In 2023’s Crook Manifesto, the second volume in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy, Zippo, a Black filmmaker struggling as a Warhol-style experimental filmmaker, decides to ride the crest of the early ’70s Blaxploitation wave while it lasts. The only advice from a white producer is to strike while the iron is hot and do it with someone else’s money.
Zippo nabs a male lead right before his breakout role, a female lead whose breakout role never panned out, and the composer of Blacula’s score, for its “funky melancholy”. The production, mostly in the Carney family’s Harlem furniture store, which is the main setting of the trilogy, is a disaster. Exploitation studio American International Pictures then butchers the final cut (“the one thing AIP hadn’t dared mess with was Gene Page’s magnificent score”). By the time the movie is finally released, “Blaxploitation was dead.”
The exploitation wave moved on to slasher movies and rip-offs of Jaws and Star Wars. No longer considered a safe commercial bet, production of Blaxploitation movies dried up for nearly a decade until it reemerged in the late ’80s as the Black New Wave spearheaded by Spike Lee and the so-called ‘hood film. The only legacy of Zippo’s cursed project Secret Agent: Nefertiti is its final end credit: “Filmed Entirely on Location in Harlem U.S.A.”
Colson Whitehead’s 2023 crime novel has Blaxploitation’s pop-culture contradictions down cold. Cheap location filming brought abundant production dollars into a struggling Harlem economy. The larger-than-life pimps, whores, pushers, and crooked cops populating these films made stars of Black men and women playing worlds they knew inside and out, even as the films wildly distorted those worlds. “These were people I knew from my ’hood,” remembers film critic, Jersey City native, and ’70s child Odie “Odienator” Henderson in his irreverent “reappraisal” Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema: “God-fearing types, outright criminals, badass little brats, and colorful hustlers.”
The gritty soul music, Black power messaging, and celebration of ghetto survival brought Black audiences into urban and drive-in cinemas in droves. Music propelled these films. Songs like – James Brown’s “Down and Out in New York City“, soundtracked in Larry Cohen’s 1973 film, Black Ceasar, Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” from Barry Shear’s 1972 film of the same title, Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man“ in Ivan Dixon‘s 1972 film of the same title, the Staple Singers’ “Let’s Do It Again“, from Sidney Poitier’s 1975 film of the same name, groundbreaking, blockbuster soundtracks by Curtis Mayfield for Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly (1972), and Isaac Hayes for Shaft album, soundtracked in Gordon Parks’ 1971 film – are just the tip of the iceberg that Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras‘ digs into for deep cuts both musical and cinematic.
From the commercial perspective of a savvy operator like AIP head Samuel Z. Arkoff, Blaxploitation may have been a flash in the pan. Culturally, though, it signaled the moment ghetto culture and something resembling the Black vernacular hit the mainstream, paving the way for rap, hip-hop, disco, and the modern NBA, for starters. Blaxploitation introduced an often terrified white mainstream to a Black cultural life it had barely imagined existed in a world ruled by positive Motown vibes and the earnest liberalism of Sidney Poitier’s ’60s movies. Just as Colson Whitehead hung a vast canvas of ’70s Harlem rooted in textured reality on the vexed production of an imagined lost Blaxploitation relic in Crook Manifesto, Odie Henderson, in Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras, takes the same movie cycle as a way to acknowledge an essential legacy that was also a “double-edged sword” “Man, that was racist as shit!” his “militant” Jersey video store coworker concludes of one such film released in the ’80s. “But we win at the end, so I can forgive it.”
“What malarkey! … TRASH!” Henderson exclaims about one particularly offensive production before adding, “And it’s good trash, too!” If there’s a goal beyond the undeniable pleasure of wallowing in “good trash” movies in Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras, this is it: how does it work, what does it do, and why should we care? The crucial test of “good trash” is that it never leaves the consumer wishing for a better editor. He emphasizes everything that critically lauded family dramas and dramatic comedies like Sounder, Claudine, Sparkle, and The Wiz shared with the R-rated Blaxploitation movies to which they were meant to offer an alternative. Henderson’s intermittently compelling, often hilarious, and obsessively completist history acquits itself well in the job it sets itself. This level of detail begs for a referencing tool. However, I would have loved either an index or a filmography, or both. The other thing it’s missing, tragically, is pictures. How can the history of a movie era so packed with iconographic posters and indelible images have been released without a single poster or publicity still?
