Whiffs (1975)

          The military-themed comedy Whiffs must have seemed promising at the conceptual stage, because the premise is outrageous—a schmuck GI spends years working as a test subject for the Army’s chemical-weapons program, gets discharged because the Army made him too sick to remain a viable test subject, can’t find steady work in the civilian world, and uses his knowledge of chemical weapons to mount a crime spree. A brilliant writer could have taken this material to wicked places, but the skill level of TV-trained scribe Malcolm Marmorstein falls well short of brilliance. His script introduces clever situations without exploiting their full potential, relies upon one-note characterizations, and simply isn’t funny enough. To be fair, Whiffs is infinitely more palatable than S*P*Y*S (1974), another project starring Elliot Gould to which Marmorstein made screenplay contributions. Yet the highest praise one can offer is that Whiffs is pleasant to watch except when it lapses into repetitive silliness, which happens often.

          The picture’s unlikely protagonist is Dudley Frapper (Gould), who enjoys getting bombarded with gases by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, led by straight-laced Colonel Lockyer (Eddie Albert). The implied joke that Dudley is an Army-sanctioned drug enthusiast is among the many pieces of low-hanging fruit that Marmorstein fails to harvest. After his discharge, Dudley fails at several entry-level jobs, succumbs to self-pity, and heads to a bar where he reconnects with Chops Mulligan (Harry Guardino), a career criminal who endured chemical experiments alongside Dudley in order to secure an early parole. Chops picks a fight with the bartender, and Dudley sedates Chops’ opponent with a tube of laughing gas. Chops steals the money in the bar’s cash register, then proposes committing more crimes while using gas to immobilize people.

          It takes the movie far too long to reach this point, and the subplot of Dudley’s romance with a pretty Army nurse played by Jennifer O’Neill doesn’t add much beyond eye candy—and a drab running joke about Dudley’s virility. Meanwhile, the subplot involving Godfrey Cambridge as an opportunistic crop-duster pilot is exceedingly goofy. Gould contributes half-hearted work, and Guardino makes a valiant effort despite being ill-suited for his comic role. The same can be said for director Ted Post, a reliable hand for action pictures and melodramas but not a comedic director by any stretch of the imagination.

Whiffs: FUNKY

Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) & Come Back, Charleston Blue (1972)

          Most reputable sources peg 1971, the year of Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, as the beginning of blaxploitation—yet two 1970 releases, Cotton Comes to Harlem and They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!, contain many signifiers closely associated with the genre. For instance, both movies include funky soundtracks, primarily black casts, and urban milieus. Tibbs!, of cousrse, is a sequel In the Heat of the Night (1967), whereas Cotton Comes to Harlem, cowritten and directed by African-American actor/playwright/activist Ossie Davis, is a whimsical celebration of modern black life, depicting a wide range of characters occupying a spectrum of social stations. Exploitation? Far from it. That’s why Cotton Comes to Harlem is interesting as a cultural milestone. As entertainment, however, Cotton Comes to Harlem isn’t quite as noteworthy.

          Based on a novel by Chester Himes, the movie is absurdly over-plotted and overpopulated, with a story that’s alternately difficult to believe and difficult to follow. The shortest possible summary is this: After a robbery/shootout disturbs a public rally, black NYPD detectives Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) and Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) investigate a criminal conspiracy related to flamboyant preacher Duke O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart). A wild chase/investigation involving angry citizens, drugs, drunks, revolutionaries, riots, stolen money, wronged women, and a giant bale of cotton unfolds, with scenes taking place throughout Harlem—culminating in a hellzapoppin finale on the stage of the Apollo Theater.

          Cotton Comes to Harlem is filled with provocative ideas and vivid performances, so it’s never boring. In fact, some parts might be too vivacious, with actors including Lockhart going way over the top at regular intervals. Conversely, Cambridge and St. Jacques are likeably cool and cynical throughout the piece, while iconic comedian Red Foxx—in one of his few movie roles—is surprisingly restrained. So, even though Cotton Comes to Harlem is bit of a mess, there’s something edifying about seeing what conscientious artists did with the same narrative DNA that, just a short while later, produced the dubious universe of blaxploitation.

