not deemed to be deal breakers, and indeed they were not, since Coffy became one of the more iconic blaxploitation films. For Blacks living in America in 1973, there was no such thing as pure escapism, no such thing as joy without nearby pain swooping in to remind them of its presence. These films understand that, and they give audiences an outlet through the ultimate victory of the protagonist over the male forces that try to hold her down and kill her. (May we be so lucky with our outcome over the next four years.)

Coffy does lean into another dominant aspect of the genre, rarely so dominant as it is here. Even with a number of the other movies I've watched involving the sex industry, I've rarely seen such a parade of bare breasts in any movie. Let's go back to that "funniest" scene. When Coffy and a jealous prostitute played Lisa Ferringer, who is King George's girlfriend, have their "catfight" that involves a whole food setup at a party, and eventually involves about five other women, each other woman has her breasts exposed as she's dispatched. It's almost as though it's some sort of finishing move by Coffy, that the ripping of their dress to reveal their ladies is going to render them combat deficient. But we get lots of other topless shots throughout this movie, including Grier several times. Which maybe still surprises me, since once we got into the 1980s, it was always the supporting characters who did nudity in movies, rarely the lead.

Before I get to my summation, there's one other person I'd like to mention here, and that's Sid Haig. He's of course the horror icon who I first met in Rob Zombie's movies (and in Spider Baby: The Maddest Story Ever Told), but this is now also the third blaxploitation movie in which I've watched him this year. In fact, he's appeared in both of Grier's other movies, those being Foxy Brown and Black Mama, White Mama. He's part of a package deal with Jack Hill, it seems, as Hill also directed him in Spider Baby and Foxy Brown. Grier and Haig now become the two most regular participants in this series, appearing in a quarter of the films each -- or what will be a quarter once I've watched my 12th film next month. His comeuppance here is pretty great.

Although this series does not wrap up until next month, I'm going to be ending it on what I think will be a lighter note, so this seems like a good time to be reflective about what I've watched. Especially in light of the fact that a man was just put into power who abuses, disrespects and degrades women and people of color.

Coffy does not distinguish itself from the other movies I've watched this year in terms of the greater story arc and where the film ends up. In fact, it is sort of the prototypical blaxploitation movie, if what I've watched this year gives me any additional expertise to make that sort of assessment. There are prostitutes (real and fake). There are pimps. There are drug dealers. There are corrupt cops. There are mob bosses. And there's a woman -- yes, more of these than not involve a female avenging angel rather than a male -- who is going to rise above it all to set things right, narrowly escaping with her own life, and unable to escape without severe damage. (The image of Coffy at the end, with deep lacerations above her cleavage, is memorable.)

It does, however, distinguish itself in the details. Moments that are a bit more disquieting than they needed to be. A deliberate choice to direct our gaze toward something we can't unsee. A purposeful question about what it means to be watching something like this, even as it points toward a "happy" ending in which the female protagonist has achieved some measure of her ultimate goals. As we see from the image of an exhausted and quite injured Coffy walking down the beach, toward what I hope is a metaphorical sunrise, we know that she wishes she never had to be here in the first place. She'd much rather be saving lives in a hospital room than in the streets. 

I'm going to hope that the Black woman in America can rise up today, as she did 50 years ago -- even though we know much of that was fantasy. It's just a shame that Kamala Harris could not quite make it there. It reminds us again of all the malevolence we're up against. It is perhaps too strong to call today's male Trump voters a series of pimps, drug dealers, corrupt cops and mob bosses -- but I wish it were further off the mark than it may be.

I'll wrap up this series in December on what I hope is a lighter note: Shaft in Africa. Which somehow also came out in 1973. (Were there a hundred blaxploitation movies in cinemas in 1973?)

Blaxploitaudient: Ganja & Hess

This is the tenth film in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies.

Blaxploitation and the arthouse don't often collide, but they have for at least the second time this series, though you could make an argument for three of the ten films I've now watched.

Ganja & Hess definitely put me in mind of Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss (not checking the correct number of S's right now) Song in terms of its narrative approach, though you could argue it has more in common, thematically, with Lord Shango, which showcases a slightly inferior version of that approach.

Either way, this was an eerie affair that immediately jumped into the top couple movies in the series, a spot it shares with Sweetback but not Shango.

I'd saved Ganja & Hess for October, knowing that it was considered to be horror as a result of first hearing about it from the blaxploitation marathon they did on Filmspotting. I remembered little else about it from the Filmspotting discussion -- and continued to know little else about it for the first third of its running time.

It was then that I made the key decision to check on Wikipedia to see where I'd failed to properly orient myself, and that at least gave me some bearings. Wikipedia clarified for me that the movie was about an anthropologist who becomes a vampire after his assistant stabs him with an ancient cursed dagger. I suppose I saw the stabbing occur, but given the abstruse presentation style of many of the narrative beats of this film, I failed to recognize it for what it was at the time it occurred. 

Don't get me wrong. I didn't mind being lost within Bill Gunn's film. There are certain films you watch where you have don't fully know what's going on, but you know that's not because of clumsiness by the filmmakers. Rather, they are making a mood more than a conventional movie, and sometimes, that mood is all you need.

The mood of Ganja & Hess was indeed carrying me along, but to repeat a refrain that has become a little boring to me, I started watching this movie too late at night, and my new couch is too comfortable. I didn't succumb to any involuntary sleep -- as in, sleep without pausing -- but I did have to take a nap or two. I probably should have saved it for another night, but I'm trying to cram in lots of Halloween movies this month, and will potentially lose some key viewing hours as I go on vacation from Wednesday to Monday. Gotta fit in things when you can.

The good news is, even if you are totally alert or on some kind of uppers, Ganja & Hess is not the sort of movie that lays things out for you. From the jump it is clear this is a movie of gestures, canted camera angles, half-seen images, and particularly, chilling sound design. There is a repeated incantation of sorts in this film, accompanied by what sounds like the ominous humming of a guitar amp not being used properly. Any time this entered the narrative, which was a lot, I found myself going to a place in my mind that the other "horror movies" I'm watching this month (more appropriate to undercut the Halloween movies by calling them merely "slasher movies") were not taking me.

The anthropologist is the Hess, and he's played by Duane Jones. I saw the name in the credits and I saw the man on screen, but it still took me a little while to put together that I was looking at a true horror icon. Jones plays the lead in the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), which I have to imagine was a factor in Bill Gunn casting him five years later for Ganja & Hess.

The Ganja is the widow of Hess' assistant, whom he killed after the vampiric stabbing. (Some of the sequence of events in this part of the film was a little lost on me, since it's the kind of film that might not be playing in chronological order.) She's played by the very charismatic and naturalistic Marlene Clark. Clark is an actress I recognized, though the only other things I would have seen that she was in -- Sanford & Son and a very small role in Enter the Dragon -- I doubt I would actually know her from, given the size of the role or the amount of time since I've seen it. She does a lot of the heavy lifting in the second half of the film, when she comes under the spell of Hess at his mansion, as she tends to be verbal and he tends to be not.

