’70s Blaxploitation Movies

 

Quote of the Day: “An independent filmmaker’s only hope of survival is to do something the mainstream studios can not or will not do”—Roger Corman, Hollywood’s king of B movies.

Let’s start by explaining what a pimpmobile was. If you take a look at the ‘70s films listed in this post, you’re going to see a lot of them, rolling jukeboxes cruising the ghetto streets of south Chicago, south-central Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and above all, New York City’s Harlem, for many years the unofficial capital of Black America. A pimpmobile was a big luxury car, usually a Cadillac Eldorado or Lincoln Continental, tricked out with garish accessories that boasted of money to burn. It was the ride par excellence of the urban criminal class, with no attempt to remain inconspicuous. On the contrary, it was as conspicuous as the Batmobile. It bragged to the world: I’m the king of the city. Nobody can stop me. Not white society, not the law, not my enemies in the streets. No one. That’s what the era of ‘70s Blaxploitation movies was all about—a young man’s fantasy of women, riches, limitless power, and revenge.

By 1978 or so, other than a couple of stragglers and late wannabees, they were gone, over. But their violent, hoes-and-playaz themes and style have endured and echoed for almost half a century, in thousands of record albums and music videos.

These films seemed to come out of nowhere at the turn of the decade, but they didn’t. For a dozen years, Americans were becoming accustomed to racial dramas, at first warm and positive ones like A Raisin in the Sun and Lilies of the Field. They often starred, as you’ve already noticed, Sidney Poitier, who back then had a unique stature almost unimaginable today: America’s Official Negro Hero. Mind you, the civil rights movement helped get work for other actors, among them Brock Peters, Diana Sands, young comedians Bill Cosby, Nipsey Russell, and Godfrey Cambridge, and a married couple, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.

It was Davis who unintentionally set a new Black wave of films into motion when Sam Goldwyn Jr. hired him to direct Cotton Comes to Harlem. Though a mainstream movie, not a Blaxploitation film—the term didn’t exist yet—the 1970 box-office success of Cotton proved to Hollywood that “race” movies didn’t have to be integrated; they could be jet black and still be a money-making hit. The few whites in Cotton Comes to Harlem were clueless officials, doofus-y cops, and hissable villains. The formula was repeated the following year with MGM’s Shaft, launching a franchise. The ads for Shaft bragged, “Bolder than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt.”—big boasts in 1971.

Independently made and released films had broken what amounted to studio monopoly and were booked by more and more theaters. Hollywood’s always-striving lower rung producers sensed an opportunity in low-low budget Black action movies.

A couple of other things happening at the same time converged. Movies in general had become much more violent once censorship was relaxed in the ‘60s. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969) stand out, but there were hundreds of others. Cop movies took the longtime place of Westerns. Gangster movies captured the imagination of the culture after The Godfather opened in early 1972. Martial arts movies—“Kung Fu fighting”—became all the rage. And the racial rage of that political era completed the combustible elements of Blaxploitation, the very name a sardonic play on “sexploitation,” another, slightly earlier cinematic phenomenon of the era.

They lit the fuse. The dry kindling that was waiting for them were thousands of smaller, single-screen old movie theaters, many of them in now-abandoned parts of American cities. They’d been struggling since TV took over. A few lucky ones became revival houses that showed old movies and foreign films. Far more became porno theaters, in a time a decade before home videotape. And many more specialized in Black action. As many whites left the slums after WWII (my family among them), theaters in newly ghettoized urban neighborhoods adjusted to the necessity of pleasing a new clientele.

By 1972, the product was ready. There were Black actors of the ‘60s ready to take Hollywood’s traditional, uncertain, highly reversible climb to the director’s chair in the ‘70s, as Ossie Davis had done. Ivan Dixon of Hogan’s Heroes helmed Trouble Man, one of the first films called Blaxploitation even in its time. Blacula made its own claim on Bram Stoker’s timeless story. Shaft director Gordon Parks was a famous photographer who’d made a few documentary films in 16mm. By contrast, his son Gordon Parks Jr. had no screen credits when he made Superfly (1972), destined to become, if anything, even more influential than his father’s film the year before. Many Blaxploitation movies at least paid lip service to Black history, the struggle to get somewhere in life. Superfly didn’t bother much with philosophy; it was straight-up glorification of a life of crime.

