5 Blaxploitation Movies You Should Know – DNyuz

John Shaft emerges from a New York City subway to the rat-tat-tatting of the film’s uplifting theme song. A drug dealer named Super Fly jumps a fence in his brown leisure suit. A cool Foxy Brown pulls a gun from her radiant Afro.

The heroes of blaxploitation, a genre that dominated the 1970s, radically changed the representation of black Americans in cinema, away from the roles of servants, comic relief, and demure freedom fighters. In this genre, black people wore fashions as colorful as their personalities, had afros as big as their ambitions, and embraced sexual, political, and economic freedom. These heroes didn’t chant, “We shall overcome.” The system was supposed to overcome them.

The genre’s treasures are on display at Manhattan’s Film Forum, where 16 films will be screened over the course of a week as part of a series called Blaxploitation, Baby! While the program includes many familiar titles, it also features lesser-known gems that add context, depth, and variety to the genre. Below is a sampling of some of the series’ rarer highlights, and, for those who can’t make it, information on where to stream them.

‘Sheba, Baby’ (1975)

Of Pam Grier’s ass-kicking heroines (Foxy Brown, Coffy, Friday Foster), Sheba Shayne, a private eye who returns to her hometown to defend her father against a gentrifying syndicate, is perhaps her most dominant. Her fashion is fly: blue denim ensembles and crisp white suits with a white fedora. She’s also respected. While Sheba is certainly the center of attention for any man, Grier isn’t just playing a dangerous sex doll, as in previous roles. This is a professional, diligent woman, as adept in the boardroom as she is against an enforcer like Pilot (D’Urville Martin) or his scheming white-guy boss Shark (Dick Merrifield). “Sheba, Baby” shows that Grier could vary her persona, tinker with it to suit the film’s political exigencies.

‘Slaughter’ (1972)

After Jim Brown spent a football career as an unstoppable wrecking ball, it was only natural that he would turn to the larger-than-life medium of film. Supporting roles in action films like “The Dirty Dozen” and “Ice Station Zebra” launched Brown’s film career; leading roles in “The Split” and “Riot” further demonstrated his prowess. But it wasn’t until director Jack Starrett’s “Slaughter” that Brown fully capitalized on his immense appeal.

After his father is killed in a car bombing, Slaughter (Brown), a Vietnam War veteran, seeks revenge on the killers. Stella Stevens plays Slaughter’s love interest in a film that seems to be based on “Casino Royale” (1967), having the former soldier don a tuxedo to infiltrate a mob-controlled gambling house. The bodies pile up high in Slaughter’s wake, to the point that only Billy Preston’s pounding funk theme hits harder.

‘Thomasine & Bushrod’ ​​​​(1974)

While blaxploitation is often associated with stories about the urban sprawl of black Americans, the Western, a genre also known for its outlaws, offered exciting new territory for someone like Sidney Poitier in his directorial debut, “Buck and the Preacher.” Where Poitier started, Gordon Parks Jr. — the director of “Super Fly” and the son of famed photographer Gordon Parks — picked up with “Thomasine & Bushrod.”

The brainy Thomasine (Vonetta McGee) and the easygoing Bushrod (Max Julien, the film’s screenwriter) are bank robbers who, led by U.S. Marshal Bogardie (George Murdock), evade white authorities and become folk heroes in the process. Much of “Thomasine & Bushrod” has an easygoing energy, full of moments of defiance and tenderness — Glynn Turman pops up briefly as the couple’s cheerful, Jamaican-born friend, Jomo — transforming the lush landscape into a place for radical existence.

‘Trick Baby’ (1972)

Of the films in the series, the hardest to find is “Trick Baby,” director Larry Yust’s adaptation of the novel by former pimp Iceberg Slim. It’s also a crazy film. Blue Howard (Mel Stewart) and White Folks, aka Trick Baby (Kiel Martin), are con artists living in Philadelphia. Blue has raised White Folks and taught him the art of conning, which they use to bilk unsuspecting white men out of money. Did I mention that White Folks is also a black man pretending to be white?

A gangster angry at the couple for betraying their father and a group of white men angry at white people for betraying them in a gentrification scheme provide the tension in this story. The passing story itself also offers other forms of transgression, such as interracial sex, which make for a raw excursion into the underworld.

‘Truck Turner’ (1974)

After penning blaxploitation’s quintessential anthem—the “Theme From Shaft”—it’s only fitting that singer Isaac Hayes would get his own action vehicle. In Jonathan Kaplan’s film, Hayes portrays a former NFL player turned bounty hunter who, along with partner Jerry Barnes (Alan Weeks), is hired to track down a pimp named Gator (Paul Harris) who has jumped bail.

Though Hayes is the film’s star, sci-fi legends Nichelle Nichols (“Star Trek”) and Yaphet Kotto (“Alien”) are impossible to ignore. Nichols plays a surly madam whose best delivery is too filthy to print. And Kotto plays a cruel pimp with an air of sadistic sophistication. Kotto’s death scene, a giddy portrait of the life leaving a man’s body, is both dramatic and poetic, a reminder of blaxploitation’s rare ability to combine high and low tastes to create nonconformist art.

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