Again, this movie is more a vibe than a strict story, exploring sex, religion, power dynamics and other provocative isms. It's no coincidence that Hess is an anthropologist, as his studies of native peoples and their iconography also factors into the proceedings.

But again, Ganja & Hess is one of those films where the less you try to analyze it, the more you get out of it. Just letting it wash over you is the best way to go, and wash over me it did.

Just two more months to go. In November I will watch Coffy, and then December is TBD. 

Blaxploitaudient: Black Mama, White Mama

This is the ninth movie in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation films I hadn't previously seen. 

I said last month that my Blaxploitaudient series has thus far neglected the actual inspiration for doing this series, which was watching Elvis Mitchell's documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? at the end of 2022. Beyond that movie being the direct impetus for starting this series, I wanted to watch movies that I'd actually learned about from that movie, and so far, had not.

So this month I got the list of all the movies mentioned in ITBEFY?!? (because of course that exists online, dozens of times over probably) and went through them to find good candidates. Not all the movies mentioned qualify as blaxploitation movies, of course, because some are mentioned as points of contrast with blaxploitation, jumping off points for blaxploitation, or historical context of regrettable depictions of Black people on screen. 

Among the actual list of blaxploitation movies, though, I wasn't able to find, at least by checking their titles, a couple movies I remembered by the scenes Mitchell showed from them, which suggested to me they might make fruitful material for this series. In fact, of the 11 titles where I chose to go in for a closer look, there were no slam dunk candidates. Or rather, I should say, there were no slam dunk candidates that felt like they were offering me something distinctly different from the films I've already seen. While I understand stories of women and men wreaking righteous revenge on pimps and drug dealers is the bread and butter of the genre -- and I do already have one more film in the pipeline that would be described this way -- I felt there was more to be gained from finding something a little different.

Which is how I landed on Eddie Romero's 1973 film Black Mama, White Mama, the second of eventually three films in this series that will feature Pam Grier. (I've been trying not to duplicate too much -- which is why I haven't watched a Shaft sequel or another Rudy Ray Moore film -- but Grier is basically synonymous with blaxploitation, and she's really good.) When I saw that this was a prison movie in which the titular characters spend much of the running time chained to each other, I thought, "Well that's something I haven't seen yet." And that title? I couldn't ask for a better encapsulation of the essential confrontational nature of blaxploitation, even if it accounts for only 50% of the title.

This is clearly an exploitation film, as there's a lot of nudity, and the prison setting -- which is at least the initial setting for the action -- is ripe with exploitation sleaze. I'm not sure if it's a totally a blaxploitation film, though, since Grier is essentially the only Black character in it. When I checked its bonafides on Wikipedia, the site says Black Mama, White Mama contains "elements of blaxploitation." I agree that it does, and that's good enough for me when I've been looking for a slight change of pace from the Foxy Browns and Cleopatra Joneses I've been watching. 

Another thing that makes the film distinctly different is its setting. The prison is not in America, but rather, in an (unnamed?) Central or South American island nation, meaning most of the cast we see is not white or Black but Latino. (I'll say Latino rather than Latinx because that's what it would have been in 1973, or maybe even Hispanic.) Actually, now that I check Wikipedia again, I see it was shot in the Philippines, which explains the Asian features of some characters. As we know, the Philippines is a blend of Asian and Latin culture, though I doubt the film is actually supposed to be set there, as a specific location is besides the point of the story.

There's some real tawdriness here. The movie takes a long and lingering look on a prison shower scene, in which we see both of our leads (the other is Margaret Markov) bearing all, as well as many others who won't appear in the movie very long. What's more, a prison warden type watches them through a peephole where she masturbates. You don't see a close-up of a hand on a crotch or anything, but I was surprised to see the movie go as graphic as it did in the scenes of her pleasuring herself. 

We learn that people seem to be in this prison for all sorts of reasons. Grier's Lee Daniels (not the filmmaker) is there for what she calls "a parking ticket," though it's hard to say whether it's an actual parking ticket or something equally insignificant and she's speaking metaphorically. I suppose it's also possible she's vastly underselling the significance of her crime. I don't believe the movie ever clarifies. (Oops, I shouldn't forget that Wikipedia is my friend. It says she's a prostitute, which could explain the "elements of blaxploitation" Wikipedia also talks about -- and indeed does not seem like sufficient reason to be shipped off to a prison on an island nation.)

However, Markov's Karen Brent is an actual revolutionary -- the contrast with Lee's crime is hardly charitable -- and this forms much of the basis of the story. When the two women escape, chained together, it is because they are freed by Karen's fellow revolutionaries, who stage a shootout on the road with prison officials and other members of the corrupt entourage of the island bigwig, as the prisoners are being transported. This bigwig is also regularly seen being ministered to in various ways by topless women. Yes, this movie wanted to deliver on the promise of its advertising.

There are some funny bits as the two escapees make their way through the countryside. (The revolutionaries just created a diversion, and they are going to rendezvous later.) For example, they disguise themselves as nuns after subduing the actual nuns, presumably in a fairly gentle manner. There's a sense that this sort of thing is supposed to be the overriding tone of Black Mama, White Mama. 

However, the movie stops being such a "good time" as it approaches its climax, with another big shootout involving the revolutionaries and the corrupt bigwig and his henchmen. In fact, without saying too much about what happens, one has to question if they had a good sense of where they wanted this narrative to go and whether the materials to get you to that point really support that goal. This isn't a good enough movie to be a serious consideration of anything involving revolution, so it's right to wonder if they would have been better off sticking to the lighter tone and sense of the triumph of good over evil that prevails in most other blaxploitation movies. (But then, this might not be actual blaxploitation, right?) 

I also hoped they would play the relationship between Lee and Karen for more tension. There's a sense that these two are supposed to be rivals, but it's not convincingly established. We do get one or two true exploitation moments when they slap the shit out of each other, but that's dropped pretty quickly, which is kind of a disappointment considering the dialectic established by the title.

Next month for Halloween I will watch the horror movie Ganja & Hess, if you want to play along with this series for at least one month. 

Blaxploitaudient: Lord Shango

This is the eighth in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen before.

My August selection in Blaxploitaudient, Lord Shango, got me asking the question: 

Just because a movie features primarily Black people -- in this case all Black people -- and is set in the 1970s, does that necessarily make it a blaxploitation film?

Ray Marsh's 1975 film came on my radar by doing a search of the word "blaxploitation" on Kanopy, earlier on the very night that I watched it. See, I had only 11 films in my Blaxploitaudient list of potential candidates for this series on Letterboxd, meaning I'd need at least one that wasn't on the list. I considered watching Coffy, one of the remaining four I had not yet watched, but I get the sense that this is another film fronted by a female badass, and I've watched a film that profiles like that in two of the past three months with Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. I'm saving Ganja & Hess, which I understand is a horror movie, for October, and I'm questionable on whether I am going to ultimately watch either Dolemite or Shaft in Africa, since I've already watched a Rudy Ray Moore movie and a Shaft movie.

