FRED WILLIAMSON in the Western that Dare Not Speak Its Name!

The newspaper ad above comes from the Baltimore Afro-American. What that shows us is that in 1975 not only did Fred Williamson have no problem producing, writing and starring in a picture called Boss Nigger, but a black-owned newspaper had no problem advertising the title. Similar ads for the movie appeared in white or mainstream newspapers as well -- with controversy or not, I can't say. In 2008, for the DVD release of the picture, Williamson prepared a text preface endorsing its reappearance under its original title, and with the original title song playing on the soundtrack. Conservatively, the DVD company released it under the title Boss. It's pretty certain that few if any movie theaters would show a film called Boss Nigger today, no matter how much a product of African-American auteurship -- albeit directed by a white man, Jack Arnold -- it was. Were race relations easier forty years ago? Depends on where you were, I suppose, but it seems at least that the "N-word" was not the red flag for so many people that it is now. I can't help thinking, too, that cable TV pundits and radio talkers would furiously (if not fearfully) denounce many of the top blaxploitation films were they to first appear today. Many would seem to a certain sensitivity today like incitements to race war, or simply expressions of race hatred. I'm sure some saw them that way in the Seventies, but my nostalgic impression is that white people back then were better sports about it all, more willing to indulge others in their particular fantasies -- and quite likely enjoying them themselves.

This is some setup for a pretty bad movie. Boss Nigger betrays its low budget and quickie schedule in almost every frame. Jack Arnold's triumphs as a director were two decades in the past, and the former sci-fi specialist at Universal brings little pictorial imagination to Williamson's story, or else he and Williamson, as co-producers, lacked the resources to bring either man's imagination to life. Much of the action plays out in poorly staged long takes, leaving the picture with little of the epic (or mock-epic) sweep the producers presumably aspired to. There's a particularly bad comic bit in which D'Urville Martin, as Williamson's sidekick, is trying to reach through a window and club a guard in a rocking chair with his pistol. Martin's reach is too short and he keeps missing. There's the beginning of a sight gag here, but they payoff would be to somehow get the guard rocking further and further back until Martin can whack him -- the gag is the rocking of the chair. Instead, Arnold has a captive woman in the room pretend to seduce the guard and simply shove the chair toward the window so Martin can strike home. That's typical of the inept comedy of the picture. Arnold had presumably proven himself as a comedy director by handling Peter Sellers in The Mouse That Roared, but here his touch is leaden. Fred Williamson is no Peter Sellers, of course, but bear in mind that Fred was after even bigger comic game.

Some of the ads for Boss Nigger wishfully label it "Another Blazing Saddles." It's tempting to dismiss the Williamson/Arnold picture as a ripoff of Blazing Saddles and to note that, in challenging Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor on the field of comedy, Fred and Jack were bringing a knife to a nuclear war. The facts suggest something more like coincidence. Boss Nigger was being mentioned as Williamson's next project as early as the spring of 1973, after the actor had made two successful "Nigger Charley" movies. Blazing Saddles wasn't released until February 1974, but Boss Nigger didn't make it into theaters until a year after that. The point of similarity, of course, is that in both films a black man becomes the sheriff of an Old West town. It wouldn't surprise me if Williamson had seen some version of a Blazing Saddles script, or if he had been offered the role that went to Cleavon Little after Warner Bros. wouldn't let Brooks cast Pryor. Whether he did or not, the one thing Williamson's own script for Boss Nigger has going for it is its discovery of a conceptual space not covered by Brooks, Pryor et al yet ideally suited for blaxploitation. In Blazing Saddles the black sheriff is a dupe, a pawn in Hedley Lamarr's plot to destroy the town of Rock Ridge, imposed on the town by Lamarr and his pal the governor. In Boss Nigger, Boss the bounty hunter (Williamson) takes over the town of San Miguel on his own initiative and for his own purpose. Boss wants the town and its jail as a base of operations from which to wage war on the gang of Jed Clayton (William Smith), with no nobler ultimate purpose, at first, than to collect the big bounty on Clayton's head. Much more so than in Blazing Saddles, the black sheriff in Boss Nigger becomes a lord of misrule. A lot of the labored comedy in the middle section comes from Boss and his sidekick Amos enforcing their "Black Laws," empowering themselves to fine or jail anyone who disrespects them by using the N-word or by any other means. Williamson and Arnold never really manage to make this funny, but the idea isn't bad.

Comedy may not come naturally to Fred Willamson, and at times Boss Nigger becomes quite uncomic. Williamson gives Boss a social conscience by having him befriend the Mexican peons who live in impoverished segregation at the edge of town. He plays Moses by confiscating goods from the general store and distributing them to the peons. He and Arnold play mawkishly for pathos by having one boy befriended by Boss trampled to death by the horses of Clayton's gang after tumbling to the ground in slow motion. Later, Boss's girlfriend, the town's only other black person, is shot dead by Clayton, and there's nothing comic about Boss's vengeance. Clayton had given Boss his own beatdown earlier, and there's nothing comic about William Smith's villainy. Williamson and Arnold cast well for a big, mean bully, and Smith is one of the few performers to fully deliver the goods here. At the very end, Boss Nigger achieves something like an epic poignancy after Boss kills Clayton, only to be gravely wounded by the town's conniving mayor (R. G. Armstrong). Convinced (against Amos's assurances) that his wounds are mortal, Boss becomes desperate to leave San Miguel. He doesn't want to die in a white man's town, and he spurns the appeal of the white schoolmarm who befriended him (Barbara Leigh) to go with him. His few white friends, including the doctor and the blacksmith, load him into a wagon for Amos to drive away. On their way, they pass through the Mexican quarter, and the body of Boss's girl is loaded into the wagon. There's something of Shane in this ending, with the hero departing not dead but most likely dying -- despite Fred Willamson's admonition that he should never die (and should get the girl) in his own pictures.  Of course the blaxploitation music that's played throughout the picture kind of kills the mood, but Williamson may not have thought the final pathos inconsistent with the overall burlesque. The ending hints at a deeper ambition than Williamson, who had not yet begun directing himself, wasn't ready to realize, and Arnold could no longer fulfill. Williamson would write a darker-toned western, Joshua, a few years after, and around the same time directed his own ill-fated collaboration with Richard Pryor, Adios Amigo. In sheer quantitative terms, Williamson was one of the major western stars of the Seventies, but Boss Nigger falls short for many reasons of any ambition he had to make a major western. In some ways, the even more impoverished Joshua is a better movie. But Boss Nigger will always be a point of interest for western and blaxploitation fans, and anyone attracted by the allure of the forbidden.