The early rumblings of the era came from films like Ossie Davis’ Chester Himes adaptation Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Melvin Van Peebles’ X-rated provocation Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, from 1971. But there’s no question that Blaxploitation as a genre and as a commercial juggernaut really took off with Gordon Parks’ breakout hit Shaft in 1971. All the ingredients were there: low-budget ($1.5 million) location shooting that turned a massive profit (12th highest-grossing film of the year); star-driven soundtrack albums that sometimes out-grossed the movie; abundant sex, extreme violence, and ghetto truths; gorgeous and stylish leads (title actor Richard Roundtree was a former model); plot threads involving Black militant groups; characters, settings, and scenes pulled directly from the city streets and urban tabloids; and unprecedentedly direct depictions of corruption, systemic racism, poverty, drug culture, misogyny, and homophobia. The latter was shared as much by the anti-heroes as by the villains and usually delivered in language stand-up comic and Blaxploitation lead Rudy Ray Moore characterized as “ghetto expressionism”, the “old ‘hood art of the dozens, or signifyin‘”: profane, offensive, performative, and irrefutably streetwise.
There’s also little argument that Blaxploitation was killed in 1977 by the G-rated adaptation of Charlie Smalls and William F. Brown‘s Broadway hit musical The Wiz. Coming in way over budget, never coming close to recouping its costs, directed by a tone-deaf Sidney Lumet, and released in a year when Black audiences were flocking to crossover blockbusters like Grease, Superman, Animal House, and Star Wars, The Wiz would still become a beloved cult classic with Black audiences. But it would give Hollywood the excuse executives would more or less cleave to for the next 30 years until Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) finally reminded them of just how effective Black filmmakers, writers, actors, composers, and technicians could be at making money for them.
The seeds of that enormous pool of talent, Odie Henderson makes clear in Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras, were sown during the ’70s, when up-and-coming Black creatives were suddenly in demand, getting on-the-job training and sometimes even making money. Meanwhile, established names like Poitier and Harry Belafonte were no longer required to play exclusively to what Henderson dubs “the clean world” of white expectations and codes.
During what we might call the “gilt” era of Blaxploitation, nearly 200 movies were made that fit more or less within the capacious form designated by this portmanteau word. All manner of crime films were Blaxploitation’s stock-in-trade. It crossed over into just about every popular genre, easily adaptable from the grindhouse and B-movie fare the major studios and also the fly-by-nights operations had been churning out since the ’50s: monster and horror movies (the self-explanatory Blacula cycle (1972-73), Blackenstein (1973), and Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde; werewolves in The Beast Must Die (1976), zombies in Sugar Hill (1974), satanic possession in 1974 Exorcist rip-off Abby), erotica (Black Emanuelle, 1975), women in prison (all of Pam Grier’s early films from The Big Doll House in 1971 to Black Mama, White Mama in 1973), science fiction (Abar: the First Black Superman, 1977), period pieces (Mandingo in 1975 and the sequel Drum a year later), Westerns (Buck and the Preacher in 1972, Thomasine & Bushrod in 1974, Take a Hard Ride in 1975, and 1972’s transgressively titled Legend of N***** Charly, renamed for newspaper advertising and TV broadcasts, as were its 1973 and 1975 followups, The Soul of N***** Charly and Boss N*****), and martial arts (Cleopatra Jones in 1973, Black Belt Jones and The Black Dragon in 1974, Black Samurai in 1977).
Blaxploitation made action stars of Grier, who headlined Coffy (1973), Foxy Brown (1974), Sheba Baby (1975), and Friday Foster (1975) and featured or co-starred in another dozen ’70 productions, Vonetta McGee (8 films between 1972 and 1975, including Blacula, Shaft in Africa, and a starring role in Thomasine & Bushrod), Tamara Dobson (title character in Cleopatra Jones and 1975 sequel Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold), and Jeanne Bell, whose TNT Jackson (1975) inspired Colson Whitehead’s imagined addition to the canon. Filmmakers successfully recruited and marketed professional athletes and martial artists like Jim Brown (the title character in the 1972 Slaughter and 1973 sequel Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off), Fred Williamson, and Jim Kelly; the trio would co-star in Three the Hard Way (1974), Take a Hard Ride (1975), and with Richard Roundtree in late entry One Down Two to Go (1982). The looseness of the scripts opened up ample space for rising comedians like Richard Pryor (Lady Sings the Blues, The Mack in 1973, Uptown Saturday Night in 1974, Car Wash in 1976, and multiple roles in the 1977 hit Which Way Is Up?), Saturday Night Live player Garrett Morris in Cooley High (1974) and Car Wash, and Rudy Ray Moore (five starring roles between the 1975 Dolemite and Disco Godfather in 1979)to bust loose their boundary-pushing stand-up routines on the big screen.