And I actually did welcome the change in subject matter with Lord Shango, which deals more with the occult than the traditional blaxploitation elements of drugs, crime, guns and groovy music. Whether or not that makes it a blaxploitation film, well, I may leave that up to wiser people than me, and in any case, with MIFF on this month, I'm definitely not going to fit in another one.

I was concerned at the start that this might be extremely low budge, and that the film's technical limitations might make it even more of a B movie than usual in a series comprised of essentially B movies. It did pick up in its confidence a bit as it went, though it likely still remains the most anonymous movie that I've watched, considering that I wasn't familiar with a single cast member -- a first for this series.

And here's an interesting indication of the obscurity of Lord Shango -- it does not have its own Wikipedia page. It's mentioned in the Wikipedia pages of some of the actors who appear in it, but it never got its own. Which is a shame, because I watched this last week and wanted a refresher on the plot. So I've just got to do my best on that one. 

Let's start with the logline on IMDB: "A tribal priest returns from the dead to take revenge on non-believers." News to me, ha ha.

So the movie opens with a woman Billie (Avis McCarther) being taken for her christening in a lake ceremony. Her fiancee Femi (Bill Overton) arrives to try to break this up, I believe since he is pagan. (Is he the tribal priest? I did not get that.) In the struggle to remove him from the ceremony, though, Femi accidentally drowns, sending Billie into a pit of despair.

The main character then becomes Billie's mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), who knows that a mysterious bystander to this ceremony named Jabo (Lawrence Cook) has a connection to the occult. The movie takes on the thrust of summoning the spiritual leader Lord Shango to save and protect Billie, though of course this has unintended consequences, and certain people who wronged the pregnant Billie are likely to get quite the comeuppance.

I ultimately gave this film three stars on Letterboxd, but my only memory of it now is hazy, and I can't say it did a great job keeping its audience up to speed with the plot points. This is becoming a theme in my posts, but I watched it on a night I was really tired, and there were naps involved. Cognizant of how busy I would be during August because of MIFF, I watched it before the festival started, but you could rightly say I was sort of jamming it in just to tick it off the list. There were ultimately things about the film that I thought worked enough to give it this narrowest of recommendations, but since I can't fully recall what they were now, it feels a little empty. I think just best to move on.

One realization I had during the movie, when retroactively pondering my August choice, is that although this series was inspired by watching Elvis Mitchell's Is That Black Enough for You? at the end of my 2022 ranking period, I don't believe I've watched many, if any, films that I learned about from that movie. There were a lot of blaxploitation movies I already knew about that I hadn't seen, and those have made up the bulk of the series so far.

So I have now vowed to check the inevitable online list of all the movies mentioned in Is That Black Enough for You?, and choose two of them to go along with Coffy and Ganja & Hess for the final four movies in this series. September seems like a good time to do the first one. 

Blaxploitaudient: Cleopatra Jones

This is the seventh film in my 2024 series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen.

I promise I am not stalking Antonio Fargas.

The actor, who is still alive at age 77, might think otherwise after I have now watched four movies in this series in which he appears. I had thought it was three, but looking at his IMDB page to remind me which three, I see that it was actually four: Shaft, Foxy Brown, Car Wash, and now Cleopatra Jones. 

I guess his prominent appearance in blaxploitation movies really explains why he appeared in the spoof of a blaxploitation movie I saw when I was just a teenager, that being I'm Gonna Git You Sucka! 

Cleopatra Jones has been linked in my mind with Foxy Brown all year, given that they both derive their titles from the first and last names of their heroines. Until I watched Cleopatra Jones on Tuesday night, I didn't realize how much deeper their link actually runs.

Not only are both movies about an ass-kicking woman who is trying to bust up the drug trade, but the central drug ring in both movies is run by a psychopathic woman who presides over a stable of henchmen for whom she is sort of a mother figure. In Foxy Brown it was the imperious Katherine Wall (played Kathryn Loder), while Cleopatra Jones' evil matriarch is much more screamy in nature and is played by Shelley Winters. To underscore the idea that she's a matriarch, she even goes by the nickname Mommy.

While I would have assumed that Foxy Brown was the forerunner of these two movies, simply because it's more iconic, Cleopatra Jones actually came out a year earlier, so if anyone borrowed someone's structure from somebody else, it was Foxy from Cleopatra.

The titular ass-kicker here is played by Tamara Hobson -- a name I did not know -- and she's actually a special agent, almost more of a James Bond than a cop who wants to clean up this city. And she's got the Bond-like set pieces to match. Not quite our introduction to her character, but very early on in the movie, she emerges from a luggage carousel to take by surprise the thugs who are laying in wait for her. Some of her moves may be a bit goofy -- or maybe that's just the way director Jack Starrett shoots them -- but she gets the results. That's right, asses kicked.

She also has a dynamite car chase through the concrete basin of the Los Angeles River, an iconic cinematic location if ever there was one, in her slick Corvette, a signature item. This one is shot really well. It involves strategic splashing of the water to blind the people who are trying to shoot her from behind, and it would stand tall next to other 70s car chases. Maybe not The French Connection, but others for sure. 

The plot itself is fairly standard according to what I've come to expect from the movies I've seen so far in this series. Because she has rogue methods, Cleopatra has a bit of a love-hate relationship with the police. The "little guy" she's trying to save is a low-level gangbanger type whom some corrupt police try to frame with drug possession, when really, they are in cahoots with Mommy and her minions.

There are two other familiar faces here that I should point out. One is Bernie Casey, a guy I recognized from way back in my movie viewing history, though I had to look him up to remember where. He played U.N. Jefferson in Revenge of the Nerds, and it made me realize I should really watch Revenge of the Nerds again. He's also in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka!, not to mention Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. 

Then there's Esther Rolle, Florida Evans from Good Times. I'm pretty sure I saw every episode of Good Times by the mid-80s but then never another one after that. Another thing to revisit. Unfortunately she's just in one short scene, so it's effectively a cameo. 

I wouldn't say there are any real surprises in the way anything in Cleopatra Jones plays out, though it's probably worth taking a moment to touch on how race is portrayed in the film. Maybe only a moment is necessary, because there isn't a lot of time devoted to it. I think Cleopatra calls Mommy a "crazy honky" at one point, but the n-word isn't used back toward her or anyone else in this movie, if I remember correctly. I think the only person who says it, and only once, is another Black character.

Okay, on to August. 

Blaxploitaudient: Car Wash

This is the sixth in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I have not previously seen.

