PicoBlog

This month the Criterion Collection is showcasing a set of movies they’re calling “Beyond Blaxploitation.” It features 15 films, mostly from the early to mid 1970s, and highlights a number of iconic Blaxploitation flicks like Shaft (plus its lesser sequel, Shaft’s Big Score!), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Across 110th Street, and several of others. The thing is.. I watched these movies. I watched quite a few of the movies in this collection, as well as other Blaxploitation movies not on the Criterion list. I really want to like this genre of movie, and I have tried. But these movies, on the whole, are terrible. And that’s unfortunate, because they’re also really good.

Let me explain. And I’ll start with the unfortunate name of this movie genre, which isn’t doing it any favors. The term Blaxploitation (yes, a portmanteau between “black” and “exploitation”) was coined in 1972 by an NAACP chapter president writing in the Hollywood Reporter. The term wasn’t meant to suggest that Black actors or film audiences were themselves being exploited, necessarily. These were Black films, with for the most part Black writers, Black directors, and a host of Black actors, many of whom really made their careers through these movies (Richard Roundtree and Pam Grier being the two examples everyone usually thinks of). In terms of visible, commercially successful Black cinema, Blaxploitation was a triumph, and we haven’t really seen anything like it since.

The “exploitative” part of the label came from the fact that, in some people’s eyes, the movies portrayed Black communities in a negative light and played on Black stereotypes. The movies trafficked heavily in Black man machismo, showed a lack of respect for authority, had a lot of casual drug use, and women were often treated as little more than set dressing. In the eyes of some, the movies glorified aspects of Black American life that should not be celebrated. In other words — these were not respectable Sidney Poitier-type Black movies. Sidney Poitier would not be caught dead in one of these films.

And frankly, all that may be fair criticism. And what’s more, these were incredibly cheap, badly made B-movies. The dialogue was stiff. The acting was often terrible. Plots made no sense. Some of these movies don’t go 15 minutes without a stupid car chase or an absurdly long gun fight where no one gets hit and no one ever needs to reload. To be honest, movies like Friday Foster and Three the Hard Way feel almost like cheesy made-for-tv movies or bad episodes of the Rockford Files rather than actual “films.”

So that’s why these movies were bad. What the “Blaxploitation” label ignores though is that these movies were also a fascinating, triumphant way of creating an alternative, Black-centered world that is really worth exploring. In Blaxploitation cinema, Black characters are the heroes of their own stories. White characters are included (if at all) as an afterthought or as foil to the main hero of the movie. The stories that were told through Blaxploitation simply didn’t exist elsewhere in mainstream cinema. As an example, take this scene from Shaft’s Big Score!, in which private detective John Shaft is meeting with the local police captain about a case he’s working on. This scene is great not because it has any major significance in the movie (it doesn’t), but because it really messes with certain racist stereotypes and turns the expected narrative on its head:

In Blaxploitation cinema, it’s not necessary that Black folks and white folks “come together” in some racial harmony. There are no teachable moments, no “now that I see this through your eyes, I understand you better” type messaging. Some of the movies were overtly political in their messaging and had overlap with the Black Power movement. Others featured complex “anti-hero” protagonists who were fundamentally good, but who sometimes had to do bad things or make questionable judgment calls in service to a higher moral duty. All of the movies imagined a world that was really unlike the present, with power structures profoundly inverted.

The movie Three the Hard Way is a good example of a movie that, frankly, is pretty silly and solidly B-grade — but is nevertheless really interesting and unlike anything in modern cinema. The plot concerns a ruthless evil white capitalist who’s invented a toxin that only kills Black people. He plans to rid the world of the Black race by introducing the toxin into the water supply in three U.S. cities — LA, DC, and Detroit. Three random Black guys team up to stop him and save Black America from extinction. This plot is ridiculous, but it’s not a comedic movie. It’s sort of a light-hearted action flick, definitely not being played for laughs — except in scenes like this one, which is a nice twist on crooked cops:

Looking back now more than 40 years after the Blaxploitation era ended, I don’t think the majority of these movies are particularly transgressive or shocking. They’re mostly just cheap, B-movies that aren’t very good. And that’s too bad. There was a brief moment in the 70s when Black cinema was genuinely popular and successful and had a distinct voice. And even today, these types of stories — these worlds in which racial power dynamics are so profoundly different than what we see in our own lives — this vision deserves good movies. I’d love to see what modern cinema could actually do with the Blaxploitation narrative — absent the pejorative name and all the baggage that comes with it.

For what it’s worth, here’s a short list of Blaxploitation films that I think actually hold up as decent movies and are worth checking out if you’re at all interested:

• Shaft. This is the best one. It’s slow, especially at the start. It has some real pacing issues. But in terms of a good, Black-centered noir detective movie from the 70s, Shaft rocks.

• Superfly. People love this movie for the music. The music is great. The plot is ok enough, and it holds together. But admittedly, this is a pretty seedy movie.

• Across 110th Street. This is another noir police procedural movie. It’s incredibly violent and really confronts a lot of issues with racism in policing.

• Friday Foster or Coffy. These movies are not actually worth watching. They’re bad. But Pam Grier is gorgeous, she’s mesmerizing to watch, and I can’t in good conscience make a list like this and not have at least one of her movies on it.

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