Editor’s Note: this analysis was originally written as my senior thesis for my history degree back in 2006.
Sweet, funky soundtracks, black superheroes, and a whole lotta ass-kicking. These are the first things people remember about the afrocentric film explosion of the 1970′s which is often called “blaxploitation”. Mostly forgotten, these films represent the adolescence of black filmmaking, as artists and actors alike struggled to redefine the black presence on the big screen.
The history of blacks in film is a turbulent one, with ups and downs like a rollercoaster. The first black filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux, emerged in the early 1900′s. He gained national prominence among blacks with his 1919 film Within Our Gates, a rebuttal of racist arguments made by D.W. Griffith in the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. But white America never fully accepted this independent black voice, and instead embraced white-created films featuring black performers who reinforced traditional stereotypes, such as Stepin Fetchit. Fetchit, whom the New York Times described in 1937 as a “Negro comic who made a career of laziness,” spawned dozens of imitators in Hollywood, all of whom eagerly performed the stereotype of the lazy coon for white moviegoers. This trend continued through World War II. In 1951, The New York Times looked back on Fetchit’s career, remarking that “He was so good every shoeshine boy in the country began copying his lazy drawl and shuffling walk.”
Postwar America only seemed to have an appetite for the “noble Negro” as epitomized by screen stars Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. These characters were more articulate than their predecessors, but were still trapped in a secondary status, sexless and powerless when compared with equivalent white characters from the era. This lasted through the 1960′s, which limited the roles available for blacks in cinema even while the political conflict between the races was coming to a head.
In 1964, black power and black nationalist movements added fuel to the growing civil rights protests, forcing Congress to finally pass the Civil Rights Act, which led to the destruction of Jim Crow segregation in the South. For the first time, blacks could stand up and demand equal rights, equal representation.
A new genre of film exploded between 1969 and 1975 that came to be known as blaxploitation. Growing from the newfound sense of political identity and empowerment blacks felt after decades of civil rights battles, these films targeted an audience previously overlooked by Hollywood, young urban blacks, and gave them powerful black role models for the first time in screen history. It is these very films that have been stuck with the nickname “blaxploitation”.
But what exactly is a “blaxploitation” movie? The term is generally applied to approximately 200 films made between 1971 and 1975, all of which shared an Afrocentric theme (that is, the films featured black characters, were set in black communities, and dealt predominantly with black culture). These were mainly action films, featuring black actors in dominant roles, usually in conflict with empowered whites. Many of these films used popular and contemporary funk music to help market and sell the movie. While the new characters did provide role models for the politically charged youth of the inner cities, the question became whether those role models were positive or negative.
The word itself is a combination of the words “black” and “exploitation” and implies a negative connotation that has been applied universally to these films. NAACP leader Junius Griffin coined the term in 1972, in an effort to bring attention to what he perceived as a proliferation of negative stereotypes of blacks that were being fed to black audiences by the white film industry. In an editorial published by The New York Times on December 17, 1972, Griffin writes that “these films are taking our money while feeding us a forced diet of violence, murder, drugs and rape. Such films are the cancer of “Blaxploitation” gnawing away at the moral fiber of our community”.
This derogatory term stuck, and every black-themed film from the era has suffered decades of shame and critical disinterest as a result. Some of the films from this era were created by blacks, but the majority were written, directed, financed, and distributed by whites.
But how many of the films saddled with the blaxploitation label were actually exploitive of blacks? Lonne Elder III, who became the first African-American nominated for an Academy Award, wrote the screenplays for the Afrocentric films Sounder and Melinda, both of which appeared in 1972. He wrote an editorial on December 17 of that year, published in The New York Times, in which he said that “…the moral concern and alarm on the part of a growing number of black people about the harmful images these films insist upon reflecting in the name of blackness, is in order, and should be supported by all black people. However, we should be aware of the varied complexities, contradictions, and rhythms to different sides of the questions. For instance, there are black actors and actresses in Hollywood who can only view the current trend of black movies as a long overdue opportunity for employment.”
Elder seems to suggest here that it is excusable, in the eyes of the black community, for black actors to take advantage of the explosion of roles, and that it is white Hollywood that is responsible for creating the negative images of blacks on screen.
