#12: Black Hooker

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 3: Side B
1974

What Would You Do If Your Mama Was A Hooker? So goes the tagline for Black Hooker, also known as Black Mama and Street Sisters. The best taglines--think In Space No One Can Hear You Scream or Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In the Water--are provocative. They pique your interest without revealing too much about the film itself. Often, they do little beyond establishing a general mood. What Would You Do If Your Mama Was A Hooker? is perhaps too straightforward. It’s less a tagline than it is a writing prompt for the screenwriter. Imagine if Alien had asked, What Would You Do If You Were Trapped On A Spaceship With A Horrible Monster? Now Write A Screenplay About That And Pitch It To A Movie Studio.

But then Black Hooker isn’t a sci-fi blockbuster. It’s a blaxploitation film, right? The luridly-rendered Pam Grier clone on the poster seems to suggest so. She Was Mean, the poster claims. Damn Mean! Sounds promising. Then the movie starts. We see Young Boy (Teddy Quinn), a little floppy-haired white kid running out of a rundown shack with Grandpa (Jeff Burton), an older black man, in hot pursuit. Grandpa catches up to Young Boy and grabs him by the collar.        

“Please love me, grandpa!” cries Young Boy. Grandma (Kathryn Jackson) shows up, shoos Grandpa away and gazes fondly into the eyes of Young Boy. Over the credits, we get a montage of Young Boy and Grandma strolling through a field of tall grass with their arms around one another. Any remaining hope that Black Hooker might turn into a funky action flick along the lines of Foxy Brown, Coffy or Cleopatra Jones are dashed the second the words “adapted for the screen from the stage play” appear on the screen.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a dialogue-heavy, largely plot-free family drama with sociopolitical overtones now and then. Theoretically speaking, that is. Unfortunately, Black Hooker botches the execution. Painted Woman (Sandra Alexander), the daughter of Grandma and Grandpa, shows up at the rundown shack to check in on Young Boy, her illegitimate son. She is, we quickly surmise, the black hooker of the title. Her parents, not surprisingly, don’t approve of her career. Grandpa is a preacher and Grandma is highly religious; both of them want their daughter to give up her life on the streets and take care of Young Boy.

“I gave you love,” Grandma tells Painted Woman, “and that’s more than I can say you’ve ever given this poor child.”

“What do you know about love?” says Painted Woman in the first of many heated, heavy-handed exchanges. It’s this sort of dialogue that bogs the film down. Perhaps it would play better on stage, where clunky dialogue can sometimes be redeemed by the immediacy of theater. Here, it just falls flat. The long, ponderous scenes of Painted Woman at work slow the film down even more.    

“Are you a man of action,” she asks one of her Caucasian clients, “or do you get your pleasure just looking at my black magnificence?”

“Why are you so hostile?” the client asks. When he leaves, Painted Woman’s pimp follows him down a hallway and smacks him around for what seems like hours, rivaling the many interminable slap-heavy scenes of violence in Fifty Movie Pack Project entry #8: Mad Dog. Next, we get a riveting scene of Grandma and Young Boy shopping for a suit. By the end of the film, Young Boy has grown into Older Boy (played by Timothy Bottoms look-alike Durey Mason) and has decided to track down his mother and force her to love him. There’s a sequence filmed entirely in sepia-tone for no apparent reason, some mild hallucinatory imagery, gratuitous slow-motion, and then Older Boy strangles Painted Woman to death. That, apparently, is his way of answering the question, What Would You Do If Your Mama Was A Hooker?

If only, amid his duties as director, writer, set decorator, production designer and art director, one-time auteur Arthur Roberson had found time to instill his film with some narrative drive and a bit of grace. The performances are good and the intention is admirable. A movie that attempts to tackle issues as complex and far-reaching as race, religion, class, family and sex with virtually no budget can‘t be all bad. Black Hooker just needs something else: A little subtlety, perhaps. Or maybe just a better tagline.