Everything Changes Across the Street

Black and Italian gangs have an uneasy alliance until three thugs gun down some of their crews in 1972's Across 110th Street. A Blaxploitation film making copious use of real locations in New York, the story is sometimes prosaic but the performances and atmosphere are terrific.

Anthony Quinn produced the film and gets top billing but his role is relatively small. He and Yaphet Kotto play a couple of cops at odds with each other in a subplot essentially copied from In the Heat of the Night.

The bigger and more interesting part of the film focuses on the three thugs and the forces of organised crime trying to find them. Two are are serious, down on their luck young men who were desperate for the cash they stole from the mobs. The third is Henry J. Jackson (Antonio Fargas) who unwisely uses his stolen dough to transform a bar into his own private reproduction of Caligula.

His demise is as over the top as his victory celebration and this movie definitely scores high on the old ultraviolence. There's a particularly nice car explosion on a Harlem street late in the film.

Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) is the film's real protagonist. One of the three thugs, he's a very noir character--there's some ambiguity about how much his desperate situation is his own fault or how much the desperate circumstances of his life forced him into it.

Across 110th Street features songs by Bobby Womack, including a title track, "Across 110th Street". Quentin Tarantino used the song prominently in Jackie Brown where, frankly, it's done much better service. It seems to be a slightly different, and much better, version of the song, too. But Across 110th Street is a decent movie in its own right.

Across 110th Street is available on The Criterion Channel.

Fighting Crime is Foxy's Scene

Her man was brought down by the illegal drugs industry he worked to destroy. Now she's getting revenge in 1974's Foxy Brown. This sort of sequel to Coffy is a smoother, more focused ride from the same director, Jack Hill, and featuring the same star, the inimitable Pam Grier.

Foxy's boyfriend, a Federal Agent, is recuperating from facial reconstruction surgery in secret. Meanwhile, her brother, Link (Antonio Fargas), is in trouble again, mixed up with drug pushers and once again trying to get ahead in the trade himself.

He pleads with Foxy to understand--he has ambition but as a black man who can't play professional sports his options are limited. She's not impressed and tells him to get his act together. So he fingers her boyfriend for a gang headed by the ruthless Katherine Wall (Kathryn Loder) who wears what appears to be the mechanical owl from Clash of the Titans on her neck.

It's an exploitation film and it delivers on sex and violence admirably. Grier comes off as more confident in the action sequences than she did in Coffy and her schemes to seduce and kill are a little more satisfying. Once again, Sid Haig plays a minor character--a different one from the first film.

He really seems like he's having a good time, his ability to convey genuine mirth outpacing most of the other actors in the film. But mostly this is Grier's movie and she carries it with aplomb.

Foxy Brown is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1361

On billiard greens the cues decide the paths.
In fruitful dreams detectives harvest sails.
Successive nights entail a string of baths.
The little gulp was deep and swam with whales.
The gathered grains pretend a plant arrived.
The movie prints absorbed a vapour cloud.
A whispered brain in spirits late contrived.
A rapid face collapsed beneath a shroud.
The middle door was green and hid a coat.
The flashing screen proceeds to grant a bill.
Discussions ranged on what to call a boat.
Remembered woods conceal the travelled meal.
Converted boxes took the form of bowls.
Reverted foxes eke the life of gnolls.

The Physical Punished by the Abstract

The impossibly pure image of the Victorian gentleman in Robert Louis Stevenson's novella is fascinatingly changed into the image of the white oppressor in 1976's Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde. Like the best of the more direct adaptations of the novella, this features a Jekyll, in this case named Dr. Pride, who isn't simply a good man in contrast to an evil Hyde but a man with his hubris invested in a superficial outer layer that creates a monstrousness within. In this case, the monstrousness is the product of a centuries old, culturally disseminated idea of white racial superiority. A blaxploitation film, it uses the broad conventions of the genre to make a stimulating statement on an interplay between the cultural and psychological.

Bernie Casey gives a good performance as Dr. Henry Pride, his name immediately evoked for irony when, in the process of giving a tour of the hospital, his colleague, Dr. Worth (Rosalind Cash), remarks on his modesty in refraining from talking about his achievements. He replies that true recognition should come not from his peers but from the patients he cures. Over the course of the film, as the Hyde persona begins to dominate, the pride inherent in his Puritanical view of his own virtue becomes more apparent.

I like exploitation films, I don't make any apologies for it. I don't think exploitation is in itself a dirty word though I think there can be good reasons and bad reasons to exploit something. I don't consider depictions of sexuality solely for the purpose of arousing an audience to be inherently a negative form of exploitation. But I think there's more going on in the film's first scene of explicit nudity, when Pride examines a patient named Linda (Marie O'Henry) who happens to be a prostitute.

She accurately lays out a lot of Pride's psychological profile for us, pegging him as a black man who wants to be a white man, pointing out his white coat and saying she bets he even drives a white car. Later we see he does indeed, a very expensive looking white vintage car, in fact. If this isn't a clear enough symbol, he uses it later to murder a black pimp.

This film's the product of a black director, William Crain, and a white screenwriter, Lawrence Woolner, whose working relationship is perhaps reflected in the two cops investigating the murders, Jackson (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) and O'Connor (Milt Kogan). Their working relationship of mutual respect seems to represent a post-Heat of the Night ideal. In contrast to films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the antagonistic relationship between the city cops and the black community isn't much portrayed. Along with Dr. Worth, the cops in this world seem to be there to provide the contrast to Pride's presumption. To be a doctor or a cop does not mean one must become a monster. But Pride has grown up with the idea that he must in some way become white to become successful, that white people are monsters, and therefore he must be a monster.

Released only a month before Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde similarly features an indictment of the arrogance of a vigilante murdering pimps and trying to save prostitutes from themselves. In that first scene with Linda, a not terribly subtle but certainly effective shot has him behind her as she bends over so he can give her a shot. This turns out to be foreshadowing for just how much his expressions of concern and respect for her are merely tools he uses in the hope of using her for his pleasure. Like Dr. Cordelier in Renoir's version, he seeks to achieve sexual pleasure without being seen as someone who would have sex with a woman he deems an inappropriate partner. Like Midge with Scottie in Vertigo, he seeks to assert a position of dominance by describing himself in a more parental role--twice he describes himself as fatherly to Linda however much she makes it clear that's not the kind of relationship she wants with him. And if he really knew himself, it's not the kind of relationship he wants with her.

His Hyde becomes a sort of albino with really effective, creepy makeup work by none other than Stan Winston. He's not trying to create a potion that separates good and evil in a person but a cure for cirrhosis of the liver, something that works as a nice metaphor for presumptions about alcoholism in poor communities--it's another way Pride is trying to save the poor from their own moral failings. The monster he becomes is neither black or white but something that perhaps could only be borne from the long, ugly conception of race in the U.S.

Twitter Sonnet #1103

Enormous round the bones a suit approached.
Beneath a mop the soap repaired the dry.
Allotted time was taken by the coach.
Continued claims ingest the number pie.
About the mint the spinach dipped a ways.
Italian thoughts arise beyond the food.
Containers keep the pasta nights and days.
Beneath the pointed clouds collects a mood.
Without a hat the dancing time arrived.
Condensing soup the pocket fixed a meal.
Besmirching pines the sap was right contrived.
Between the green and blue was something teal.
Evaporation fills a blank ravine.
Before there's luck a dozen counts convene.