Ossie Davis (1917-2005) was a prolific writer, director, and actor. He was well-respected by the black community, and had eulogized both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. at their funerals. In his co-autobiography with wife Ruby Dee entitled With Ossie and Ruby, Davis wrote that “there is from time to time a big brouhaha – sometimes it gets quite excitable – over whether or not a white director can really ever make a film truly representative of black lifestyle and black culture.” He made his directorial debut in 1970 with the movie Cotton Comes To Harlem. This movie is considered by many as the immediate precursor, the inspiration, for the blaxploitation film explosion that followed.
Cotton Comes To Harlem is the story of two detectives investigating a mysterious bale of cotton that lands in the middle of Harlem. Both detectives, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, were black. The characters, as well as the black world they inhabit, are grittier than black characters and settings that preceded them. They established the mold from which future characters, such as John Shaft, would be born. In his book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, author Donald Bogle writes that “Cotton…seemed to be telling black audiences that it was now all right to laugh at the old dum-dum characters that would have infuriated audiences of the 1960′s. Now the old ethnic humor seemed blessed with a double-consciousness”.
Is Cotton Comes To Harlem exempt from being considered blaxploitation because it was entirely created by blacks? Discussing the film, Davis wrote, “Though Chester Himes, the original author, is black, the screenplay for Cotton Comes To Harlem was written by Arnold Perl, who was white. This fact didn’t bother me, and I know of no one else, black or white, who was bothered by it.” Here, a black director defends the contributions made by a white writer to an Afrocentric film. There seems to be no hint of feelings of exploitation by the white community.
The following summer saw the release of two very different films, both of which are given credit for actually launching the blaxploitation genre. The first was Sweet Sweetback’s Baddaassss Song, which was written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles. Peebles also played the lead role of Sweetback, a black male prostitute who, after killing two white cops for bullying a young black boy, spends most of the movie on the run, jumping from one woman’s bed to the next. Peebles dedicated the film “to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the man.” New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called Sweetback “a technically fancy, absolutely mindless and dirty political exploitation film.”
Sweetback premiered on April 23, 1971. With a production budget of just $150,000, it grossed more than $15 million. With its graphic depictions of sex and violence, and its evident anger toward white authority, Sweetback portrayed blacks on screen in a way audiences had never seen before. Did it portray a positive or negative role model? Sweetback is a violent, womanizing prostitute who commits crime after crime, but he does so in an effort to fight the oppression of the white man, and his successful escape at the end of the film seems to indicate that he was victorious.
Shaft was released two months later, on July 2, 1971. Like Cotton Comes To Harlem, it was directed by a black man, but written by a white (Ernest Tidyman). Directed by acclaimed photographer Gordon Parks, Sr. (1912-2006), it was the story of a black private detective who first battles, then helps, a criminal whose daughter has been kidnapped by the mafia. In his book Profoundly Disturbing, film historian Joe Bob Briggs describes the black community response to the film: “Every black adolescent and wannabe badass adopted the walk, the style, the swagger…if ever a single movie transformed a whole culture, Shaft was that movie.” His description is reminiscent of that ascribed to the phenomenon surrounding Stepin Fetchit, except that now youthful filmgoers were emulating more confident personalities.
Shaft is one of the films Lonne Elder III cited as blaxploitation in his editorial, because it, like others, “are all products put on the market by white people for black people to buy and…none of them had a black writer-producer-director team involved in its artistic outcome.” Briggs quotes Gordon Parks on the association of his film with the blaxploitation label: “I hate that term, blaxploitation. Shaft has nothing to do with exploitation. I don’t know where they got that. What Shaft was about was providing work for black people that they never had before, letting them get into films. That’s not exploitation.” Times critic Vincent Canby argued that Shaft represented a more positive role model on screen than did Sweetback (which did not make Elder’s list), saying that John Shaft “moves through Whitey’s world with perfect ease and aplomb, but never loses his independence, or his awareness of where his life is really at. He has no identity problems, so he can afford to be cheerful under circumstances that would send a lesser hero into the kind of personality crisis that in a movie usually ends in a gunfight.”
Shaft was made for a little more than $1 million, and grossed $12 million. Both Shaft and Sweetback made similar wild profits from comparable budgets. In contrast, 1971′s Best Picture Oscar went to The French Connection (also written by Tidyman), which was released on October 9, and grossed just over $51 million, with a production budget similar to that of Shaft.
