FOXY BROWN (1974)
Once Jack Hill and Pam Grier hit their stride as an
effective team of writer/director and actor muse with COFFY, of course they
would do it again. What is exploitation if it doesn’t make use of a winning
team? For that matter, a wining formula is one to which all of Hollywood aspires.
Knowing that black audiences found in Grier a strong
non-tokenistic female action heroine to cheer on, Hill distilled her appeal
into a full-blooded vigilante hell-cat with FOXY BROWN. It was originally meant
to be a direct sequel to COFFY but when
AIP nixed that idea, hasty changes had to be made and there was no time for
example to establish what job Foxy had compared to her previous role's nurse duties.
FOXY BROWN is a fun action vehicle though with some
relishable dialogue and vengeance mayhem for Grier to savour. This is signalled
from the start as she is telephoned by our old Blaxploitation friend Antonio
Fargas as her brother ‘Link’. His nervy hustler persona is perfectly suited to
playing her ne’er-do-well sibling who can’t stay out of trouble and needs help
in being extracted from mobster bad debt repercussions. With a sigh, Foxy gets
out of bed (giving us the first of many unnecessary but welcome boob shots),
reaches for her pistol and rescues him. She does this by mounting the pavement
in her car, having Fargas get in at speed, plummeting face-first through the
sun-roof and depositing one of the tenacious hoods who clings to the hood into
the harbour.
Shady Fargas cannot resist easy opportunity. His lack of
self-awareness is over-shadowed by a burning desire to channel his creative
energy: “You tell me what I’m supposed to do with all this ambition?” he moans.
He justifies his scheming against what he sees as black social failure all
around him, including Foxy’s lover Michael Anderson (Terry Carter) whom he
denigrates as a ruined informer, when he is in fact an undercover federal agent
who’s undergone plastic surgery to enable him to go incognito back on the
streets. Foxy visits him as he’s completing his recovery and almost administers
some non-medicinal TLC before a nurse spoils it. Link spoils things even more
by treacherously informing on Anderson after Foxy tries to hide his old
identity. The mob shoots Anderson to death and Foxy threatens to kill her
spineless scum-bag brother when she finds out he was responsible for the
tip-off. “You think you’re back in with these people? They got a stick of
dynamite up your ass and the fuse is burning!” She has a solution to rectify
the situation:
“The only way to handle these smart-ass hoods is with a
bullet in the gut!”
Foxy leaves her apartment, having roughed up Link and his
girlfriend like the Angel of Death. “That’s my sister – and she’s a whole lotta
woman”, he mutters fearfully.
Foxy herself now goes undercover to get revenge, posing as a
hooker for a ‘modelling agency’ run by the curiously androgynous villain Miss
Katherine (Kathryn Loder). Her first customer is a corrupt judge who likes
black women: “The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice”, purrs Foxy before dispatching the “pink-ass corrupt honky
judge!”. Lines like these are scattered like Blaxploitation pearls throughout
the script.
Foxy cuts like a scythe through the forest of gangsters,
stopping off for help at a lesbian bar that is murkier than the dock-side dive
in AIRPLANE. “I got my black belt in bar-stools” she rages during a brawl. She
enlists the help of a pilot in the unlikely form of genre familiar Sid Haig. I
say unlikely because aside from his dress sense of floppy hat and bushy beard making him resemble a boho painter, he refers to his skills as an airplane
‘driver’. (Surely a scripting or actor’s line faux-pas).
Foxy flies to the henchmen’s lair, where she ‘propels’ one
hood into dismemberment by gunning the plane at him, and for good measure cuts
off the penis of Miss Katherine’s lover. Back home, fetchingly leather-clad and
bouffant of afro, she completes her mission by visiting the brothel madame and
presenting her with her partner’s bottled appendage and then shooting her with
the pistol she concealed in her hair.
Overall, FOXY BROWN pushes all the right buttons for sheer
crowd-pleasing no-brainer fun. The executions and one–liners Grier delivers
are a bravura answer to the male vigilante figures sparked off by Charles
Bronson, but with more humour and the uncommon sight of a woman (and a black
woman at that) in the driving seat.
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