When adding films to my potential viewing list for this series on Letterboxd -- and I've only got 11 so I still have an opening -- I wasn't sure whether or not Michael Schultz's 1976 film Car Wash counted as a blaxploitation movie. It would be the first movie I'd be watching where crime plays no explicit role in the plot, although there is a minor criminal act that occurs as part of the multiplicity of set pieces that make up the film. What's more, it is, I believe, the first film I've considered for this series where there is no reference to blaxploitation within the characterization of the film on Wikipedia.

However, having rubber-stumped it to go ahead -- remember, I've only pulled out 11 candidates for this series so far -- I found it felt quite appropriate for Blaxploitaudient as soon as I started watching. Then just now, to make extra sure the word "blaxploitation" did not appear on this film's Wikipedia entry just to support my claim in the previous paragraph, I found the word does appear after the text for the entry -- as one of the Wikipedia categories with which Car Wash is associated. If Wikipedia feels Car Wash belongs as part of a category called "blaxploitation films," then so should I. 

Now that we've confirmed its right to be here, let's get into the movie proper.

Car Wash is the quintessence of the hangout film. In fact, if you had told me Richard Linklater based the structure of Dazed and Confused on Car Wash, I would not have been surprised. The film takes place entirely within one day at an urban Los Angeles car wash next to an urban Los Angeles diner, the latter of which gives the film a secondary location to relieve some of the burden on the primary location. We follow more than a dozen characters as they arrive for work and clock out at night, or drop by regularly to hang out with the people who actually work there, with cameos from other actors (some famous, some not) as customers of the two establishments.

"Follow" might be a strong word. Joel Schumacher's script doesn't give us many hard story arcs to keep track of, and the exposure to characters is initially only a glancing one. Over the course of the narrative, we do get an increasingly firm understanding of who everybody is, and even some sense of their goals in life, but the script has no interest in ramming this down our throats, or possibly giving us definitive conclusions to every storyline. 

There are a number of guys who wash the cars, who love playing pranks on each other and sometimes on the customers. There's the profits-first owner and his son, who is an amateur Marxist. There's the car wash employee who is sweet on the waitress at the diner. There's the ex-con who is just trying to keep his job despite embarrassing visits from his parole officer. There's the cabby who makes more visits to the car wash than is probably necessary. There's the Black Panther wannabe who has given himself a Muslim name. There's the whore with the heart of gold who is potentially waiting to do business in the back alley.

And sure enough, I was comforted to see, the majority of these characters are Black, which was really what I wanted in order to feel good about including this film in this series. I wasn't expecting them all to be Black, because there are white characters in each of the blaxploitation movies I've watched so far in 2024. Just 70%, and Car Wash hits that percentage easily enough, with one Native American character thrown in for good measure. (Though, given the Los Angeles location, surprisingly few if any Latinos.)

And what a cast. When looking up the posters for possible inclusion with this post, I was amused to find the DVD cover that shows Richard Pryor and George Carlin as though they were the stars of the movie. Pryor has one scene that is short and sort of superfluous -- except that it also features the Pointer Sisters, which I enjoyed -- as he appears as a character in a limo named Daddy Rich. Carlin is the aforementioned cab driver, but after appearing several times in the front half of the movie, he basically disappears. Neither of these guys would accurately be described as the star of the movie.

Then again, in an ensemble movie, I suppose if you are going to emphasize anyone, might as well emphasize the two guys who had the biggest careers outside of this. Others I knew and really enjoyed were Garrett Morris of SNL fame, Antonio Fargus (who is making his second appearance in this series after last month's Foxy Brown, and plays an out homosexual), Bill Duke (who plays the would-be political activist with anger and frustration to spare), Melanie Mayron (the car wash cashier) and others whose faces I recognized if maybe I didn't know their names before this. (On Wikipedia just now I noticed there was a TV-only version of this movie in which Danny DeVito appears.)

At first thinking the movie might be too slight to really make an impression on me, I got into its groove and enjoyed it in the same way (though perhaps not to quite the same extent) that I enjoy the aforementioned Dazed and Confused. There are a lot of funny little bits here, such as the woman who stops at the car wash with her husband in a full body cast in the passenger seat, and how Morris interacts with the man whose words cannot be fully heard. I also enjoyed the pranks, such as one employee stuffing his co-worker's burrito with hot peppers.

And the individual story arcs did ultimately strike me, particularly the two that culminate in a joint scene at the end of the movie. That's the story involving the ex-con (played by Ivan Dixon) and Duke's frustrated revolutionary, who was fired earlier in the day and tries to hold up the car wash after closing. (Spoiler alert, I guess.) The ex-con Lonnie needs to prove to the world, perhaps especially himself, that he is trustworthy, so when Duke's Abdullah tries to rob the place while Lonnie is counting the cash, the stakes are high. However, more than anything, Lonnie cares for his hurting brother, so the way he talks him down from the possible heist, knowing from experience the impact it could have on Abdullah's future, is a lot more than a man just trying to save his own hide. Given the tone the film had had the whole time, I knew it could not conclude with some sort of minor tragedy, and Car Wash proved me right.

Director Schultz had directed Cooley High, another blaxploitation adjacent film, the year before, and this seems well within that mode. I find it a slightly more unusual project for Schumacher, whose career would feature many different modes, but not a lot that really would come to remind me of this. I learned also just now that this was originally envisioned as a stage production to be adapted for the screen, which is how Schumacher got involved, though it sounds as though the stage version never took off. It was also possibly going to be a musical, which is why we get one song from the Pointer Sisters and another half-song from the car wash employee who is smitten with the diner waitress.

Oh, and I can't forget to mention the titular song, which plays a couple times and which I always love hearing. 

Okay we've crossed the halfway point in Blaxploitaudient. On to July. 

Blaxploitaudient: Foxy Brown

This is the fifth in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't previously seen.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day. I was going to say "here in Australia," but unlike with Father's Day, it's the same day as in the U.S. (Australian Father's Day is in September. Let's not get into it.)

Which means it's the perfect time to watch a movie about a vengeful nurse who goes undercover as a prostitute to take out heroin dealers.

In all seriousness, though, I did think the month of Mother's Day was a good time to turn to the first female-led movie of this series, not to mention one of the genre's most iconic.

In a way, you could say Pam Grier's Foxy Brown is the mother of all blaxploitation heroines, except there's probably some evidence that an earlier film would be more accurately considered that. Grier herself actually appears a year earlier in 1973's Coffy, another likely viewing in this series. 

But Foxy Brown is the name we all know. When Grier appeared in Jackie Brown more than 20 years later, there were a lot of mentions of Grier's iconic turn in Jack Hill's 1974 film Foxy Brown, not so much about Jack Hill's 1973 film Coffy. Heck, it could just be the fact that the characters have the same last name. (Interesting to note that Hill was such a maker of blaxploitation, when he was white. A discussion for another time probably.) And since I found Grier very captivating in Jackie Brown -- one of my favorite parts of the movie, of which I have only a middling appreciation -- I had wanted to see Foxy Brown for a good 25 years.