This is roughly where your humble narrator entered the picture: offscreen, as a newly minted movie projectionist. My very first shift was at the Melba, a long-gone 600-seat theater in the Bronx. It had been built as part of a neighborhood improvement scheme when the neighborhood was Jewish; 50 years later, it was showing Sugar Hill on a double bill with Scream, Blacula, Scream. This was a somewhat different kind of movie than those I’d recently studied at the NYU film school, with different, very direct lessons about the kind of responses a sharp filmmaker could draw out of an audience.

The projector lamp often went out, resulting in a screamingly violent audience until light could be restored. The theater manager, himself Black, refused to spend the few dollars to buy repair parts. He cackled uproariously, “We promised them the black motion picture experience, now didn’t we?” Indeed, we did. I didn’t stay long at the Melba. Something about life expectancy.

I moved my job downtown to 42nd Street. Sure, drunks still occasionally fired guns at the soundproof projection booth windows there, trying to knock off the light beam, and mobs still tried to hammer down the iron door to the booth. But the burly ushers had tire irons and crowbars, to use on the mobs, not the doors. On balance, it was a safer, altogether more normal environment than the central Bronx. Paid better, too. Think of 42nd Street in its heyday, in modern terms, as a 14-plex on two sides of a single block. But no 14-plex in today’s world has or had more than 19,000 available seats.

Times Square and 42nd Street became the instant capital of the brief Blaxploitation era, mostly because Harlem and the newly Black parts of Brooklyn didn’t have anywhere near enough screens to compete. 42nd and 34th Streets were sites of major bus and train connections. In that era, there were many servicemen of every shade of color hanging out at the movies just killing time for a few hours. Contrary to public belief, most 42nd Street movies were no different from the ones you saw elsewhere, but cheaper, and part of a double bill, long after that ended in most other theaters. You’d see two cop thrillers, say The New Centurions with Sudden Impact, or two lesbian melodramas, Fraulein Doktor with The Fox. Of those 14 screens on “The Street,” only two were showing porno. Okay, three when Flesh Gordon was in town.

Black Eye was better than the run-of-the-mill Blaxploitation films of the day, and for maybe the first time Hollywood realized what a screen presence Fred Williamson had. As an actor, he wasn’t the black John Gielgud, no, but he was at least the black Roger Moore, polished, handsome, and sharp, much more believable than Richard Roundtree’s Shaft.

The plot was also much more like a classic noir detective story than like other Blaxploitation films, head and shoulders above routine stuff like The Mack, Hell Up in Harlem, or Cleopatra Jones. The movie was photographed with unusual skill for a relatively low budget studio film. I suspect this was being groomed as a crossover, a film that could transcend a Blaxploitation label for at least modest mainstream success. That quest for crossover appeal to whites didn’t catch on quite yet, but it would soon.

Trick Baby was a relatively serious story that tried to ride the blaxploitation wave. Despite the fact that it has the streetwise pedigree of coming from an Iceberg Slim novel, or maybe because of it, Trick Baby doesn’t have much of the crude-but-effective slam-bang action, or the uninhibited earthy humor of its contemporaries, the real blaxploitation films. Superficially it has the authentic look of The Mack or Truck Turner, with its dirty streets, pimpmobiles, and mafia-ridden cops, but it comes across as a woodenly acted, low rent biracial version of The Sting set in Philadelphia. The “old” black guy more or less looks the part, though the actor was only 42 at the time, but his Iceberg Slim dialog is so stilted and literary that he might as well be Baby Stewie in Family Guy.

Michael Schulz isn’t the blackest-sounding name, but he made Cooley High, a cheerful blatant ripoff of American Graffiti, and his next picture was Hollywood backed, a true crossover at last: Car Wash, an engaging workplace comedy whose Black cast did not peddle cocaine or fire guns. By now, the music business and the movie business were agreed: Black movies could sell records, plenty of them. Motown became a respected partner to the studios.

The earliest Blaxploitation films were mostly made with white directors and crew members. The only Blacks were in front of the camera. Thank God It’s Friday reversed that formula; Blacks and whites clowned it up on screen, with a great deal of black control behind the scenes. By now, things had changed. In 1977, Esquire magazine ran a feature called “Why Blacks Aren’t Scary Anymore.”