          Cambridge and St. Jacques reprised their detective roles two years later in Come Back, Charleston Blue, which was adapted from another of Hines’ novels. This time around, the director was Mark Warren. The sequel is more disciplined than its predecssor, in both good and bad ways. While the stoyline of Come Back, Charleston Blue is a bit easier to track than that of Cotton Comes to Harlem, the second movie doesn’t have quite as much exuberance. That said, Come Back, Charleston Blue offers a faint echo of the charms that made Cotton Come to Harlem interesting, namely the offbeat fusion of comedy and drama and the loving depictions of black culture. Coffin Ed and Gravedigger, as well as other principal characters, are introduced during a charity ball that climaxes with a nasty murder. Eventually, the detectives learn that someone is playing vigilante by killing local mobsters, using straight razors to slit the throats of criminals plaguing Harlem neighborhoods. Clues suggest the culprit might by a fellow nicknamed Charleston Blue, who waged a similar war on crime years earlier but has long been thought dead.

          As Coffin Ed and Gravedigger search for the real identity of the avenger, they get into hassles with their superiror officer, Captain Bryce (Percey Rodrigues), and they dig around the activities of a photographer/activist named Joe (Peter De Anda). Along the way, the detectives get demoted to beat cops, employ various silly disguises, and survive lots of slapstick antics. Like the previous movie, Come Back, Charleston Blue is unweildly in terms of tone, bouncing between cartoonish comedy and extreme violence, but some of the elements work well, such as a running joke about a precocious street kid. Oddly, the leading actors are underused, since the filmmakers get disracted by nonsense. (What’s with the homage to The Public Enemy, the 1931 gangster classic with James Cagney?) This results in episodic pacing that makes Come Back, Charleston Blue feel overlong and sluggish.

          Perhaps that’s why Coffin Ed and Gravedigger didn’t appear onscreen again until A Rage in Harlem (1991), featuring Sam Pierce and George Wallace in the roles.

Cotton Comes to Harlem: FUNKY

Come Back, Charleston Blue: FUNKY

Watermelon Man (1970)

          Although screenwriter Herman Raucher’s storyline for Watermelon Man represents a trite expression of white guilt (with a distasteful counterpoint of white arrogance), the participation of director Melvin Van Peebles transforms the piece into a more complicated statement. Raucher’s story fancifully depicts what happens when a white bigot wakes up one morning to discover he’s become a black man. Suddenly forced to experience the racism of which he was previously a purveyor, the hero learns a lesson about sensitivity toward minorities.

          Columbia Pictures reportedly envisioned the movie with a white actor playing his black scenes in makeup, planning an ending in which the hero wakes from his “nightmare” to discover he’s white again. Van Peebles, the thorny independent artist who won entrée into Hollywood by making a European feature called The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968), persuaded the studio to embrace a different approach. In Van Peebles’ movie, the lead actor is a black man who wears makeup during his white scenes, and the ending depicts the hero embracing his new black identity.

          Given this provocative context, Watermelon Man should be a classic of race-relations cinema, but it’s not. For one thing, Raucher’s writing is infused with sitcom-style superficiality, a problem exacerbated by leading man Godfrey Cambridge’s exhausting performance. His acting sharpens once his character becomes embittered, but even then Cambridge is so far over the top it’s hard to parse nuances.

          The picture is equally divided between scenes at home, where the hero’s wife (Estelle Parsons) gradually shuns her husband because of his new color, and scenes at work, where racism leads to marginalization. A vast number of offensive clichés are invoked, some ironically and some less so, from the idea that black people require a steady stream of fried chicken to the notion that horny white women lust after every black man they encounter.
          Unsubtle as ever, Van Peebles employs awkward devices like flash cuts and superimpositions, plus he supplies a clumsy musical score that would have been more suitable for the broad-as-a-barn comedy of the silent-movie era. Based on his subsequent work, it’s clear Van Peebles was itching to move in a more experimental direction, but the tension between his offbeat flourishes and the movie’s homogenized photography is distracting. Like the leading performance, Van Peebles’ direction bludgeons everything interesting about Watermelon Man, making the picture’s flaws as prominent as its virtues.