So the actual movie was probably a mild disappointment for me, though I do think Grier is great in it, and she has an absolutely dynamite succession of period outfits.

First I should say it was something of a relief to return to a more straightforward narrative after last month's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which was the best movie in this series so far, if not always the easiest to watch in terms of clarity of the story. I still, though, don't think I got all the details, or maybe some of those details were just wrong. For example, I don't actually think Foxy Brown is a nurse, a detail I got from the Amazon Prime brief plot synopsis when I rented it. Speaking of Coffy, I think they may actually be conflating the two, as she definitely appears to be a nurse there. 

The Wikipedia plot description makes no mention of her profession at all, but there is an early scene in a hospital, so I tell myself I may have just missed a throwaway line of dialogue. However, in that scene Brown is a visitor to the hospital, not working there, as her boyfriend, an undercover agent who had infiltrated a drug ring, has needed to have facial reconstruction to avoid being targeted now that his cover has been blown. It might have worked, too, if this man hadn't been ratted out by Foxy's own brother, a drug addict named Link, played by Antonio Fargas.

Before we continue with the plot, I wanted to pause for a moment to mention Fargas. His was a face I immediately recognized, and thought I even knew from where, even though this next film is one I haven't seen in more than 30 years. Sure enough, I confirmed on IMDB and he plays that pimp with the fishbowls in his shoes in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka!, which was probably my first exposure to blaxpoitation in the form of a spoof. Maybe I will rewatch that this year after I have seen the original version of many of these tropes. It's been too long. 

So one thing I thought was funny about this undercover agent, who is played by Terry Carter, is that to prove the success of the facial reconstruction and change in name from Dalton Ford to Michael Anderson, the film shows us a newspaper headline that reads UNDERCOVER AGENT DALTON FORD MISSING. I love imagining that there would have ever been a time when the whereabouts of undercover agents, whose names should not be named, would be the subject of newspaper articles.

Anyway, Ford/Anderson is gunned down, and that sends Foxy on the warpath both to rough up her own brother and to take down the drug ring headed by Kathryn Wall (Kathryn Loder) and her lieutenant Stevie (Peter Brown). Loder's performance is pretty campy, but it's hard to tell whether or not it's on purpose.

Hill's direction is probably the weakest part of the movie, as his ability to get good line readings from the actors is only one of the deficits he puts up there on screen. He's also challenged when it comes to staging the action scenes, with some of them even prompting laughter.

At least he has Grier, whose charisma is a physical force. I did find myself surprised, though, how much this movie takes us down into the dirt with her character. I imagined her to be kind of a groovy superhero with a great afro in a variety of sharp wardrobes, above the fray and able to dispatch foes with a cool quip. But that's me looking back on Foxy Brown from the perspective of her being an icon, not imagining how the filmmakers might have seen her at the time.

There's no doubt she's badass and strong, but the film is not above degrading her. Without getting too much into spoilers -- though I doubt you are worried about spoilers for a film that turns 50 this year -- there's a scene where Foxy is tied to a bed, drugged, and raped. The rape is off screen, but that would not have played in a film today -- at least not for the hero of the film. As she's struggling against the ropes that have her bound, we get a casual exposure to her breasts. I suspect this sort of thing may have contributed to why the film was, according to Wikipedia, "seized and confiscated in the United Kingdom under section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 during the video nasty panic." I'm not following the link to see what the "video nasty panic" was. 

There is one other actor I wanted to call out. Sid Haig, who I know from his later life collaborations with Rob Zombie, appears here, looking quite thin, as a hippie pilot. It's a goofy role and it brought a bit smile to my face.

The movie does end with a very satisfying comeuppance for its villains, which reminds me a bit of the ending of Shaft. That might be the kind of thing that gives a film its iconic status. I'll have to see whether Coffy botches that same sort of ending when I get to it later in the year, perhaps explaining why that film is not as well known.

So Happy Mother's Day, everyone. If you have a heroin ring you want to bust up, Foxy Brown is available. 

Blaxploitaudient: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

This is the fourth in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies that I have not previously seen.

I had been curious about seeing Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song -- checking the correct number of A's and S's, and confirming -- ever since I saw the movie about the making of that movie, made by the son of its director.

Mario Van Peebles directed the movie Baadasssss! in 2003, and he plays the role of his father, Melvin, who wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song back in 1971. As an interesting side note, Mario also appears in the movie as the 13-year-old version of the character his father plays for the rest of the movie.

Having vaguely understood that this was a significant movie in the history of blaxploitation, I found that a little funny because I never considered Mario Van Peebles to be quite that black. Now, it's highly problematic to tell somebody they aren't "black enough," and that's not really what I mean. More than anything, I mean that Mario Van Peebles never struck me as someone who particularly bucked the system or fought for the rights of people who looked like him. I didn't see any of the Mario Van Peebles movies that might have undercut my impression of him -- for example, New Jack City is a notable omission. But he always profiled as someone who went down easily and was not very confrontational.

His father's movie does not go down easily and is highly confrontational.

In fact, at first, I had no idea what to make of it. This is a genuine arthouse movie, the first such I've encountered in this series. While the movies I've seen so far have showcased both the grit and the humor of blaxploitation, they have all stayed within bounds in terms of the narrative. Even a fairly outlandish narrative like the one in Petey Wheatstraw is still something that is more or less easy to follow.

Well, Melvin Van Peebles wanted to make this movie his way. He had made the studio film Watermelon Man the year before in 1970, and apparently didn't take to the rules and restrictions of a studio film. So he blew that all up and made a movie so experimental that it leaves you scratching your head for large quantities of it, until at some point you decide it might be brilliant.

There isn't much of a plot in the movie, and what is there has been forgotten to me in the nine days since I watched it. (I really would have been better off writing this post straight away, but life doesn't always work out that way.) What I can tell you is that the main character, who bristles against the system the whole movie, is known for his "sweet back" and for having intercourse with various women as a sort of performance art in groovy settings that are into that sort of thing. (Er, whorehouses I guess.) At some point in his young adult life he runs afoul of the police, getting caught in a scenario where the cops were trying to frame him and a couple of the officers ended up being killed. This puts him on the run for most of the movie as corrupt and blatantly racist officers try to track him down, and we see his interactions with various other characters throughout. (Including, I was pleased to see, a young John Amos as a biker, who is billed as "Johnny Amos.")

The movie has all sorts of elliptical editing, quick cuts, half-seen camera angles, interesting uses of close-ups and slo-mo, and a soundtrack of what I might call "protest soul" by Brer Soul and Earth Wind & Fire that is equal parts joyous, chaotic and desperate. This movie is a scream of rage against the establishment in the package of a cool 70s movie that is constantly in dialogue with the racism of society, but rarely in ways you can easily parse.