Odie Henderson’s Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras channels the voice of a rabid fan turned savvy critic to craft a volume that provides detailed accounts (sometimes too detailed!) of the genre’s milestones. It pays breathless homage to his favorites, touches on more obscure relics than I had known existed, and carefully fills in the various contexts that Blaxploitation was informed by and would have a powerful influence on. This latter attention is especially welcome. Henderson is fascinated by the sources feeding into Blaxploitation and the tributaries flowing out of it into the present day. He is well aware that the creators of these films were simultaneously involved in a myriad of other projects, which means that we learn about television series – Black and white – crossover blockbusters from Jaws to Star Wars and what he astutely labels “counterprogramming”, i.e., uplifting dramas meant to counteract the deleterious influence of what they regarded as bottom-feeding exploitation.
Throughout Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras, Henderson shows a gift for one-liners that are at once laugh-inducing and critically insightful. “After all, Sesame Street did have a workable corner,” he quips at the end of a paragraph describing how in 1974, Roscoe Orman went from playing a pimp in Gilbert Moses’ Willie Dynamite to “Gordon” on the long-running children’s show (which he would do for the next 42 years). He would get letters from kids who were fans of both productions “begging him not to beat up Big Bird”.
Indeed, double features would often inappropriately match Blaxploitation with more ostensibly child-friendly fare, and urban kids didn’t suffer from the same kind of gatekeeping as their suburban counterparts. Henderson recounts that his aunt took him to a double feature of Bruce Lee’s swan song in 1973’s Enter the Dragon and Jim Kelly’s action vehicle Black Belt Jones (1974) (both films directed by Robert Clouse) when the author was four. That same year, a “much older cousin” took him to a double feature of the even more violent and drug-filled Coffy and Foxy Brown. “I can recall my female cousins ‘playing’ Pam Grier in their make-believe games,” he recalls, concluding, “Sure, there was violence in these films, but there was violence on our streets, too. We were more resilient than the grown-ups gave us credit.”
Henderson reminds us that “Darth Vader was technically Black” but that Hollywood preferred James Earl Jones be “heard but not seen”. He reminds us that the same gay white filmmaker (Joel Schumacher) who designed the costumes for Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper and his 1978 Ingmar Bergman pastiche, Interiors also wrote the scripts for no fewer than three beloved Black films of 1976-77: Sam O’Steen’s Sparkle, Michael Schultz’s Car Wash, and The Wiz. And he notes that Norman Wexler, who wrote the screenplay for quintessential “good trash” , Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975) was also responsible for “A White version of a Blaxploitation movie: it had a New York City-based antihero[…], incredible fashions, brutality and profanity galore, and a song-filled score that scored millions of copies. Paramount called this massive hit Saturday Night Fever”.
Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is similarly attuned to the ignorance of many white viewers and critics to the kind of code-switching and boundary-crossing that were everyday life for Black Americans. A case in point would be mainstream singer and actor Diahann Carroll, whom some white critics found too refined and beautiful to credibly play a struggling single mother in John Berry’s 1974 working-class romantic comedy Claudine. “Their disbelief,” Henderson concludes, “revealed they hadn’t done their research. ‘I grew up on 153rd Street [in the Bronx] just a few blocks from where we shot Claudine‘, Carroll told the Pensacola News Journal.”
Black audiences and artists were aware of the stereotypes and bad behavior trafficked by Blaxploitation. There was plenty of pushback, and there were plenty of arguments within as well as outside of Black communities about the sociocultural harm these movies may or may not have been doing. But there was also a recognition by many that the stereotypes trafficked by white movies were, if anything worse, that there was a lot of realism intertwined with the performative exaggerations and that the economic clout and relative artistic freedom outweighed any other consideration, especially in communities as depressed as those in the Black inner cities during the ’70s. Moreover, Black audiences felt an incredible charge from these films’ anger, injustice, and subversive rebellion – even the most egregiously offensive genre derivatives. “The rage it projects is real,” Henderson cites New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who concluded in a review that he could not decide anything else about Ivan Dixon’s 1973 speculative spy thriller, The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
The sustained attention to “counterprogramming” is an important feature of Odie Henderson’s refusal to honor boundaries even as he continues to recognize the need to attend to their existence. He cites Pam Grier lauding Claudine and John Korty’s 1974 television movie, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, as “representatives of a new consciousness”, while slyly noting that “she had yet to shoot Friday Foster” (Arthur Marks’ 1975 action Blaxploitation movie) and questioning any stark temporal or cultural division between the two. He refuses to discuss these films either merely as worthy “counterprogramming” or solely as what Grier saw as “something else to be said”.