VIGILANTE (1983)

William Lustig is an honored name among cult-movie collectors for his DVD entrepreneurship, mainly as the proprietor of the Blue Underground video line. He gained cult credibility as a director, his best known works being the 1980 slasher film Maniac and the 1988 extravaganza Maniac Cop ("You have the right to remain silent ... forever."). Between these landmarks Lustig got involved with the vigilante genre, taking the most obvious yet unused-to-date title for his 1983 picture. Lustig's Vigilante is a stripped-down version of the archetype, notable for an absence of either introspection or much in the way of cheerleading. Vigilantism is simply taken as a phenomenon, an inevitable reaction to systemic injustice as a bystander is sucked into the maelstrom. Robert Forster plays Eddie Marino, whose co-workers, led by Fred Williamson's Nick, are clandestine vigilantes. We see them in action dragging a rapist off a street corner ("Slime!" one yells at the criminal). We later learn that the gang broke nearly every bone in the perp's body. The cops seem to have a clue who's doing this stuff, but no evidence. After one warns Nick, Eddie wonders what's going on but wants to keep his nose clean. He'll soon think differently after his wife insults a gang member at a gas station. His gang follows her home, tears up the place, tears her up pretty bad, and blasts her little son to death with a shotgun -- we see a window explode with bits of red on the fragments. Eddie assumes a legal remedy is at hand and an earnest prosecutor encourages that belief. But the gangs have the power and the money, so that the gang leader plea-bargains his way to a suspended sentence and Eddie gets sent to jail for going nuts and attacking the judge. During his two months in stir he's saved from rape only by an old con (Woody Strode), and the near-miss hardens his attitude even further. Once free, he learns that his traumatized wife is leaving him; she wants no reminders of the past. Vigilante is nearly Kafkaesque in its accumulation of injustices and indignities on its poor protagonist. But never mind the literary pretension. Lustig's film is a coiled spring that takes pressure until it releases. Eddie wants in on Nick's vigilante gang, who help him track down the gang members so he can wipe them out. But that's not all. The film closes on an ambivalent note -- at least I felt ambivalent about it -- when Eddie extends his vengeance campaign to the judge who put him in jail. Is that going too far? Lustig doesn't give us time to dwell on it, though the finish means it's up to us, not him, to decide whether Eddie has crossed one line too many. All the film tells us is that Eddie was pushed too far and pushed back.

Forster makes a good everyman hero without having to do much fancy acting, while Fred Williamson's limitations as an actor work in his favor here, underscoring his character's singleminded fanaticism. What he lacks in subtlety he makes up for in disquieting intensity. The locations look appropriately grungy, and the film as a whole has a look that qualifies it for "last film of the Seventies" consideration. There's nothing special about the action or the film's big car chase, but the film moves briskly. It definitely ends briskly, and it's bound to seem incomplete to anyone curious about the consequences for Eddie, Nick and their friends. You're tempted to wonder whether there was more story to tell, but no more money to tell it with. Another, more unsettling reading is possible. Our expectation that there should be more to the story is based on an assumption that the protagonists' vigilantism is exceptional, with necessary implications for the transgressors. Ending the film without the usual soul-searching or police manhunt creates a counter-impression that Eddie's reaction has become a normal one, or at least an inevitable one, in his present-day dystopia. It isn't really a satisfying finish, but maybe it wasn't meant to be.

Darrligsmag uploaded this version of the original trailer to YouTube. Note the second-person spiel toward the end: you, not Forster's character, have to take a stand, it seems.

1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS (1982)

My recent viewing of The Road inspired me to crack open Shriek Show's Post-Apocalyptic Triple Feature box set and take a fresh look at how Italian genre directors imagined the collapse of civilization nearly thirty years ago. Enzo G. Castellari's action film is an early example of the Italian sub-genre, and reflects the influences available to him at the time. It's possible that Castellari could have seen Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior before filming this, but you can't really tell from the product. The Mad Max influence is arguably more apparent in The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland, also from 1982, but 1990 is more obviously influenced by more non-dystopian movies like The Warriors and the controversial Paul Newman cop film, Fort Apache, the Bronx.