If you want to understand where this movie is coming from, in the opening credits it describes itself as starring "the black community," and is dedicated to "All the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man." In reading up a bit more about it now, I see it is rightly described as a "picaresque." That's a good word and I should use it more often.

I see also that the film is considered instrumental in the creation of the blaxploitation genre. So if I am considering its style and rhythms to be an outlier in what I have seen so far, that may be because other blaxploitation films realized that they could not be quite so abstruse and still connect with an audience, even though SSBS seemed to pull that off just fine. (And while we're talking about the inception of blaxploitation, I should say that two of the films I've watched, Shaft and They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!, are actually direct contemporaries of SSBS, so which chicken hatched out of which egg at which time is a subject of some uncertainty and/or disagreement.)

I was flummoxed by large sections of this film, and it took me a really long time to decide it was not a slog. The realization I really had, as I was going, was that this movie did not want to feed me easily understandable narrative beats with conventional satisfactions. That's beside the point of what this movie is trying to accomplish, as this movie defines itself by being different. And the technique applied to making it distinct represents a true artist's understanding of the tools of cinema, and how to blow them up and use them in confronting ways. You can't make something so shaggy and ragged unless you understand exactly the things against which you are contrasting it.

I doubt I will ever see Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song again, but I respect it immensely -- and I think there is a good chance it will make me curious enough to revisit Mario's homage to his father, who was still living and continued to be so until 2021, the aforementioned Baadasssss!

On to May.

Blaxploitaudient: Petey Wheatstraw

This is the third in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies.

Petey Wheatstraw was, in some ways, the first movie on my list for this series.

I'm being a bit cheeky when I say this. Of course, as soon as Elvis Mitchell's documentary Is That Black Enough for You?? gave me the idea to do this series, I realized that Shaft was my biggest blind spot and the movie I would watch first.

But Petey Wheatstraw was on my Kanopy watchlist even before I saw Mitchell's movie, just waiting for its perfect occasion to rise to the top of that list. That didn't happen until this series, unfortunately -- but then again, previous neglect of blaxploitation is why I'm doing this series.

Of course, part of the reason it came up for viewing as early as March was that a bird in the hand beats two in the bush. When something is already available to you on streaming, it tends to jump ahead of things where you have to shell out some money to see it (as I did with the first two movies, each chosen specially for their months for different reasons).

Another good reason to watch it: It stars Rudy Ray Moore, the character played by Eddie Murphy in Dolemite Is My Name, which was my #14 movie of 2019. Perhaps Dolemite would have been a better Moore movie to watch, but Dolemite isn't on Kanopy -- though the movie he made the year before Petey Wheatstraw, The Human Tornado, is. By getting to it early, it left me with a chance to watch one of these films later in the series, if I really dug Moore.

So, did I really dig Moore?

In parts I did. There is definitely a goofy charisma there that explains why he was popular within this milieu in the late 1970s. (Made in 1977, Petey Wheatstraw is now the newest movie I've seen in this series by more than five years.)

I think I thought he would be more consistently entertaining, which is a funny comment to make about a performer who has stylized himself on the principle of being loud and outrageous and chaotic -- in short, inconsistent by his very nature. But, I can't deny that I hoped Petey Wheatstraw would see its ideas through just a bit more coherently.

Of course, other times I just reveled in the joyous nonsense of it all.

There is not a lot of plot in Petey Wheatstraw, but the chaos is baked into the movie from the very beginning. In a device I recalled from Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story -- because I haven't actually read the novel on which it was based -- the title character, after some opening introductions to the audience, says he recalls his own birth. So of course we go straight to a scene of this birth, and it's immediately hilarious. Petey emerges from between his mother's legs as a boy of about eight or nine years old, and the first thing he does is start wailing on the doctor, who runs screaming from the shabby house where he's been born. This leads to an immediate scolding by his mother, which adds further hilarity to the affair. No one seems surprised by the fact that a newborn should be as large as he is, should be able to talk or hit people, and should be in a position to even understand what it means to be scolded.

It might have been something to sort of follow Petey through this picaresque childhood, but pretty soon we get to the main plot. Petey is a standup comedian about to open a new club, but that means he's drawn the ire of competing comedians Leroy and Skillet, played by Leroy Daniels and Ernest Mayhand. Apparently, they are so eager for their act to retain the spotlight over Petey's that they are willing to kill for it, and so it is that Petey and a bunch of his cohorts are assassinated -- at a funeral for a boy killed in the previous scene, no less.

Sound grim? Well don't you worry. The corpses littered on the church steps are soon revived, as showing up on the scene is none other than the devil. (He's played by G. Tito Shaw.) Oh, I think I forgot to tell you -- the movie sort of has a subtitle that I don't find used as part of its official title anywhere, so I'm not using it here. But the full title, if you chose to use it, would be Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-Law. (I always like a title that rhymes.)

So Lucifer is happy to reverse what has just happened over the last five minutes if Petey will agree to sell his soul and marry the devil's daughter. We don't see her face right away, but Petey gets a look at it, and he assures us that she is ugly. But, it's better than him and all his friends being dead. So the scene rewinds and Petey has saved everyone, plus been given a special walking stick belonging to the devil that has magic powers. 

After this promising setup, there's a fair bit of meandering in the middle of the movie -- things happening that don't make much sense, and are more enjoyable to appreciate on the level of sheer spectacle. For example, at one point Petey turns an abusive man into a poodle, but I don't think this man or the woman Petey's saving from him have anything else to do with the rest of the movie.

By the end, when Petey tries to fool the devil into getting out of his commitment to marry the girl, the movie has found some of its purpose again, as well as a wild spirit that it never lost in the first place.

I won't say I loved Petey Wheatstraw. It's the first movie in this series to get a technically thumbs down star rating, as it ended up at 2.5 stars on Letterboxd. But the more curious thing was that the things I did like about it were not tied to Moore himself, or not as tied to him as I expected they would be. That speaks well both of the supporting cast and of the wild imagination of writer-director Roquemore, who I would not be surprised to learn was also a character in Dolemite Is My Name. (Does not appear to be the case, though Mike Epps does play Jimmy Lynch, who is Petey's closest friend and second billed in the Petey Wheatstraw cast.)

When I do give the movie only 2.5 stars, it's certainly not because I wanted it to be made any better than it was. The low-tech special effects and makeup are of course a huge part of the fun, and I suspect they wouldn't have wanted to make this movie any better even with five times the budget. This is a movie that is what it wants to be.

I'll see another such movie in April, title undetermined as of now. 

Blaxploitaudient: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

This is the second in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen.

It being Black History Month in February, I tasked myself with finding just the right title to watch for this series, but it's possible that effort may have backfired.

It was a bit doomed from the start. Although I reckon there is something empowering about any blaxploitation film, when considered through the right lens, any blaxploitation film is also necessarily going to include disempowering elements that lean into hurtful stereotypes, even if the ultimate goal is to undermine those stereotypes.