Instead, Oddie Henderson emphasizes everything that critically lauded dramas and dramatic comedies like Sounder, Claudine, Sparkle, and The Wiz shared with the Blaxploitation they were made during and marketed in opposition to. Like concert films Save the Children and Wattstax, this counterprogramming “provided a real-life look at the communities so many Blaxploitation films dramatized” and “served as a way to channel the anger resulting from racism, assassinations, and segregation into a positive event”.
Not only did this intended counterprogramming share stars, artists, musicians, and technicians with Blaxploitation (in 1972, for example, playwright Lonne Elder III wrote the screenplay both for G-rated rural drama Sounder and for karate-filled crime drama Melinda). Some movies didn’t fall easily into either group. Henderson touches on several points on this hybrid category that further question any stark division. There was Lady Sings the Blues (1972), which was marketed as a mainstream period biopic but which drew abundantly on Blaxploitation tropes of drug culture and organized crime, featuring Richard Pryor as Billie Holiday’s partner-in-addiction. There were the “‘more respectable films that showed us Blaxploitation could be bittersweet” – movies like coming-of-age comedy-drama Cooley High and Laurence Fishburne’s debut Cornbread, Earl, and Me or ensemble comedy Car Wash with its “stunning, dramatic climax”.
What unites these films, without exception, is the music. Even the rural period piece Sounder was scored by and featured blues great Taj Mahal. Advance singles provided free marketing, soundtrack sales boosted studio profits, and Black composers and artists brought instant street cred. At times, the music was in tension with the narrative, as when Curtis Mayfield’s anti-drug songs intentionally undercut what he saw as Super Fly’s feature-length “commercial for cocaine”. At other times, the music synced action, rhythm, and lyrics, as in Shaft, for which Isaac Hayes gave drummer Willie Hall a metronome timed to Richard Roundtree’s walking pace. Often, soundtracks functioned—as Henderson remarks of Mayfield’s score for Claudine—like “a Greek chorus under” the film.
In one of the many sidebars that are a welcome addition to the book’s main text, Henderson lists “the Top Ten Best Blaxploitation Songs”, including jazz-funk vibraphonist Roy Ayers, Willie Hutch, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Martha Reeves, Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes. A playlist generated from the book supplements that illustrious list further with the likes of Bobby Womack, Diana Ross, Gene Page, Hues Corporation, Millie Jackson, Pam Grier, The Staple Singers, Rufus Thomas, Dobie Gray, Edwin Starr, Rose Royce, Stargard, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Among its many other cultural contributions, it was Blaxploitation that made pop music a permanent fixture in movies, regardless of genre, all but replacing the orchestral soundtrack except on the biggest ‘prestige’ productions.
Henderson notes that, while Stevie Wonder was one of the few prominent Black artists of the era that did not contribute a song to a Blaxploitation flick, his Grammy-winning 1974 song “Living for the City” breaks in the middle for “a skit that sounded like a mini-Blaxploitation movie”. The note is a neat preview of Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras‘ concluding argument about the legacy of Blaxploitation. There were the later satires, the various remakes, and the homages by Tarantino and others. “So many movies,” he concludes, “incorporate tropes from Blaxploitation … sometimes blatantly, and sometimes on the sly.”
But the truest heir to Blaxploitation, down to the ongoing dispute about criminal influence and how much they reflect biography and reality, must be hip-hop. Born in New York City during the height of the Blaxploitation era, hip-hop copped its attitude and beats, translating Blaxploitation to the radio and the music video just as the cinematic cycle was fading. “Truth be told,” Henderson writes of “the clean world” to which the Black New Wave had more or less reverted in the late ’80s, “if one wanted to feel nostalgic for the Blaxploitation era … all one had to do was turn on the radio. Gangsta rap put those tropes to poetry and music.” Biggie Smalls named himself after Calvin Lockhart’s character in
Sidney Poitier’s 1974 crime comedy, Uptown Saturday Night, the debut album of the same name by Camp Lo is, not surprisingly, “dripping with Blaxploitation references”.
There’s another book waiting to be written there. If Odie Henderson writes it, I hope he’ll keep what works best in Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras—the depth and the range, the abundant detail, the broad contexts, the sharp analysis, the personal and social history, the critic’s version of the dozens, and of course the music—and then hire a better editor to trim the plot summaries and focus the action to a faster metronome. Unless Colson Whitehead beats him to it. The third volume of the Harlem Trilogy, presumably, will be set in the ’80s. You can’t tell the story of Harlem in the ’80s without hip-hop any more than you can tell the story of the ’70s without Blaxploitation.