Watermelon Man: FUNKY

Beware! The Blob (1972)

The 1958 drive-in movie The Blob is fondly remembered for its absurd premise—a giant mass of radioactive goo invades a city, eating everyone in its path—and for the presence of future superstar Steve McQueen in his first leading role. However, the world probably wasn’t crying out for a sequel, much less one that hit theaters more than a decade after the original. Fitting the lack of marketplace excitement that preceded its arrival, Beware! The Blob is a genuinely terrible movie, noteworthy only for the participation of several familiar Hollywood names. Inexplicably, the picture was directed by Larry Hagman, who was at the time best known for starring in the ’60s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. Hagman makes a very brief appearance in the picture, as do fellow cameo players Shelly Berman, Godfrey Cambridge, Carol Lynley, and Burgess Meredith; principal roles are played by second-stringers including Richard Stahl, Dick Van Patten, and Robert Walker Jr. The plot, which couldn’t matter less, involves the blob escaping captivity and attacking another town until our valiant young hero (Walker) traps the gelatinous beastie in an ice-skating rink. The picture was obviously envisioned as a spoof of horror movies, but insultingly cheap special effects and numbingly stupid jokes kill any humor potential, as does the movie’s tendency to wander off on tangents by introducing minor characters who appear onscreen just long enough to get consumed by the Blob. In one particularly pointless bit, a stoned hippie wanders into a barber shop, where the barber toys with him thusly: “I don’t cut hair, I sculpt it. Do you want a hair sculpt? It will be four hundred dollars.” As the saying goes, are we having fun yet? There’s a reason Hagman never directed another feature, and there’s a reason Hollywood ignored this misbegotten flick when it rebooted the Blob franchise more than a decade later with a gory remake of the original movie. Beware, indeed.

Beware! The Blob: SQUARE

Friday Foster (1975)

          First, the good news. In the last of her ’70s blaxploitation star vehicles, leading lady Pam Grier looks fantastic, and she displays an endearing quality during the film’s too-few comedic bits. She’s also supported by an eclectic cast: Godfrey Cambridge, Scatman Crothers, Julius Harris, Yaphet Kotto, Thalmus Rasulala, Carl Weathers, and the always-bizarre Eartha Kitt. There’s even room for erstwhile Love Boat bartender Ted Lange, who plays a pimp named “Fancy Dexter” in a spectacularly bad performance.

          Now, the bad news. Friday Foster is a silly adventure story adapted from a family-friendly newspaper comic strip, but with the requisite level of sex and violence to earn its blaxploitation bona fides—meaning it’s too rough for lightweight escapism, and too soft to be a real action picture. The characters are cardboard, the plot is clumsy, and the storytelling is so numbingly obvious that the whole thing feels like an episode of Wonder Woman (which is not a compliment).

          Friday (Grier) gets assigned to photograph a possible sighting of Blake Tarr (Rasulala), known as “the black Howard Hughes.” Instead of grabbing a paparazzi shot, however, she photographs an assassination attempt, drawing her into a conspiracy targeting leading members of the black community. If that sounds promising, prepare for disappointment, because Friday’s unauthorized investigation, with cranky PI Colt Hawkins (Kotto) at her side, comprises a clichéd string of close calls with incompetent would-be killers and convenient discoveries of clues that only make sense when one of the characters provides a recap of the plot thus far. It’s all very garish and labored, so it’s impossible to care what happens, even in the rare instances when the storyline is decipherable.

          What makes this so unfortunate is that Grier is actually stronger than usual here; she clearly relished the chance to try something a bit outside the grimy blaxploitation norm. It’s also fun to see Kotto playing a gruff charmer instead of one of his ususal menacing roles. Yet, no matter how likeable Grier and Kotto are in fleeting moments, they can’t make up for the flat filmmaking and tedious narrative.

Friday Foster: LAME