WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Big Bird Cage

Our story starts in 1971 with Jack Hill's 'The Big Bird Cage', a fairly standard example of the women-in-prison genre (or more particularly of its especially sleazy subgenre which locates said prison somewhere in the wilds of a politically unstable tinpot South American country) which was enlivened no end by Pam Grier in a supporting role. It was only her second film appearance and it kicked off a four-movie relationship with Hill that spanned the first half of the 70s and made Grier a blaxploitation icon.

Fast forward to 1972 and Hill made an in-name-only sequel, 'The Big Bird Cage', this time with Grier in the lead. She plays Bloosom, an hilariously inappropriate name for a Marxist revolutionary who's as handy with a gun as she is with her fists. Blossom is committed to the revolution, even if her leader - and lover - Django (Sid Haig) is content to postpone the glorious moment to a never-ending parade of tomorrows as long as he can swing on his hammock and drink wine and have a small army of followers defer to him.

Said followers, however, are a tad disaffected that Blossom is the only woman amongst them and exclusive in her favours to Django. They, too, dream of revolution but more fervently so of female company. A two-birds-one-stone solution presents itself when they learn of a women's prison run by a sadistic warden (is there any other kind?) by the name of Zappa (Andres Centenera). More work farm than penitentiary, the inmates labour at a giant mill known as the bird cage and are occasionally pimped out to visiting dignitaries.

The revolutionary front decide to liberate this facility (and hopefully score some new recruits). To this end, Blossom finds herself "volunteered" to get arrested and shipped out to the prison, whence she will foment rebellion; the plan is for Django's troops to provide firepower to assist with the break-out. So far so excessive force, but what none of them realise is that the prison's latest detainee, American party girl Terry (Anitra Ford), owes her arrest to a case of misidentification arising from Django and Blossom's actions earlier in the film.

Indeed, 'The Big Bird Cage' focuses as much on Terry as it does Blossom, perhaps more so in the early stages as Terry negotiates the prison's power structure, learns who to befriend and who to be wary of, and looks out for fellow wrongful arrestee Rina (Marissa Delgado).

Naturally, the Blossom/Terry plotlines eventually coincide, but the outcome isn’t what you might have been expecting, one of several unexpected swerves Hill makes with the material. Likewise the ongoing feud between aggressive lesbian Karen (Karen McKevic) and smart-mouthed Mickie (Carol Speed): when Mickie is forced into harm’s way at Zappa’s hands, rather than take advantage of the situation, Karen reacts with righteous fury.

Perhaps the oddest thing Hill does, though, is during the mid-section where Django infiltrates the camp by getting hired on as a guard. Zappa, keen that his staff keep their hands off the inmates (there is a general “no sex” rule at the camp that’s only repeal when Zappa wants a visiting politician or businessman to have a good time), hires only gay guards. Django expedites his employment opportunities by allowing himself to be picked up by chief of guards Rocco (Vic Diaz) in what seems to be a gay bar in the middle of the jungle.

While all of this malarkey is as stereotypical and risible as the lesbian bar scene in ‘Foxy Brown’, the absurdity somehow makes it not only palatable but outright entertaining. There’s something about Sid Haig – Sid fucking Haig, ladies and gentlemen – pretending to be gay that totally rewires the synapses and leaves your head spinning.

By the time Blossom, Terry et al stage the break-out, a set-piece that occupies the last quarter of an hour and delivers explosions, shoot outs, chases and Rocco suffering the proverbial fate worse than death (another moment that has to be seen to be believed), ‘The Big Bird Cage’ has not only careened through a deliriously inclusive exploitation checklist, but upended most of them even as it ticks them off. It thumbs its nose at intellectualization, renders redundant the reviewer, and glories in its gorgeous and strikingly iconic heroines. ’Nuff said.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Foxy Brown

Of the four films Pam Grier made with Jack Hill, ‘Foxy Brown’ is easily the most famous. In fact, it’s one of the most famous blaxploitation movies of all time. Perhaps only ‘Shaft’ can lay claim to being better known as the key exemplar of the genre.