For starters, Shriek Show's box cover lies brazenly when it describes 1990's setting as "Post-nuke New York City." There's no evidence of a nuclear attack, as all the landmark skyscrapers (including the World Trade Center towers, of course) are still standing, the better to lend epic scope to Castellari's location footage. Nor is 1990 about scarcity or the depletion of resources, as The Road Warrior is. There's no evidence of shortages and over in Manhattan civilization seems to be still puttering along quite nicely. The real problem, as a title card explains, is that government has lost the will to enforce the law and defend public safety in its worst neighborhoods. We may be meant to assume that New York can't afford to do so anymore, but it's just as dystopian to imagine a wealthy elite deciding to leave the rabble to their fate while shoring up their defenses in gated or otherwise segregated enclaves. We've seen this kind of dystopia as recently as George Romero's Land of the Dead, and we're likely to see it again.

1990 often leaves you wondering how post-apocalyptic things really are in a more-than-intact New York City (above) but if you want an explanation of societal breakdown, look no further than the malt liquor can on this stooge's desk (below).

By 1990, the script says, law and order in the Bronx has been left to the gangs. The situation is a little confusing, since the film portrays a gang leader played by Fred Williamson as the "King of the Bronx" who can allocate resources to different neighborhoods, while the title card claims that the real law in the benighted borough is the motorcycle gang known as the Riders. This is an utterly generic gang, as the name should have told you, lacking any kind of uniform compared to the pimpadelic Tigers (led by Williamson) and the hockey-fetishist Zombies (led by beloved Italo-brute George Eastman as "Golan," --which sounded like "Golem" to me). The Riders -- could they really not come up with a more intimidating name? -- look for leadership to a man named Trash, the hero of our film.

Trash is played by Mark Gregory, a Castellari discovery found in a gym. He's arguably the most post-apocalyptic thing about 1990, because -- I don't know, maybe it's just me -- he doesn't seem quite human. He looks misshapen, top-heavy. He walks in a very careful way, stiff-backed, chest out, and arms stiff at his sides, as if profoundly uncertain of what to do with his hands or concerned that if he didn't step just so the top half of him might topple forward and fall off. On the DVD, Castellari explains that he had to choreograph Gregory's movements very carefully; the result looks like a giant imbecile child's halting emulation of militant adulthood. Here is a man born (made??) to play Frankenstein's monster or a denizen of Goon Island in a Thimble Theater movie. His performance is riveting; watching him, you're in constant anxiety that he'll suddenly malfunction or come to a dead halt. And when he talks, from the mouth of this atavism comes a dese-dem-dose dubbed delivery that sounds about as futuristic as 1970: The Bronx Warriors, at the service of such dialogue as, "We were born dead. Life means nothing. Death walks with us....We carry its smell under our skin." Speak for yourself, Trash.

It's good to be the king, even of the Bronx, as Fred Williamson proves in this strangely interactive shot from 1990

Gregory isn't the only thing that's just sort of wrong with 1990. Frankly, the entire cosmic order is out of whack when Fred Williamson is in a movie and a character named Hammer is played by someone else. While Fred is assigned the role of "the Ogre," and attended by a tall blond whip-wielding "Witch," "Hammer" is the handle of the actual star of the film, Vic Morrow. Hammer is a Bronx-born mercenary (Trash: "He's an asshole who thinks he's God") who's under contract to the Manhattan Corporation, the firm responsible for 60% of world arms production. All that power comes into the hands of an heiress, Anne, on her eighteenth birthday, but she's run away to the no-mans-land of the Bronx, where she seems to be the only civilian apart from the occasional comical drunk. Assaulted by the rollerskating Zombies, she's rescued by Trash, whose consort she becomes. Hammer has to retrieve Anne and deliver her back to Manhattan despite her disinterest in warmongering. His plan includes provoking a general gang war, though I suspect the real reason to do that is so he can lead a flamethrowing cavalry into the Bronx to destroy them all.

The heroes of 1990: The Bronx Warriors fight mercenaries, "Zombies" and all ... that ... jazz!

So Hammer wanders around the Bronx assassinating folks and planting gang spoor to sow distrust, despite Trash's judicious skepticism ("You fuck," he answers one hothead, "it could be a pile of shit out of someone's asshole."). When the Zombies finally succeed in snatching Anne and all too easily laying out Trash, Hammer tries to buy her from Golan (I still like "Golem" better) while an all too rapidly recovered Trash goes on an anabasis to the Tigers, fending off subhuman Scavengers and Fosse-ite dancing fighters along the way, to recruit Ogre and Witch for a rescue operation. But Anne's rescue by Trash and the Tigers is only the prelude to Hammer's blitzkrieg, codenamed Operation Burnt Earth, the nearest thing to an apocalypse we'll get from this movie and, actually, a genuinely inspired gonzo gotterdammerung presided over by a transfigured, barking mad Morrow, for whom only The Twilight Zone was left after this. It turns out that Trash was right about this Hammer person, who we last see howling, "HAMMER! HAMMER IS GOD!" before being proven wrong.

Hammer commands! The horsemen of the post-apocalypse obey!

The final ten minutes of 1990 have an exhilarating and sometimes hilarious intensity that exposes just how halfhearted and misconceived most of the movie was. Castellari seems uncertain of the tone he wants to set and clearly had a hard time taking much of the story seriously. There are moments when he apparently wanted to impose a kind of musicality on the film, editing to the beat of a drummer who just happened to turn up at his location during a gang summit and opening the film with an almost glamorous montage of gang weapons, makeup and fashion. You could believe that the film he really wanted to make was Streets of Fire. As it is, there's an obvious artistry to 1990, which is really a meticulously art-directed picture thanks to Sergio Salvati's cinematography and Massimo Lentini's production design. It's pictorially ambitious in a way that later genuine post-apocalypse films wouldn't be. But as far as the genre goes, Castellari's New Barbarians (which I've seen only in its grungy American form) is a more aggressively imagined and more viscerally disturbing film than this one. I intend to watch the better version from the Shriek Show box set soon. Until then, I'll restrict my recommendation of 1990 to those looking for a lark through the slums of the post-Seventies collective consciousness on a purely tourist basis.