In the decades since, Blacks came to regard the films of the Blaxploitation days with a mixture of affection and embarrassment, not unlike the way my family regards the Irish movie gangsters and East Side Kids of the Depression.

As another symbol of the end of the era, Harlem radio station WBLS, which once angrily billed itself as the “World Black Liberation Station” recast itself in a smoother, more seductive mode to take advantage of lucrative multiracial advertising revenue. Now it was called the “World’s Best-Looking Sound.”

This post is part of the Quote of the Day series, a longtime, member-created feature of Ricochet. It’s one of the easiest ways to join the R> conversation. If you haven’t done it, give it a try!

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  1. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Incredibly, that’s not actually a pimpmobile, though it sure looks like one. It’s a limited production car, a Clenet I think. Pimpmobiles were big on the long hood/short deck look.

    The one I posted?  The picture caption said “Stutz IV”.

    • #31
  2. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Hartmann von Aue (View Comment):

    Man, everyone’s mentioning Yaphet Koto and now I want to look for Homicide: Life on the Streets on Amazon.

    Well, that and Shaft.

     

    Another suggestion: Warning Sign, with him plus Sam Waterston and Kathleen Quinlan.

    One trailer:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sINnqU6Jf0

    It’s available on youtube for pay, or download here:

    https://www.adrive.com/public/DupdBT/Warning.Sign.1985.BRRip.XviD.MP3-XVID.avi

    in SD (Standard Definition), or here:

    https://www.adrive.com/public/mtVkub/Warning.Sign.1985.720p.BluRay.H264.AAC-RARBG.mp4

    in 720p.

    The 1080p version is too big for the service I use, but if someone is convinced they absolutely must have 1080p, I’ll see what I can do.

    Even if you watch it for free, though, I encourage people to buy the dvd or blu-ray or amazon stream or whatever, to show their support.

    • #32
  3. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Incredibly, that’s not actually a pimpmobile, though it sure looks like one. It’s a limited production car, a Clenet I think. Pimpmobiles were big on the long hood/short deck look.

    I had a ’78 Ford LTD II that my friends called “the land yacht.”

    • #33
  4. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Incredibly, that’s not actually a pimpmobile, though it sure looks like one. It’s a limited production car, a Clenet I think. Pimpmobiles were big on the long hood/short deck look.

    Trust a white pimp to get a pimpmobile wrong. :-)

    • #34
  5. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Incredibly, that’s not actually a pimpmobile, though it sure looks like one. It’s a limited production car, a Clenet I think. Pimpmobiles were big on the long hood/short deck look.

    The one I posted? The picture caption said “Stutz IV”.

    1981 Stutz IV-Porte.

    https://www.imcdb.org/v409384.html

     

    • #35
  6. Jon Gabriel, Ed. Contributor
    Jon Gabriel, Ed.
    @jon

    I grew up in an extremely white neighborhood in far north Phoenix. When my brother, five years my senior, attended high school it had 2,000 students, only one Black. There were maybe five Black kids by the time I got there.

    Then I joined the Navy and bootcamp exposed me to all kinds of Americans. After boot, I was assigned to a room with three Black guys from inner-city Atlanta. I was like their skinny white mascot which made for a hilarious three months. I was exposed to early underground hip hop, every scratchy Blaxploitation video they could get their hands on, ’70s funk and soul. They would quiz me on all of it and bring me to their friends to recite dialog from Penitentiary or something. It was basically a second bootcamp for me.

    Years after, I’ve confused the hell out of Black friends and co-workers by my in-depth understanding of and references to the movies and music of this era. Great conversation starter.

    • #36
  7. CarolJoy, Thread Hijacker Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Thread Hijacker
    @CarolJoy

    Gary I thought your summary of the Blaxplotation film era was a work of art.

    Thank you.

    • #37
  8. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Jon Gabriel, Ed. (View Comment):

    I grew up in an extremely white neighborhood in far north Phoenix. When my brother, five years my senior, attended high school it had 2,000 students, only one Black. There were maybe five Black kids by the time I got there.

    Then I joined the Navy and bootcamp exposed me to all kinds of Americans. After boot, I was assigned to a room with three Black guys from inner-city Atlanta. I was like their skinny white mascot which made for a hilarious three months. I was exposed to early underground hip hop, every scratchy Blaxploitation video they could get their hands on, ’70s funk and soul. They would quiz me on all of it and bring me to their friends to recite dialog from Penitentiary or something. It was basically a second bootcamp for me.