Sweetback was entirely created and financed by Peebles; it was an independent, low-budget film that would serve as a benchmark for a generation of filmmakers to follow. Shaft was financed and distributed by whites. Neither Shaft nor Sweetback brought in the biggest box office receipts for the year, but both turned phenomenal profits for their creators, considering the relatively small production budgets. The lines at some theaters wrapped around the block, and Hollywood was quick to notice their popularity among urban black audiences. And quick to cash in. Over the next few years, Hollywood studios churned out Afrocentric movies at blizzard intensity.
1972 began with Black Mama, White Mama, starring genre-icon Pam Grier, which was released on January 19, followed by The Legend of Nigger Charley (March 17), Cool Breeze (March 22), The Final Comedown (May 31), Shaft’s Big Score (June 8), Come Back, Charleston Blue (June 29), The Thing With Two Heads and Bone (July 19), Superfly (August 4), Slaughter and Melinda (August 16), Blacula (August 25), Hammer (September 20), Black Girl (November 9), Across 110th Street (December 19) and Black Gunn (December 20). All were financed in large part by whites.
Of these, Superfly was the biggest success. Written and directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. (1934-1979), it had more in common with Sweetback than it did with Shaft or Cotton. Superfly is the story of a black pimp (played by Ron O’Neal) trying to get himself out of a dark world of drugs, women, money and crime. The film grossed more than $6 million, roughly one-third the business generated by the Woody Allen film Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), which was released August 6 of that year.
These number still pale in comparison with The Poseidon Adventure, which grossed more than $84 million, and 1972′s Best Picture Oscar winner, The Godfather, which grossed more than $250 million worldwide. But Superfly, as well as most of the other Afrocentric films that year, made enough of a profit to keep the genre going.
By 1972, white directors also began making black films. The most prominent was Larry Cohen, who directed Bone, Black Caesar, and Hell Up In Harlem. In an interview for Incredibly Strange Films, Cohen discussed how he came to be involved in the Afrocentric film explosion. “The first picture I did, Bone, had Yaphet Kotto, a very fine actor. I showed that picture around and then American International Pictures called me up and said, ‘Listen, we want to make some pictures with black casts, and you know how to direct those black actors.’ One black actor in the whole film and ‘you know how to direct those black actors’.”
Cohen developed Black Caesar originally as a vehicle for Sammy Davis, Jr., but eventually black athlete-turned-actor Fred Williamson was cast in the lead role. Cohen says of the project, “it wasn’t a typical black exploitation picture. Usually the black guy beats up all the white people, gets the white girl, becomes successful, and it’s kind of a victory of the black over the white society. But Black Caesar is a picture about a guy who tries to live this dream but is destroyed by it. He doesn’t win, he loses”. Black Caesar is the story of Tommy Gibbs, a poor black man who orchestrates for himself a meteoric rise from shoeshine boy to mob kingpin, only to find that money and power can’t give him everything he really wants.
So, was Black Caesar, having been written and directed by a white man, exploitive of black culture? Its leading man, Williamson, doesn’t think so. In a 1999 interview, he related: “Larry Cohen couldn’t tell me how to relate to the black people and the black public. He had no idea. He left it up to my interpretation and to my lifestyle. All the life that I had lived, I flowed into this character. Larry Cohen damn sure couldn’t tell me. What the hell does he know about the relationships in black communities, about how black people really act and interact with each other?”
Gloria Hendry, who also starred in Black Caesar, addressed her concerns in a 1974 interview with Ebony magazine, saying that “we [black actors] are being exploited at the moment, but the increasing number of black movies has created a demand which only black actors and actresses can fill. At least more people are working.”
Williamson was determined to write his own rules in Hollywood, to not allow the Hollywood system to exploit him. In a recent interview, he said: “When I came to Hollywood, I said I’m gonna be the hero, I’m gonna be the star. I got three rules, based on my lifestyle. One, you can’t kill me; two, I gotta win all my fights; and three, I want the girl at the end of the movie. You can’t do that, I go make my own movies. So, I was way ahead of my time. This was, like, in the sixties, man. This was like no black exploitation, none of that. I had an idea of the image I wanted to portray, and I wasn’t gonna succumb to what Hollywood saw us as at that time, was all comedy and black ignorant people.”