Here's an English language trailer (with Dutch subtitles), uploaded to YouTube by aylmer666:

And here's a sample of Mark Gregory walking and talking, sort of, uploaded by grumblenonymusbosch. Anne is played by the director's own little girl, Stefania Girolami:

BLIND RAGE (1978): "It's going down right now in the International House of Pancakes!"

In the wake of the fall of South Vietnam, the United States government creates "Project E.S.A." to prevent the domino theory from being proven a reality. The Americans will invest $15,000,000 to finance counterinsurgency efforts and other initiatives to shore up the governments of the region. The money will be deposited in the Oriental Bank in Manila, where Johnny Duran is the liaison with the E.S.A. Duran's involvement in the scheme is known to elements of American organized crime, represented by a mystery man who corners Duran in an International House of Pancakes.

"My name is Lew Simpson," he explains, "Most of my friends call me...Wilbur." This is a fittingly strange introduction to one of the most inept performers I've ever seen. In his only performance known to the IMDB, B. T. Anderson has clear difficulty remembering his lines. Unfortunately, director Efrem C. Pinon has placed the idiot cards behind Anderson, so that he has to look over his shoulder every few moments to finish his sentences. "You've been used to money," his character tells Duran, "You've been surrounded by it eight hours........a day." Later, on board his office yacht, "Wilbur" tells Duran about Rocky, "my main man [who] has in his file, and in his head, more than five hundred names. He knows the size of their bank accounts, the time of day when they take a........take a crap." He may actually have meant that pause for emphasis, or that may be the way it was written in the script co-written by multitalented Asian-Arkansan Leo Fong. However you slice it, you know you're in the hands of masters the rest of the way.

Rocky tries to figure out Johnny Duran's bank account, crap habits or fashion sense in Blind Rage.

"Wilbur" has persuaded Duran to act as the inside man in a daring "foolproof" scheme to take the $15,000,000 from the Oriental Bank. The foolproof part of the plan, he tells his new partner, is that the robbers are blind men. There's Willie Black (D'Urville Martin), who got his eyes gouged out by gangsters, as we see in a flashback. There's Len Wang (Fong), a Hong Kong enforcer who crossed the triads and got acid in his face, as we see in a flashback. There's Hector Lopez, a matador who had his eyes gored out by a bull. No flashback for that one. Finally, there's the naturally blind magician, Amazing Anderson. They make ideal bank robbers because A. they're used to working without sight, and B. No one expects blind guys to rob a bank. That's what makes it foolproof!

The gang that could shoot straight, but couldn't see what they were shooting: from left, D'Urville Martin, Leo Fong, Darnell Garcia and Dick Adair.

Intensive training also helps. Duran puts together a full-scale replica of the bank so the bandits can learn their way around it in carefully timed and measured movements. They receive martial arts training so they can manhandle anyone who manhandles them. They become crack shooters trained to fire instantly (and accurately) at any unfamiliar sound -- and they have metal taps installed in their shoes so they'll know their own footfalls. Duran has recruited Sally, an educator at a school for the handicapped, to whip the men into shape, but only late in the game does he realize that he needs a blind electronics expert to deactivate the bank alarms. Sally knows just the man: Ben Gavara, who "needs money so he can get even with the world" for getting blinded by fellow gangsters, as we see in another flashback. He feels protective toward Sally, especially when Willie Black attempts to become a blind rapist. "Lay off her, sex-hungry bastard!" Ben warns him.

Against all odds, the robbery works, though thanks less to Ben's electronics expertise than to his knocking a guard's head into an electrical circuit to deactivate the alarm. Our trigger-happy blind men bump off several bank employees, one for merely leaning to one side, for which Len Wang apologizes. Ben goes his own way while the foreigners are packed into a leaky gas truck for shipment out of the country, and is promptly caught in a dragnet of known blind criminals. Under pressure to rat out his partners, he does so instantly. But Sally and the rest of the gang seem destined for a fiery reckoning at the airport no matter what Ben does, while Johnny Duran boards another plane for California with the loot.

Enter Fred Williamson. More specifically, enter Jesse Crowder, a character Williamson created for the movie Death Journey in 1975 and reprised in 1976's No Way Back. Crowder was apparently very popular in the Philippines, or else Blind Rage's Philippine producers thought including Williamson as Crowder would give their film a better shot at U.S. distribution. Whatever the reason, it's an odd shift in tone for the film to become a Fred Williamson movie in its last reel. For some reason the U.S. government needs a super-operative like Crowder to figure out how to tail a man they already know about until he makes contact with Lew "Wilbur" Simpson at another IHoP to bring the picture full circle. But maybe they needed a badass like Crowder to take the dangerous Duran down. Recall that he was just some schlub who worked for the bank and wore loud clothes before "Wilbur" set him up as a criminal. But now, at the movie's climax on a rooftop outside the IHop, he gets all Emperor of the North on Crowder.

Crowder: All right, Duran. That's about as far as you go.
Duran: There is no way one man can take me alive.
Crowder: [points gun].
Duran: I said one man!
Crowder: [shrugs] Forgot to load it this morning anyway.