My first port of call, among the movies I've already identified in a Blaxploitaudient Letterboxd list, was those that at least also empowered women. But the two different movies I will watch this year starring Pam Grier, Coffy and Foxy Brown, both mentioned drug dealers or pimps or some other unsavory element of society in their brief plot descriptions, so I steered clear of them -- at least for this month. March and beyond, these will be fair game again.

Then I saw there was an obvious option staring me in the face: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

(Incidentally, in the movie itself, the title is listed as They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! But it goes against my sense of correctness to capitalize only a single word in the title, even to provide the correct emphasis when spoken out loud. At least I include the exclamation point, which my iTunes rental did not.)

This being a sequel to In the Heat of the Night, I never would have thought it could qualify as a blaxploitation movie. But in my research leading up to this series, I saw the 1970 film listed as a "pre-Shaft blaxploitation movie," which implies that Shaft is considered the inception point of the genre. Clearly that assignation would have been given in hindsight, if people were not even talking about blaxploitation at the time it came out. In fact, given that the term was coined in 1972, that's obviously the case. 

Given Sidney Poitier's proximity to the civil rights movement and prominent role in the emergence of Black leading men in Hollywood, I could think of no better choice for Black History Month.

Here's why it may have backfired: 

Most of this cast is white. As is the director, Gordon Douglas.

It's true, Virgil Tibbs and his family are all Black, and there's a lot more time spent with his family, particularly his son, than you would expect in a movie that is largely the case of a murdered prostitute. (Even though I used this unsavory subject matter as a reason to exclude the Grier movies, you can't fully escape it, I suppose, because that's one of the things that makes it blaxploitation. At least Poitier's dignified presence takes the edge off it.)

And there are one or two more other Black characters, one another prostitute and one a mentally slow handyman who discovers the first prostitute after she's been killed. (An opening scene that actually has a bit of a giallo flavor to it.)

In general, though, you've got a bunch of white guys filling out the rest of the cast, including three very familiar faces: Martin Landau, Ed Asner, and Anthony Zerbe, whom I know from a lot of things but who I initially mistook for Tom Skerritt. (Which allowed me to look up Skerritt and remember that he is still alive and kicking at age 90.)

Given that this movie comes only three years after Poitier's watershed twin appearances in In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, it's not surprising that this would still be the sort of template in which he'd be fed to mainstream audiences. This is distinguished from other films considered blaxploitation by the fact that indeed, it would have been clear that the studio wanted the same audience from In the Heat of the Night to watch this. As it would develop, the blaxploitation movement would be a lot more clearly aimed at Black audiences than this movie is.

I said the choice of They Call Me Mister Tibbs! was sort of a backfire, but I don't have any objection to it being included in a blaxploitation series, and am very glad I've seen it. Let's talk about the parts that do resemble a blaxploitation movie.

One is clearly the groovy score by Quincy Jones. It's very seventies, even in only the first year of the seventies. I'm not musically literate enough to talk about the instruments that give away the score's placing within this landscape, but let's just say the score did definitely put me in mind of other blaxploitation movies I've seen, especially the way it gets ramped up and almost over-emphasized in action moments.

And those action moments are also noteworthy in terms of our genre expectations. There are only a few moments where Tibbs has to become a man of action and take out a potential assailant, but given that this was never Poitier's primary mode on screen, they are striking for using karate chops and other moves with heavy genre associations. So while I think the movie on the whole is not so different, tonally, from In the Heat of the Night, these individual moments do set it apart. 

Because I have, up to this point, failed to bring you up to speed about what this movie is about, I thought I should include a few thoughts on that quickly here. Virgil Tibbs and his family have relocated to San Francisco -- reason unknown -- and Tibbs is a lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department. He's called in to investigate the death by strangulation and bludgeoning of a prostitute being protected by her pimp (that's Zerbe), and the prime suspect is a minister involved in the passage of a local proposition for an upcoming vote (that's Landau). In fact, given that the project relates to urban renewal, and the precariousness of the vote is one of the factors why they are being delicate with the investigation, it does make this probably a good choice for Black History Month, at least in that respect.

As alluded to earlier, it's interesting how much of this story is related to Tibbs' family dynamics, specifically the way his son (played by George Spell, whose real-life sister plays his sister in the film) is reaching an age where he's talking back to his parents and even experimenting with smoking. There's a memorable scene where Tibbs makes the boy (Andy by name) smoke a cigar and drink what appears to be some whiskey, which he predictably reacts to by vomiting in short order (since he seems to be about 11). Today, that kid would be taught a lesson in a different way, just because the idea of showing children smoking is so taboo. (Also taboo: hitting children. Tibbs hits a defiant Andy a couple times in this movie, though each time it is a slap on the face that is a very small percentage of his capabilities, which we saw on full display in In the Heat of the Night.)

Overall I was quite impressed with the film. There are some subtle bits of technique on display, and Poitier is brilliant as always. If it does ultimately feel fair to include They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in the blaxploitation genre, only just barely, it is likely one of the finest example of the form in terms of the overall quality of its craftmanship, to say nothing of the caliber of its performances.

Unlike In the Heat of the Night, in which the topic of race is quite foregrounded, They Call Me Mister Tibbs! basically includes no discussion of race whatsoever. It isn't even really an elephant in the room, since Tibbs is generally treated with respect. And perhaps that explains the existence of this and one other Virgil Tibbs film, 1971's The Organization, which I may or may not watch in this series depending on how much it is viewed as blaxploitation: They want to show this character become post-racial, at least for a little while. Mission accomplished. 

Before I leave you, I did want to mention a funny random pickup I made during the film. There's a scene outside a church where you see a lot of extras, and in probably no more than three seconds of screen time, I picked up actor Al White in his first (uncredited) screen appearance.

Don't know the name Al White? Allow me to refresh your memory:

He's the one on the left.

Yep, with just a few seconds' exposure, I picked out "Second Jive Dude" from another movie with an exclamation point in its title, Airplane!

Come to think of it, there may be more blaxploitation in that one scene of Airplane! than there is in the entirety of They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

Blaxploitaudient: Shaft

This is the first in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation films I haven't seen.

I'm seeing the name of this series in the subject of a post for the first time, and I don't love it. But, I feel like I've committed to it, and hey, it's only 12 months, ha ha. 

Actually, the series title is appropriate because this is a blog that likes portmanteaus. You know that. "Blaxploitation" is already a portmanteau of "black" and "exploitation," and this just adds a third segment to the portmanteau. If two is good, three is even better.

When I chose Shaft for the debut of Blaxploitaudient, though, I didn't know it was also going to be a Richard Roundtree Memorial Viewing.

When I'm watching movies, I'm not on my phone, but I do sometimes like to look up the ages of the actors. It's a little game. I guess how old they are and I see how close I am to being right. The number of times I am dead on is pretty remarkable. 