Another prominent white director within the genre was Jack Hill, who discovered Pam Grier and directed her in four films: The Big Doll House (1971), The Big Bird Cage (1972), Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974). Jack Hill built his career making low-budget films that were considered exploitation in other genres, such as Mondo Keyhole (1966), Spider Baby (1968), and The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974). Was his involvement in Afrocentric film indicative of exploitation as well? Were his movies “blaxploitation”? In his 1974 film Foxy Brown, the title character’s brother, Link Brown (portrayed by Antonio Fargas), is reminiscent of the “coon” stereotype, seemingly a throwback to the prewar days of Stepin Fetchit. Author Donald Bogle describes the coon as “no-account niggers, those unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creatures good for nothing more than eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting crap, or butchering the English language.”
The film opens with Link, apparently about to be beaten by white criminals, begging his sister for help and stalling cops at a taco stand. He has ended up in a situation where he must rely upon many others to protect and save him. When his sister does rescue him, he shouts “You saved my beautiful black ass, you really did!” He then says the men were after him for “practically nothin’,” yet goes on to describe his failure to repay $20,000 borrowed from loan sharks to finance some get-rich scheme, seemingly without realizing his culpability. It is then that he delivers a wonderful speech which seems to beautifully summarize the philosophy of the pure coon: “I’m a black man. And I don’t know how to sing, and I don’t know how to dance, and I don’t know how to preach to no congregation. I’m too small to be a football hero, and I’m too ugly to be elected mayor. But I watch TV, and I see all them people in all them fine homes they live in, and all them nice cars they drive, and I get all full of ambition. Now you tell me what I’m supposed to do with all this ambition I got?”
Forty years earlier, Stepin Fetchit’s characters were masters at getting out of work, using any excuse imaginable to maintain their lazy lifestyle. Link has already come up with all his excuses to legitimize his laziness, and to justify his scheming actions. He sees good living through the television, but is too lazy to work toward a similar lifestyle, preferring instead to pursue various get-rich schemes which require little effort.
It is this course which leads him to sell out his sister’s lover, at which point even his own sister seems nearly ready to kill him. Eventually, his scheming does end in an early, violent death. In this, Hill runs counter to prior versions of the coon stereotype. He seems to be telling his audiences that this is a negative way of life, one that has the potential to end badly.
Hill also offsets this traditional coon image with a brand new character for the screen, a strong black female. At first glance, Foxy Brown (portrayed by Pam Grier) seems constructed from the male stereotype of the black buck. She is powerful, sexual, and aggressive. But the female version also adopts a strong maternal sense of responsibility and justice, while keeping a strong sexual desirability. Grier’s characters in both Coffy and Foxy Brown are committed to defending the black community from the evils of drugs and the people who push them. Writing about Coffy, New York Times film critic A. H. Weiler wrote that “despite a good deal of lip service against the evils of drugs and the like, there’s a maximum of footage devoted to exposing Miss Grier.” Writing about her role in Foxy Brown a year later, Weiler said that she “again emerges victorious over mobsters, a bigtime madam, pimps and rapists.”
Writer-Director Jack Hill believes that his films helped achieve crossover success for black talent. In a recent interview, he said that “a few of the films – like mine and a couple of others – showed that there was what they called a ‘crossover potential,’ that a large, white audience would appreciate the movies. So what happened was that the subject matter, black characters and lifestyles, was absorbed into the mainstream films. So there was no longer a need for special black-audience movies, particularly. The characters were integrated into mainstream movies and black audiences went to see them.”
By 1975, the Afrocentric film explosion had diminished, and many black actors were taking roles in more traditional white films. But the roles offered them had none of the raw power of presence that those during the blaxploitation era did. Ten years later, a new generation of black filmmakers like Spike Lee and the Hughes Brothers would fight the same battles once again, seeking to create their own Afrocentric visions on the big screen. And now, more than thirty years later, white Hollywood has embraced the nostalgia value of the blaxploitation era, with the satire Undercover Brother and a remake of Shaft already made, and remakes planned for Coffy and a handful of other classics of the genre.
Looking back, thirty years later, Fred Williamson recently talked about the blaxploitation phenomenon. “I have no idea who was being exploited. Black people loved the movies, all the actors were being paid. I mean, if you compare it to Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood movies of the same time, they never called them ‘white exploitation’. It was a terminology they had to use to distinguish black film, because black films with heroes didn’t exist until [the 1970’s].”
It comes as no small tragedy that today there are still few “black films with heroes” being made. Perhaps if the negativity could be stripped away from the Afrocentric films of the 1970′s, and people could objectively see them for the positive things they tried to say and do, there could well be room in today’s Hollywood for more characters like John Shaft.