Crowder than tosses his gun aside to engage the rogue banker in hand-to-hand combat, and actually gets his trademark cigar knocked out of his mouth before setting things to rights. That may not be enough for Fred Williamson fans who get suckered into this film on the assumption that he's the star and fights the blind bandits. VideoAsia's Thug City Chronicles collection goes so far wrong as to claim that Fred leads the blind gang in this picture. Even more disappointed will be such fans as there are of eccentric auteur Leo Fong. Though the story is as goofy as you might expect from Fong, whatever his actual contribution was, he doesn't really have much to do in the picture and his distinctive voice is overdubbed by another actor. Those caveats aside, bad movie connoisseurs should have a blast with this blockheaded epic. If the story isn't enough for you, there are outrageous Seventies fashions and ponderous theme ballad, "The System," to take into consideration. I'll leave you with some lyrics from Tito Sotto's song:

We live in a world
Of heartaches and pain
And somehow you feel
Life's just but a game

So dare not say why.
You have to survive.
The moment you fall...
...Into the System!

And speaking of falsely advertising a Fred Williamson vehicle, here's the trailer as uploaded by HuffTheTalbot

JOSHUA (1976)

Along with Richard Harris, Fred Williamson is one of the unlikely western stars of the 1970s. Yet he made more westerns in that decade than Clint Eastwood did, and while he didn't pioneer in aiming westerns at black audiences, he probably did more to sustain the black-oriented western as a subgenre. Joshua, also known as The Black Rider, is the last of his westerns. He wrote the story and screenplay, while Larry G. Spengler, Williamson's collaborator on the "Nigger Charley" movies, directed. It looks like a big comedown in budgetary terms from his previous westerns. He's the only name in the cast that most people will recognize, though Seventies specialists may recognize Mexican actress Isela Vega from such stuff as The Deadly Trackers (with Harris) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Curiously, Joshua's stripped-down, almost minimalist quality may point to some serious artistic intentions on Williamson's part. This isn't one of his typical swaggering performances. Instead, he's a taciturn Civil War veteran bent on revenge for the murder of his mother. She was a servant for a white man whose pioneer circumstances don't seem like the kind that would require a maid, but he has not only Joshua's Mom but a brand-new mail-order bride (Brenda Venus). But a band of desperadoes show up for dinner, take the wife and kill Martha as she goes for a rifle. Learning of this, Joshua mourns for a moment, reclaims the rifle (it belonged to his father and was Martha's only possession) and rides out into the brutal landscape beyond where the posse gave up. From this point on, everyone he encounters takes him to be a bounty hunter, and the question of his identity seems to matter to screenwriter Williamson. He's always quick to deny that he's out for money. Asked by Vega, for instance, he responds, "No, ma'am; I'm a killer." Hunting down the kidnappers is an easy segue from his wartime vocation. Warned by the posse that he'd be one against five, Joshua scoffs: "I just came back from a war where I killed nearly twice that many." And this is what I mean about Fred's unusual modesty in this production. Do you think he'd normally claim less than ten kills in a war?

Joshua's mission is further complicated by the fact that the mail-order bride seems to succumb to a sagebrush version of Stockholm Syndrome after being raped several times by the gang. The apparently heavily-edited version of Joshua that I saw off a Mill Creek Entertainment DVD doesn't illustrate any transition from shrieking hysteria to apparent camaraderie, but I wonder whether there was a parallel intended between the bride and the slaves whose freedom Joshua has just fought for. She was sold to one man, raped by another, but may be exercising some freedom, for what it's worth, by sticking with Jed, the gang leader.

"Don't do this anymore!" Brenda Venus protests during a rape scene. Is she addressing the rapists or the leering cameraman?

By the final showdown, when Jed's willing to give her up to get Joshua off his back, she doesn't want to leave him, and she ends up sharing his fate. So there's really no one to rescue, and no bounty that Joshua wants to collect. It's understandable, then, that Jed howls the question "WHO ARE YOU?" repeatedly during the final confrontation. And it's typical of this film that Joshua has no more answer to offer than "I'm my mother's son."

I think Fred was trying hard to make a serious western that transcended the blaxploitation sub-genre. Race hardly comes into the story apart from a few times when Joshua is called "boy," but he doesn't even really take note of the slur. When Jed promises to take the gang into a town where Joshua would be crazy to follow, it's not because the town has a Klan chapter, but because a gang of renegades runs the place and doesn't like bounty hunters, lawmen, etc. Arguably, the hero and his dead mother don't even need to be black for the story to work. But the Hammer's good intentions are often sabotaged by his own failures of invention or some dubious dialogue. Williamson concocts a silly scene in which his stalking of one of the gang is interrupted by a snake attack. This obliges him to indulge in some snake wrestling before taking out two foes at once by dropping the snake on the outlaw's head.

Later, we see him sharpening some sort of arrow at night. In the morning, we see that he'd snuck into the outlaws' camp and killed another of the gang by planting the arrow in his neck. You can't help but think that he could have killed all the outlaws in their sleep and taken the bride away -- if only he had made more arrows. Instead, he resumes his customary stalk. Later still, he's wounded in a gunfight in the renegade town. He rides off into the wintry mountains until he falls off his horse and passes out. Overnight, he is buried by the snow. In the morning, three renegades ride in, having offered to finish Joshua if Jed will pay them. Their arrival is only a wakeup call for our hero, who pops out of something like a foot of snow cover to kill the renegades. To his credit, Williamson promptly has himself collapse again so he can be taken to Isela Vega's house for surgery and that sure-fire cure for fever and delirium, a night in a naked woman's arms. But again, this isn't typical Fred; he's too busy selling the shakes to really enjoy the experience. Still, you get the idea: some of the action in this film is pretty dumb.