    Years after, I’ve confused the hell out of Black friends and co-workers by my in-depth understanding of and references to the movies and music of this era. Great conversation starter.

    One thing that set Penitentiary apart was the fact that it not only had a Black director, Jamaa Fanaka, but he was also an entrepreneur who made the first film for only $100,000. The second and third were also very successful, and he owned all the rights. That’s the way to do it. Business-wise, Fanaka was the Tyler Perry of his day. 

    • #38
  9. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    CarolJoy, Thread Hijacker (View Comment):

    Gary I thought your summary of the Blaxplotation film era was a work of art.

    Thank you.

    Thanks, Carol! I’m always honored by your patronage. 

    • #39
  10. Vance Richards Inactive
    Vance Richards
    @VanceRichards

    Gary McVey: In 1977, Esquire magazine ran a feature called “Why Blacks Aren’t Scary Anymore.”

    Growing up in an all-white neighborhood, movies/TV and sports did more to combat racism than anything else. Now it seems like the sports and entertainment worlds are the ones stirring up racism.

    • #40
  11. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Vance Richards (View Comment):

    Gary McVey: In 1977, Esquire magazine ran a feature called “Why Blacks Aren’t Scary Anymore.”

    Growing up in an all-white neighborhood, movies/TV and sports did more to combat racism than anything else. Now it seems like the sports and entertainment worlds are the ones stirring up racism.

    It’s more profitable for them, at least short-term.

    • #41
  12. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Gary McVey: This post is part of the Quote of the Day series, a longtime, member-created feature of Ricochet. It’s one of the easiest ways to join the R> conversation. If you haven’t done it, give it a try!

    “Hey, anyone want to do the Quote of the Day?” I asked. “You don’t have to put a lot of work into it. I threw yesterday’s together in five minutes.”

    “Okay, I’ll do it,” Gary says, “I’ll probably regret throwing something together this quickly, but I’ll take the risk.” *

    1,743 words later, Gary is through “throwing this together.”

    Folks, don’t be intimidated. The Quote of the Day can be an easy way to start a conversation on Ricochet. You can be more like me, rather than like @garymcvey or @seawriter. I mean, if you want to write a masterpiece essay on some aspect of history based on a quotation, you can. On the other hand, you can just grab a quotation, maybe say a few words and ask a question to get the conversation rolling. We still have eight openings on the schedule this month.

    Or, if you’re looking to write something a bit more creative, you might try our Group Writing Project this month: It was a dark and stormy night…


    * Not necessarily verbatim quotations, but close enough.


    • #42
  13. Taras Coolidge
    Taras
    @Taras

    Let’s not forget Undercover Brother (2002), with Denise Richards as “black man’s heroin”,

    • #43
  14. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Percival (View Comment):
    We had our suburban noses glued to the schoolbus windows every time we took a field trip into Chicago waiting to spot one.

    Um, a black person or a pimpmobile?

    • #44
  15. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Outstanding, Gary.  Thanks.

     

    • #45
  16. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Taras (View Comment):

    Let’s not forget Undercover Brother (2002), with Denise Richards as “black man’s heroin”,

    Not heroin.  Kryptonite.

    • #46
  17. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    We had our suburban noses glued to the schoolbus windows every time we took a field trip into Chicago waiting to spot one.

    Um, a black person or a pimpmobile?

    Pimpmobile. We had plenty of black people in town. We even had a few pimpmobiles in town, especially on the East Side. I don’t think Percy got over to the East Side much, though.

    • #47
  18. Vance Richards Inactive
    Vance Richards
    @VanceRichards

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    We had our suburban noses glued to the schoolbus windows every time we took a field trip into Chicago waiting to spot one.

    Um, a black person or a pimpmobile?

    When my mother was young the family moved from Pennsylvania coal country to Newark, NJ. Evidently some other families did the same because mom remembers a black man getting on the bus and another young white girl saying, “Look, the have coal mines here too.”

    • #48
  19. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    We had our suburban noses glued to the schoolbus windows every time we took a field trip into Chicago waiting to spot one.

    Um, a black person or a pimpmobile?

    A pimpmobile. We had seen black people. Heck, there were black students on the bus. They wanted to see the pimpmobiles too.