When Shaft started, I guessed that Richard Roundtree was 84. It turns out, I was off by three years -- but also, he died three months ago at age 81.

It was news I missed at the time. I'm not sure I would have done anything on the blog to note his passing. Shaft is easily his most prominent work, and I hadn't seen it until Monday night. I wasn't likely going to write an in memoriam piece for his bunch of small supporting roles in features ranging from Brick to Se7en to Boat Trip. But I did always enjoy his presence, so I would have felt sorrow on October 24th, hearing he had passed from pancreatic cancer. Instead, I feel sorrow now.

The viewing of Shaft allowed me to appreciate where it all began for Roundtree, on the day I learned it had all ended for him.

Gordon Parks knew what he was doing when he cast Roundtree as John Shaft. The charisma radiates off the screen, and that's only partly because Isaac Hayes' iconic theme song has done some of the work to make the man larger than life.

That opening, with the theme song, was indeed my favorite part of the movie, just because that song is so great. But this is a pretty sturdy film overall, perhaps not quite what I was expecting in terms of size and scope -- but that's because Shaft wasn't conceived as some game changer, at least I don't think it was. Obviously a huge hit, it has come to achieve significant prominence in our culture over the years, such that it has already been remade twice (both times starring Samuel L. Jackson). However, at its core, this is a low-budget film from the early 1970s, and sometimes it shows.

For example, there's at least one exterior scene where the sound is really bad. I guess they decided to mic it up live rather than doing dubbing in post, and while I do appreciate the greater seamlessness of that choice, the dialogue in that scene sounds tinny and far away. 

But is this a substantive criticism of Shaft? No it is not. And I make it only because it helped remind me just what sort of underdogs these films were.

This is a pretty tight narrative by the loose standards of movies about private eyes. With only very few small tangents, the film deals with Shaft's case to find the kidnapped daughter of a mover and shaker in the Harlem criminal scene, with the great name of Bumpy. (That's Moses Gunn.) The police are also hip to things related to the case, though because of Bumpy's status in the criminal underworld, he can't formally go through them. That's why he has Shaft.

It occurred to me that this was an interesting watch in the wake of my viewing of Charlie's Country last week, which I wrote about in my last post. Shaft has a similar relationship to the police that Charlie has in that movie, someone they lean on when it's convenient for them and abuse when they think they can get away with it. Charlie gets the last laugh sometimes in that movie, but Shaft gets the last laugh a lot more here -- as that is literally how the movie ends, on his laughter after hanging up a pay phone on the detective who is his most frequent contact on that side of the law. 

And so it is worth transitioning into a discussion of race. What I found clever about Shaft is that race is everpresent without being a constant topic of conversation. With a world more than 50 years less progressive than it is today, clearly Shaft has a significant lack of privilege relative to the white characters. But they aren't all dropping n-words on him left and right, and even the relatively few uses of that word are more about him ("I'm looking for an n-word named John Shaft") then at him ("Hey n-word!"). He understands how to live in this world without making more than a few snide comments here and there, and gives back as good as he gets. He doesn't feel disempowered by this world, which is probably one of the reasons he was such an aspirational figure to the Black culture at large in 1971.

There's some good staging here, too. A couple of shootouts are more than decent, and the film ends on a particularly high note in that regard, as Shaft and the "army" he recruits (for $10,000 a head of Bumpy's money) put together a plan whose details aren't evident until Parks springs them on us in a great minute-long sequence in which it all comes to fruition. A thrilling way to end a very solid movie.

One thing I did notice, though, was that there was a small part of me that figured Shaft was monogamous. "He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman." Indeed we are introduced to "his woman" early on, and though it seems like they are a mutually dedicated pair who challenge each other, Shaft is not faithful to her. Later on in the movie he sleeps with a white woman, one of those few tangents that has no bearing on the narrative that I can see. However, I suppose this just makes him a bit more like James Bond -- who was getting his final (authorized) turn from Sean Connery that same year in Diamonds Are Forever.

Haven't chosen the movie for next month ... though with it being Black History Month, perhaps I need to hold myself to a standard of picking just the right thing, with a little extra empowerment thrown in for good measure. 

Blaxploitation on the docket in 2024

I came up with my 2024 monthly series as a result of one of my final viewings before closing off my 2022 list, about a year ago.

The series that was all lined up for 2024 was booted out -- possibly for the second time, I don't remember -- and may not surface until 2026 at this point, since I have a possible 2025 idea already. And this was the result of watching a movie that didn't really make an impact on my 2022 list, finishing at a mere 77th out of 175 movies ranked. 

Film critic Elvis Mitchell made a documentary called Is That Black Enough for You?!?, which I thought was limited a little bit by the fact that Mitchell is not actually a filmmaker. It was more like a long YouTube essay, the kind Kogonada made before he became an acclaimed filmmaker, but without Kogonada's visual sense.

But the subject matter was great.

And I became aware of a number of blaxploitation blind spots, and reminded of one huge one: Shaft.

Oh I've seen one of the two Shaft remakes starring Samuel L. Jackson, but the 1971 original, starring Richard Roundtree as pictured above, has eluded me for the entire 53 years of its existence. 

Time to correct that.

So, it's as simple as that for 2024: one unseen blaxploitation movie per month.

I won't reveal any titles as of now except for Shaft, which will probably be my first later this month. However, I can give you some idea of what I've already seen, to provide a sense of where I'm coming from and how much work I have to do. 

One of the earliest I can remember seeing is Super Fly, a film whose bigger impression was left by its Curtis Mayfield soundtrack, which I listened to regularly back in the 1990s. Over the years I've also caught up with the likes of Blacula and Get Christie Love!

The fact that I didn't list a third title in that last sentence, as the rule of three dictates you should, indicates how direly in need of this series I am.

I think of myself as having a good familiarity with blaxploitation, but that's largely because I've watched a lot of what Wikipedia refers to as post-blaxploitation films, which are either latter day versions of blaxploitation movies or movies that consider the blaxploitation movie as a phenomenon by recreating the making of a blaxploitation movie. There are a lot more titles in this group, such as I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Black Dynamite, Pootie Tang, Dolemite is My Name, Baadasssss!, Jackie Brown and Undercover Brother. Some of these only contain elements of blaxploitation. 

The real McCoy, though? It's a blind spot that I'm going to partially cover with a dozen seminal films in 2024, exclusively from the 1970s. You can think of it also as a belated recognition of the 50th birthday of this 1973 baby. 

I struggled a bit with what to call this series. The genre name itself is already confronting, so I figured, confronting names are on the table.

Not that what I settled on is really confronting, it's just that it requires a permission that has already effectively been granted by the initial genre name.

I'll call this series Blaxploitaudient. 

It's a bit of a mouthful, containing one more syllable than the genre name. But you know I like to fit the blog name in where I can, and so, this is what we're doing.

Stay tuned later this month as I cross the mother of all blaxploitation blind spots, Shaft, off my list.