Williamson's writing is hit-or-miss, and success seems to depend a lot on the actors speaking his lines. Here I have to single out one Ralph Willingham, who here makes what IMDB claims to be his only appearance ever as an actor. After watching him play Weasel, the old coot member of the kidnap gang, I can sort of understand why he never worked again, at least under that name. Weasel is kind of a comedy relief character, if your idea of comedy is hearing him say, "I ain't had so much fun since the time I raped my nine year old sister!" Fred has to take the blame for that line, but I strongly suspect that Willingham muffed one when, after being teased provocatively by his cronies, who want to open his pants to see what he's got before allowing him to rape the mail-order bride, he screams, "Put your tail between...your tail and run off like a goddamn coyote!" I think Willingham's instincts were partly right. He saw that he was in a low-budget show that was low on charismatic action, so like many legendary performers in the wild world of cinema, he took it upon himself to make the movie more entertaining. He ended up making it look and sound more stupid than it really is.

Ralph Willingham is memorably bad in Joshua, but not in a way that'd ever make you want to see him act again.

On top of his codgery looks he has a high-pitched whiny voice that gets into Chris Rock if not Christ Tucker territory as he babbles, whines and shrieks about "that black devil" who's out to get him. In his final scene, in which Joshua works up a nice deathtrap by wrapping wet rawhide around the trigger of a gun tied to a tree, so that by drying in the sun it will tighten and fire the gun at a trussed-up Weasel, Willingham's wailing is pretty much incomprehensible. The point of giving a great bad performance is to leave behind memorable lines and line readings, but Willingham too often is just obnoxious, and his badness handicaps the whole film.

In the end Joshua isn't a very good movie, but Mill Creek's presentation of it in their Mean Guns: the Time to Die Collection box set makes matters much worse. It's a fullscreen copy that doesn't even rise to the level of pan-and-scan, missing so many of the opening credits that you might think that someone named Ed Iamson was starring. I strongly suspect that the Mill Creek copy is an edited version that got the film re-rated to PG after an initial R release. Mill Creek claims that their version is rated R, but apart from a few bursts of blood I saw nothing in the film to warrant that rating, though I could see that something more R-worthy may once have been there. Supposedly there are better versions in circulation, but if you find one I can really recommend this movie only to Fred Williamson fans, and then only on the understanding that it's an interesting experiment on the Hammer's part that doesn't quite come off as he hoped.

SpoonMHD has graciously uploaded the first ten minutes of the picture to YouTube, so take that as a trailer. This is about what the Mill Creek version looks like.

CRAZY JOE (1974)

A few months ago I listed Carlo Lizzani's biopic about wiseguy revolutionary Joe Gallo among the films I remembered dimly from my childhood that I couldn't find on DVD. In the late 1970s the film was in fairly heavy rotation on WOR in New York City, and I recall seeing it several times when it played on weekday afternoons. I didn't actually remember much about it besides the distinctive music (a kind of disco version of the song "Mona Lisa" is the main theme), a prominent political assassination, and the presence of Fred Williamson. When I found that I could watch the film on Crackle, it was the first time in perhaps 30 years that I had given it a look. It more than lived up to my expectations.

Peter Boyle plays the title character in what may have seemed a natural follow-up to Joe. We meet Joey Gallo in 1960 as a movie-mad made man and a disgruntled underling alongside his brother Richie (Rip Torn) in the Falco family. Gallo's crew doesn't feel that they're getting their due or the proper respect from their bosses, and so they go to war, with second-in-command Vinnie Colleti opting to sit things out.

After a few rounds of mayhem the other crime families, led by Don Vittorio (Eli Wallach) attempt to negotiate a settlement, but Vittorio himself gives Joey a private assurance that, after the formality of releasing some hostages, the Gallos can settle accounts with the Falco leadership without interference. The Falcos end up with the upper hand when they set up Joey to get arrested trying to make an illegal firearms purchase, leaving him in jail for the next eight years, but they overplay their hand when they try to convince Colleti to whack Don Vittorio. Instead, Vinnie rats them out and is rewarded with leadership of the family. Richie can't handle the stress on his own and drives his car off a cliff to end the first act of the picture, which to this point has been a fairly conventional Mafia movie with moments of effective brutality and a nearly overqualified cast as well as such distinctive Seventies personalities as Henry Winkler and Herve Villechaize in supporting roles.

Herve Villechaize as Samson, Joey Gallo's "bodyguard"

In the second act Crazy Joe becomes a definitive Seventies movie as the Mafia formula morphs into something more challenging. While in prison Joey educates himself with a bunch of books that Richie had given him, ranging from War and Peace (which he'd formerly mocked as "a commie book") to the writings of the Existentialists, who really impress him and give him a glorified sense of his own struggles. He also befriends Willie (Williamson), a black convict and a born leader who takes Gallo's half-baked philosophizing with increasing good humor; he sort of gets it himself. Joey himself can take some mockery, embracing the label of "the Italian Hippie."

When Willie leads a prison riot to demand better conditions, the warden trusts Gallo to negotiate a peaceful resolution, which ends up with Willie getting his way and still getting released on schedule. The seeds of a potentially revolutionary collaboration are planted when Willie offers his help to Joey if he wants to challenge Coletti upon his release. At the same time that Joey and Willie envision an interracial mob, Coletti hits upon a notion of taking the heat off the Mafia by forming an Italian-American anti-defamation movement to protest negative portrayals of his people in the media. Consciously imitating both the Black Panthers and the NAACP, he rapidly builds a popular movement that draws 50,000 people to a Columbus Day rally. He does this initially with Don Vittorio's blessing, agreed on over a bottle of J&B because the Don is impressed by the amount of money Vinnie can raise in membership fees.