    • #49
  20. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Boss Mongo (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    We had our suburban noses glued to the schoolbus windows every time we took a field trip into Chicago waiting to spot one.

    Um, a black person or a pimpmobile?

    Pimpmobile. We had plenty of black people in town. We even had a few pimpmobiles in town, especially on the East Side. I don’t think Percy got over to the East Side much, though.

    I used to ride my bike to Pilcher Park. That’s about as far east as you could go.

    • #50
  21. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    In the 1974-75 recession, I remember a Black comedian on TV: “I know times are hard. Why, the other day, I saw a pimp driving a Volkswagen”.

    Then it happened. There was a ’70s fad for modifying Volkswagens with fiberglass add-ons. A 1940 Ford grille was common. Then a mock Rolls-Royce front. Finally, yep, the pimpmobile treatment. 

    • #51
  22. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    In the 1974-75 recession, I remember a Black comedian on TV: “I know times are hard. Why, the other day, I saw a pimp driving a Volkswagen”.

    Then it happened. There was a ’70s fad for modifying Volkswagens with fiberglass add-ons. A 1940 Ford grille was common. Then a mock Rolls-Royce front. Finally, yep, the pimpmobile treatment.

    And hippie Bugs.

    • #52
  23. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Percival (View Comment):
    I used to ride my bike to Pilcher Park. That’s about as far east as you could go.

    Yeah, well, my dad was a policeman and had friends up on the hill.

    • #53
  24. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):
    I used to ride my bike to Pilcher Park. That’s about as far east as you could go.

    Yeah, well, my dad was a policeman and had friends up on the hill.

    My mom used to visit the Hill to check on the elderly to make sure they were okay and let them know about senior services such as Meals-on-Wheels. She got hassled by the the son of one of them who was apparently living with his mom. He threatened her. She told the cops. The cops had a talk with the son. Something along the lines of “if anything happens to her, we are going to be on you like flies on poop.” She never had a problem after that.

    • #54
  25. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Not exactly Blaxploitation, though the audience took it as one: “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song”. Melvin Van Peebles posed as the most radical and revolutionary of the new crop of Black filmmakers, but he was an Army veteran and former postal worker who made a couple of arty, European-style independent films in the ’60s like The Story of a Three Day Pass. Then he made the mainstream comedy “Watermelon Man”. 

    “Sweet Sweetback” was the violent, barely coherent story of a pimp. Its poster tag line was “You Bled My Mama…You Bled My Papa…But You Won’t Bleed Me”.  There was a white liberal vogue for Van Peebles, who promptly mounted two Broadway shows, “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” and a musical, “Don’t Play Us Cheap”. He kept working but never again equaled his notoriety in the early ’70s. 

    Some of the hate-whitey was an act. In fact, in the right mood Mel was downright genial. I saw him at Sundance in 1990 when he was about to turn 60. He’d wave at the lunch tables jovially. “Hello, ladies”, he called out. “Any of you recognize me with my clothes on?”

    • #55
  26. Boss Mongo Member
    Boss Mongo
    @BossMongo

    Percival (View Comment):
    And hippie Bugs.

    Thing the hippies never caught on to: those aren’t flowers, they’re targets.

    • #56
  27. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    The view from my window. Actually, it wasn’t even a window; it was a literal hole in the wall. The complete text was, “Cooped Up? Feeling Low? Enjoy a Movie Today. 42nd Street, The World’s Greatest Movie Center”. 

    • #57
  28. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    The Liberty Theater, built 1904 as “legit”–stage, not a movie theater. It was converted, and hosted the New York premiere of the historically famous “The Birth of a Nation”, considered by many as the first feature film. 1490 seats. By the mid-’70s, it was reduced to this–

    Make Them Die Slowly was dubbed from the original Italian (Ferocious Cannibals), about a quartet of white explorers raping and killing their way across the Amazon forest. Needless to say, karma turns out to be a b—-h. It featured nudity, disembowelment, and a castration scene that never failed to get cheers from our distinguished audience.

    • #58
  29. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    From The Liberation of L.B. Jones. Rosalind Cash doesn’t look happy. 

    • #59
  30. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    Gary McVey: Americans were becoming accustomed to racial dramas, at first warm and positive ones like A Raisin in the Sun and Lilies of the Field

    Or Sounder.

    • #60
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