antisocial life. At one stage of Johnson’s career, the champ
defeats “the Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries, in a 1910
match that had European-American fans in an uproar. In a
later part of the documentary, Johnson is convicted for vio-
lating the White Slavery Act because he is blamed for his sec-
ond white wife’s suicide. Another key aspect about Jack
Johnson in terms of its relationship to later fictional blax-
ploitation films was that jazz innovator Miles Davis wrote the
entire soundtrack for the documentary. The Davis sound-
track was created at the pinnacle of his funk-rock-fusion
experimentation era and featured a famous quote in the cal-
culated, articulate speech of the late boxer:
I’m black—they never let me forget it.
I’m black alright—and I’ll never let THEM forget it!
—Brock Peters (Jack Johnson, 1970)
By all accounts, the first blaxploitation film was Gordon
Parks’s Shaft (1971), which served as the prototype for the
future genre flicks. Shaft featured the superslick, streetwise,
oversexed, angry, proud, strong black male—in this case pri-
vate investigator John Shaft (Richard Roundtree)—as he
worked to solve a problem directly or indirectly caused by
The Man, or “white America.” In this case, Shaft had to res-
cue a woman. Along the way, the title character fought street
gangs, spat in the face of police racism, and loved sexy black
women. Like the Miles Davis collaboration for Jack Johnson,
Shaft’s soundtrack was created by a popular funk artist of the
time, Isaac Hayes, and had an infinitely longer lifespan than
that of the film. Even more than 30 years later, the Shaft
theme, which showcases funky guitars and 16th-note high
hats, is instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever seen a
Wendy’s commercial. The formula that Parks created with
Shaft and its sequel Shaft’s Big Score (1972) would translate
into dozens upon dozens of “B” movies for the remainder of
the decade.
The main theme of blaxploitation cinema always boiled
down to a supercool African-American street hero/antihero
who fights an allegorical fight against the white establish-
ment’s racist oppression. Usually, the object of oppression is
the criminal lifestyle of street gangs; drugs like cocaine and
heroin were commonly judged by many ghetto dwellers to be
a conspiratorial plot by white America to keep blacks in
poverty. However, there were different variations of the
black-versus-white theme other than the typical street gang,
prostitution, and drug-dealing scenarios. Three the Hard Way
(1974) is about three heroes (Jim Brown, Jim Kelly, and Fred
Williamson) who must save the city from a white supremacist
plot to poison the city’s water supply with a toxin that is
harmless to whites but fatal to blacks. In William Crain’s
Blacula (1972) and its sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream! (1973),
a black vampire, Manuwalde (William Marshall), is
unleashed on white neighborhoods in Los Angeles to terror-
ize The Man and make love to mortal women. Finally, the
third installment of the John Shaft trilogy, Shaft in Africa
(1973), does away with subtle socioeconomic allegory, cut-
ting straight to the chase with the hero traveling to the
African continent to break up The Man’s underground inter-
national slave trade.
As mentioned before, male blaxploitation heroes were
often characterized by street smarts, machismo, coolness, and
bitterness toward whites. The hero was usually a special
agent, a private investigator, a cop, a vigilante, or in another
somewhat “legitimate” heroic profession. However, there
were antiheroes in illegitimate, illegal professions—pimping,
drug dealing, and ganglording—who also took the role of the
hip protagonist. In Superfly (1972), cocaine pusher Young-
blood Priest (Ron O’Neal) is threatened by a violent, dark
past that soon catches up to him. Youngblood (1978) followed
the story of a ghetto-dwelling youth (What’s Happening! tele-
vision actor Bryan O’Dell) who joined the Kingsmen, a street
gang ruled by a disgruntled Vietnam veteran. Youngblood
found himself murdering fellow African Americans in the
name of gang warfare while The Man pulled the strings in
the unseen background. Black Caesar (1973) and its continu-
ation Hell Up in Harlem (1973) was a gangland epic about
Tommy Gibbs (Fred Williamson) who fought to take over
the white criminal establishment.
Much as in film noir decades before, women characters in
1970s blaxploitation were categorized into two stereotypes.
The first type—affectionately dubbed “the ho”—was an
unintelligent, uncomplicated main squeeze. The ho’s job was
to be the hero’s love interest and take part in the obligatory
sex scene. The second female stereotype was very similar to
film noir’s dangerous, smart, sassy femme fatale. This other
woman was streetwise, hip, strong, sexy, and usually played
by a genre juggernaut such as Pam Grier or Tamara Dobson.
As opposed to the ho’s supporting-character status, the dan-
gerously hip femme-fatale-like heroine took the center stage
away from her male costars and fought The Man with mini-
mal help from the opposite sex. Jack Hill’s Coffy (1973) would
mark the start of the Hill and Grier collaborations and fea-
tured a strong black woman hero who wreaks revenge against
The Man for killing her sister. In the ridiculously similar Foxy
Brown (1974), another Hill-Grier collaboration, Pam Grier’s
heroine again exacts revenge against her adversaries, this
time for killing her boyfriend. Likewise, Cleopatra Jones
(1973) featured a strong black heroine (Tamara Dobson) who
tried to hamper the drug lord’s opium supply by destroying
Turkish poppy fields.
Cinematically speaking, blaxploitation films were almost
always technically simplistic with basic workable shots and
the occasional kung-fu-styled hyperactive camera montage
work for fight scenes. Note the karatelike essence of the end
scene of Superfly in which Priest literally high-kicks The Man
into submission in his bell-bottom slacks and platform shoes.
Rarely, if ever, was the concept of creating visual art taken
into consideration over fundamental storytelling technique.
For the most part, the amateurish look of blaxploitation
films, combined with the cartoonlike style and jive language
of the 1970s, helped create and maintain the cult audience
that the films still have today.
Perhaps the best parts of ’70s blaxploitation films were
the superb soundtracks created by top-shelf funk, soul, and
jazz-fusion musicians. Unlike those of most other films
before and since, these soundtracks were not simply collec-
tions of songs or mere musical ambiance accompanying what
BLAXPLOITATION FILMS
47