Eli Wallach as Don Vittorio, the arch-conservative who excels at playing insurgents off each other.

But Vittorio is taken aback by the size of the movement and the attention it's drawing to Costelli and other organizers. He warns Coletti to give up the movement before the second annual rally, but Vinnie refuses, besotted with a bit of megalomania and feeling that the movement is the only thing he can claim to have created himself. The Don initially welcomes Joey out of prison as a counter to Coletti's excess ambition, but soon finds himself even more troubled by Gallo's consorting with black gangsters.

Joe and Willie meet again on Joe's release as a runty-by-comparison Henry Winkler looks on.

The genius of Crazy Joe, for which credit is due to writers Nicholas Gage and Lewis John Carlino, is to make an old gangster the spokesman for "law and order" and against change. "All I hear about is change," he complains, "Men are becoming women. Women are becoming men." Despite this, he insists ominously, nothing really changes. In time, Vittorio finds a way to kill two birds with one stone, apparently hiring a black man to assassinate Costelli at the second Columbus Day rally so that Joey and Willie can be blamed for it. At first Willie thinks Joey has set him up to take the fall, but their bond proves stronger than his suspicion, and he buys into Joey's Spartacus-inspired scheme to go all-or-nothing -- to topple Don Vittorio himself or die trying....

How could a film with a cast like this go wrong? Well, it doesn't. Peter Boyle is terrifically charismatic as a guy who starts out a little crazy and a little dumb, who still seems a little laughable as he overeducates himself to the point of becoming briefly the lion of high society, yet finally proves a poignant figure as a final scene with his long-suffering girlfriend (Paula Prentiss) reveals the sincerity of his need to be an important person -- what he often refers to (imitating Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, as in a pre-credits theater scene) as a "big man." Although history dictates that he loses in the end, we get a sense that he did win to some extent, as he realizes that you're really a big man when others call you that, and experiences that when he negotiates the prison truce. Boyle's chemistry with Fred Williamson, who is quite good here in evolving from jailbird to a more "Hammer" like figure in freedom, gives the last half of the film a vitality that it lacked earlier. They share some outrageous moments, as when Gallo forces one of Vittorio's men to kiss Willie's (clothed, thank goodness) ass during a numbers robbery. Wallach and Torn are also very good, as is the less well known Charles Cioffi as Coletti, built up as a nemesis to Gallo who ends up the protagonist of his own parallel tragedy.

Carlo Lizzani's location work in New York City with cinematographer Aldo Tonti, assisted by stock footage of the real Columbus Day rallies staged by Joe Columbo, gives the film an additional epic feel in scenes atop skyscrapers overlooking the Manhattan skyline or at massive construction sites. He doesn't go short on the violence either, with a sequence of a Gallo gangster getting buried in cement after being beaten down with pickaxes and other implements and getting a hand chopped off serving as a highlight. Giancarlo Chiaramello's score has a lounge quality bordering on Muzak at times, but that seems appropriate for the period, and he comes through with some more serious music for the final scene between Boyle and Prentiss.

The movie can now apparently be purchased through Crackle, but the picture quality there is actually pretty good (the "Buy Now" thing doesn't mar the image if you watch it full screen) if you want to sit through it on your computer for free. Be prepared, however, to sit through some advertisements in the middle of the picture. If you can stand that, then Crazy Joe is definitely worth your time if you like Seventies crime or any of the lead actors. It's a unique blend of the gangster and failed-revolutionary genres that ought to be better remembered as a classic of its time.

And if you don't believe me, watch the trailer uploaded to YouTube by johnnyredeyes

THREE TOUGH GUYS (Uomini Duri, 1974)

"International junk of no interest, by far the worst film yet produced by Dino De Laurentis since he left Rome to make movies in this country."

VINCENT CANBY, The New York Times

March 16, 1974.

* * *

On the violent streets of Chicago, crime is the heresy and

Lino Ventura

is a one-man Inquisition.

Who is the former cop

Who fights crime 'cause he just can't stop?

Academy Award winner Isaac Hayes.

Hayes did the same math you just did. The "preacherman" and the "po-lice man" add up to two tough guys. So what did they do, have a kid? No, it just turns out that after the film was shot and Hayes had turned in his score and theme song, Signor De Laurentis and his partners at Paramount Pictures realized that their movie's bad guy, Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, had become bankable. Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem had come out the year before, and That Man Bolt was opening around the same time as Duccio Tessari's Italo-blaxploitation combo, 35 years ago this month. So just because the man Tenebrous Kate calls "the Black Shatner" is a bad guy this time, that doesn't mean he's not a tough guy, too. The two qualities sort of go together. So here's how they sold the film.

Williamson is "Joe Snake," the owner of the Red Rooster bar and a pinball arcade/bowling alley in Chicago's grindhouse district. He's harboring Tony Red, a survivor of a robbery of Mob money. It's a tense situation, since the only reason Snake keeps Tony is around is because he knows where the loot is, but Tony won't tell him because "I like living." Unfortunately for everyone, Tony is shot down during a meeting with insurance investigator Gene Lombardo, who dies with him.

