John Shaft emerges from a New York City subway to the rat-tat-tatting of the film’s empowering theme song. A “Super Fly” drug dealer leaps over a fence in his brown leisure suit. A cool Foxy Brown pulls a gun from her luminous Afro.
The heroes of blaxploitation, a genre that dominated the 1970s, radically altered the representation of Black Americans in cinema away from the roles of domestics, comic relief, and buttoned-down freedom fighters. In this genre, Black people wore fashion that was as colorful as their personalities, had Afros as large as their ambitions, and grasped sexual, political and economic freedom. These heroes were not chanting “we shall overcome.” The system would have to overcome them.
The genre’s treasures can be witnessed at Film Forum in Manhattan, where, over the course of a week, 16 movies will screen as part of a series called Blaxploitation, Baby! While the program features plenty of well-known titles, it also includes under-the-radar gems that add greater context, depth and variety to the genre. Below is a selection of some of the rarer highlights in the series, and, for those unable to attend, information on where to stream them.
‘Sheba, Baby’ (1975)
Of Pam Grier’s butt-kicking heroines (Foxy Brown, Coffy, Friday Foster), Sheba Shayne, a private investigator returning to her hometown to defend her father against a gentrifying syndicate, might be her most commanding. Her fashion is fly: blue denim ensembles and trim white suits topped by a white fedora. She is also respected. While Sheba is certainly the center of every man’s attention, Grier is not just playing a dangerous sexpot, as in previous roles. This is a professional, diligent woman adept both in the boardroom and against an enforcer like Pilot (D’Urville Martin) or his conniving boss, a white man named Shark (Dick Merrifield). “Sheba, Baby” demonstrates that Grier could vary her persona, tinkering with it to fit the political requirements of the film.
‘Slaughter’ (1972)
After Jim Brown spent a football career as an unstoppable wrecking ball, it only made sense that he would turn to the larger-than-life medium of film. Supporting roles in action movies like “The Dirty Dozen” and “Ice Station Zebra” launched Brown’s movie career; starring roles in “The Split” and “Riot” further proved his prowess. But it wasn’t until the director Jack Starrett’s “Slaughter” that Brown fully capitalized on his immense magnetism.
After his father is assassinated in a car-bomb attack, Slaughter (Brown), a Vietnam War veteran, seeks revenge against the killers. Stella Stevens plays Slaughter’s love interest in a film that appears to riff on “Casino Royale” (1967) by having the former soldier don a tuxedo to infiltrate a Mafia-controlled gambling house. Bodies pile high in Slaughter’s wake, to the point that only Billy Preston’s stomping funk theme hits harder.
‘Thomasine & Bushrod’ (1974)
While blaxploitation is often associated with the stories of Black American urban sprawl, the western, a genre equally known for outlaws, offered exciting new terrain for someone like Sidney Poitier in his directing debut “Buck and the Preacher.” Where Poitier began, Gordon Parks Jr. — the director of “Super Fly” and the son of the famed photographer Gordon Parks — pushed further with “Thomasine & Bushrod.”
The whip-smart Thomasine (Vonetta McGee) and the easygoing Bushrod (Max Julien, the film’s screenwriter) are bank robbers whose evasion of the white authorities, led by U.S. Marshal Bogardie (George Murdock), make them folk heroes. Most of “Thomasine & Bushrod” has a freewheeling energy, filled with moments of defiance and tenderness — Glynn Turman appears for a spell as the couple’s high-spirited, Jamaican-born friend Jomo — retooling the lush landscape as a site for radical existence.
‘Trick Baby’ (1972)
Of the films in the series, the hardest to find is “Trick Baby,” the director Larry Yust’s adaptation of the novel by the former pimp Iceberg Slim. It’s also an insane movie. Blue Howard (Mel Stewart) and White Folks, a.k.a. Trick Baby (Kiel Martin), are con men living in Philadelphia. Blue raised White Folks and taught him the art of the con, which they use to extract loot from unsuspecting white men. Did I mention that White Folks is also a Black man passing for white?
A mobster angry at the pair for tricking his father and a gaggle of white men angry at White Folks for bamboozling them in a gentrification scheme provide the tension here, while the passing narrative itself offers other types of boundary crossing — such as interracial sex — that make for a gritty underworld excursion.
‘Truck Turner’ (1974)
After penning blaxploitation’s quintessential anthem — the “Theme From Shaft” — it’s only fitting that the singer Isaac Hayes would get his own action vehicle. In Jonathan Kaplan’s film, Hayes portrays a former N.F.L. player turned bounty hunter, who, along with his partner Jerry Barnes (Alan Weeks), is hired to find a pimp named Gator (Paul Harris) who skipped bail.
Though Hayes is the film’s star, the sci-fi legends Nichelle Nichols (“Star Trek”) and Yaphet Kotto (“Alien”) are impossible to ignore. Nichols plays a surly madam whose best line readings are too dirty to be printed. And Kotto plays a vicious pimp with an air of sadistic sophistication. Kotto’s death scene, a woozy portrait of life leaving a man’s body, is both dramatic and poetic, and a reminder of blaxploitation’s rare capacity to combine high and low tastes to make nonconformist art.
Read More: Beyond ‘Shaft’: 5 Blaxploitation Movies You Should Know
