#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.        

#11: Jive Turkey

Drive In Movie Classics
Disc 3: Side B
1974

The little-seen blaxploitation flick Jive Turkey is also known by the more colorful title Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes and the less politically-correct Get Nigger Rich on Number 666--which, depending on your point of view, is more confusing than it is offensive. “This Is A True Story,” an opening title informs the viewer. “Only the Names, Places, and Events Have Been Changed To Protect the Innocent.” By these loose, ambiguous, noncommittal standards, pretty much any film could be said to be a true story.

No matter. It’s 1956, or so nearly every character in the film would like us to believe. “This is 1956!” they are often heard to say, a claim that goes unsupported by the 70s era cars we see in the background, the slang, the haircuts and the tie-dyed poncho one guy is seen wearing in an early scene. Still, you have to admire this low-budget movie for even attempting a period setting. The story follows Pasha (played with conviction by Paul Harris), an African-American crime boss who controls the numbers racket in an unidentified Ohio city. His rival is Italian mobster Big Tony (Frank DeVoka).

“The narcotics business is in a slump,” explains Big Tony at an uneasy meeting between the two criminals. He wants the numbers game for himself.

“Numbers is my business,” says Pasha with a confident smirk.

Big Tony thinks for a moment. He needs to negotiate. “You can keep prostitution,” he offers. Pasha isn’t having any of it. Big Tony goes on to say that one of Pasha’s men is secretly working for him and that he--Big Tony--knows Pasha’s every move. Not only that, but there’s a contract out for a hit on Pasha from Big Tony’s bosses in Chicago--pretty forthcoming for a deceitful, nefarious mobster, but still Pasha refuses to give up the numbers. Next we see the mayor and his aides discussing their plan to eradicate Pasha's
gang. As in almost every single movie or television show ever made about organized crime, it’s an election year--1956, to be exact--and the mayor is determined to crack down in order to please his constituents, even if it means bending the rules himself.

It’s a story that’s probably inspired--at least in part--by the exploits of infamous Harlem mob boss Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, who was portrayed in the 2007 film American Gangster and provided the inspiration for 1997‘s Hoodlum. In other words, it’s pretty ambitious stuff for a b-movie--too ambitious, in the end. Jive Turkey devolves into a standard action movie, complete with back alley shootouts and car chases, as the cops and the Italian mob close in on Pasha’s numbers racket.

It’s standard, that is, except for the character of Serene, Pasha’s female assassin, who is lusted after by Big Tony’s flunkies and who dispatches them in ever more gruesome ways. In one scene, Serene poisons a guy, climbs on top of him and repeatedly slams the heel of her shoe into his eye, laughing maniacally as the camera lens is drenched with blood. It’s genuinely disturbing, something more fitting of a horror movie than a blaxploitation flick. That Serene is actually a man in drag is obvious to no one within the world of Jive Turkey--not even to Pasha, it seems. Are we, the audience, supposed to recognize that Serene is a man? I began to wonder.

Then, with a group of mobsters trailing her, Serene goes into her house, removes her wig, fake eyelashes and makeup, puts on a pair of glasses, a hat, and a suit and tie, and walks back out, transformed. She goes right up to the car where the mobsters are waiting, pulls out a cigar and asks for a light from the man behind the wheel. None of the mobsters recognize her. As she strolls away, we hear her trademark maniacal laugh. It’s a strange, subversive moment in an otherwise conventional film. What does it mean? Who knows?