Lombardo's demise brings Father Charlie into the story. I didn't catch the name of his church, but let's call it St. Pugnacious, where they hand out beatings like sacraments. The bit you saw with the Father bitch-slapping first a parishioner, then a fellow priest, sets the tone for Lino Ventura's entire performance. Imagine James Cagney playing Father Flanagan of Boys Town as if he were Cody Jarrett from White Heat and you may begin to get the idea. Whatever subtleties Ventura mastered in films like Classe Tous Risques (see below) are set aside like worldly things for this occasion. St. Pugnacious features what a bishop calls an "ex-voto arsenal" of guns turned in by repentant thugs. It's a constant temptation to what Father Charlie calls his "flock of starving wolves," but he's confident that no one would dare steal from him.

For the sake of the widow, Father Charlie decides to find out who killed Lombardo. Nobody expects this kind of inquisition, least of all the Red Rooster bartender. In mufti, the Father invades the bar, shows off his strength by squashing a bottle cap between his fingers, follows the bartender into his office, and strangles the sucker with a phone cord until he gets the answers he wants.

There are thugs waiting for him outside, but his fists and some timely bike fu make short work of them. He's finally overpowered on his way to see Tony Red's girlfriend. The goons put him into a serial-worthy predicament, meaning to feed him to a factory furnace, when the mystery man who's been following the Father around steps in to clean house. This is Tough Guy No. 2, Lee Stevens, a disgraced former police captain. He was blamed for Tony Red's robbery because he had left his post for a woman. Now he lives in poverty, frying eggs on an iron. But he knows everything about Father Charlie: an erstwhile juvenile delinquent on a typical Lino Ventura career track (crime, then death) until a religious experience in prison set him on the priesthood path. The iron also comes in handy to press the Father's pants. In return, Charlie gives Stevens $28 to get his gun out of hock.

Now partners in investigation, the Two Tough Guys find the Red Rooster closed due to the proprietor's death by truck. They take their inquiries to the grindhouse district, making possible priceless footage of Chicago movie houses circa 1973. A local with access to the Tribune and Sun-Times could probably tell us the week when these scenes were filmed from the titles on the theater marquees. Prostitutes provide more local color. Father Charlie fends one off by saying "I played with dolls as a boy." To which the hooker responds, "Good, I have a kid brother. He got to make money too."

Finally they enter the arcade where Joe Snake is keeping Tony's girlfriend Fay (Paula Kelly) -- who just happens to be the woman who seduced Lee Stevens before the heist. Payback time!

After she tells what she can, the TTG face some more goons in a parking garage. This is the bit from the trailer when they force their enemies to jump into the river, sarcastically telling their leader that they're so scared that they'll piss themselves. The punch line: our heroes prove their truthfulness by actually pissing on their victims.

Fred Williamson has a high standard to meet if he wants to be considered a Tough Guy in this picture. But Joe Snake finally asserts himself past the halfway point as he manipulates Fay into recovering the loot (she knew where it was all along), only to take it from her by force. After she desperately calls Stevens for help, Joe clubs him down, shoots Fay, and fixes to frame Stevens for the murder. The cops nearly have him before Father Charlie pedals to the rescue with an "unloaded" machine gun from his sacred arsenal. Pondering Fay's fate, Stevens reflects: "He must have been some kind of freak to shoot her that way."

Fred or Freak?

All that remains is an incredible final showdown at the arcade that obviously influenced the making of There Will Be Blood. Indeed, Lino and Isaac do everything but drink poor Fred's milkshake. He may already have been top-billed elsewhere, but the Hammer was still paying his dues at this point. This film may well have helped convince him to take creative control of his career in order to avoid such humiliation in the future. As it is, he might console himself by noting that it took two tough guys to even knock him out, and then with the use of foreign objects.

* * *

The "Two Tough Guys" theme to Three Tough Guys sets the tone for a film that isn't quite coherent. Tessari, a versatile genre veteran, struggles to please disparate audiences: the Europeans who presumably wanted to see Lino Ventura invade America, and the Americans who almost certainly had never heard of Ventura but were curious to see Isaac Hayes's acting debut opposite Fred Williamson. Ventura is top billed on the poster and in the actual film, while Hayes is named first in the trailer. Hayes was clearly learning a new craft but has a natural authority, while Ventura was most likely dubbed. If so, the voice actor is smart enough to use a foreign accent, but it sounds too scratchy and crabby to match what I've heard of Ventura speaking French. I suspect that Americans didn't know what to make of Lino. While he was close in age to Charles Bronson, then on the brink of long-awaited superstardom, he simply had no history here (apart from playing opposite Bronson in The Valachi Papers) to make him meaningful to grindhouse audiences.

But isn't Vincent Canby's grim verdict just a bit exaggerated? He seems guilty not so much of snobbery but of reverse philisitism, a refusal to recognize any aesthetic values but his own, as if there were only one legitimate way to be entertained by a movie. No interest? By my standards, it has even more interest now than it did then, as a document of its time, an experiment in international genre crossover, and a battle of blaxploitation behemoths. Sometimes you just want junk food, and for me, Three Tough Guys is a roll of SweeTarts: pure cinematic magnesium stearate with colors you can taste, and a Lino Ventura beatdown with every bite.

Of course, my copy of the movie from the infamous Grindhouse Experience collection is more like a 35 year old roll of candy. You can judge for yourself from my screencaps. It looks like it was just hauled out from the basement of one of those Chicago theaters, after it was imploded. But I can't hold my breath waiting for a letterboxed version of this movie. This may be the best edition we ever get, so let's treasure it.