This perplexes me, since ‘Foxy Brown’ – while, after a slowish start, undeniably entertaining – is nothing compared to ‘Coffy’ as an example of the revenge thriller; and nowhere near as subversive as ‘The Big Doll House’ or ‘The Big Bird Cage’.

It certainly gives its heroine a lot to be vengeful about, though. The opening sequence has Foxy (Grier) called upon to rescue her feckless brother Link (Antonio Fargas) from a beating. Link’s been running numbers but has screwed up to the tune of twenty grand, which leaves him with the twin requirements of a place to hide and a means of raising the do-ray-me. Foxy willing provides the former and inadvertently the latter.

You see, Foxy’s boyfriend, Michael (Terry Carter) is an undercover cop who has just undergone reconstructive surgery and been given a new identity as a protective measure against underworld duo Steve Elias (Peter Brown) and Katherine Wall (Kathryn Loder). That Steve and Katherine are still at liberty suggests Michael’s investigations haven’t been worth a damn, but hey ho! Link intuits that Foxy’s “new” beau is Michael, masquerading under his new persona, and sells him out without a second thought.

In short order, Michael gets whacked and Foxy gets medieval on Link’s ass. Link gives up the goods on Steve and Katherine and Foxy goes out for revenge. Discovering that Katherine operates a modeling agency as a front for high class call girls – whose charms she uses as leverage on judges and local politicos to keep her crew out of jail and her and Steve’s drug running operation off the radar – Foxy gets taken on the books.
So far, so ‘Coffy Part 2’, but whereas ‘Coffy’ begins with its heroine already out for revenge and remorselessly working her way up through a criminal hierarchy, ‘Foxy Brown’ takes a bit of time to get to Michael’s assassination and then puts Foxy in Steve and Katherine’s orbit very quickly. There’s no sense of Foxy having to scheme or improvise or overcome obstacles to get close to her nemeses. Nor does she exploit any of several opportunities she has, before Katherine sets her up with a corrupt judge, to simply take the biatch out. Instead, Foxy recruits junkie hooker Claudia (Juanita Brown) to her scheme and they set out to humiliate said judge in an attempt to ruin Katherine’s judicially-preferential relationship and provoke a reaction from her.

This is where ‘Foxy Brown’ starts running into problems. Simply taking out Katherine and Steve would achieve both of her ends: vengeance for her lover’s death, and severing the connection with the justice system that’s keep scumbags on the streets. Humiliating the judge only achieves the latter objective and tips off Katherine that something’s amiss. Moreover, there’s no reason for Claudia, whose family Katherine is using as leverage against her, to involve herself. When Katherine, predictably, reacts by sending her goons after them, Foxy puts herself in harm’s way in order to protect Claudia. 

Harm’s way here refers to drug-pushing misogynists Brandi (H.B. Haggerty) and Slauson (Boyd ‘Red’ Morgan), to whose “ranch” Katherine orders the swiftly captured Foxy be sent. A narrative development, this, which serves no other purpose than woman-in-peril tropes and a sleazy rape scene. Once Foxy contrives an escape route, the real business resumes and she targets Steve’s drug running set-up by conniving her way into the affections of Hays (Sid Haig), a pilot contracted to bring the stuff in.

Once Hill arranges his ducks in a row for the big finale, ‘Foxy Brown’ ticks enough of the boxes to emerge as a decent thriller. But the narrative peregrinations by which Foxy does pointless things for the middle third just to push the film towards feature length annoy. As does a schizophrenic tone which sees outright nastiness cheek-by-jowl with goofy humour (several action scenes are played as slapstick); this is nowhere more in evidence than in a pointless set-piece in a lesbian bar that is horrible in its stereotyping, even by the standards of the 1970s. Also, Loder – so good in some of her other roles – doesn’t even begin to suggest the level of villainy required to make Katherine a credible mob boss.

Still, as in ‘Coffy’ – indeed, as in anything in her filmography – Grier is iconic. She looks amazing and kicks ass with wince-inducing proficiency. Having laid a beatdown on Link and left him in no uncertainty that it’s only kinship that’s prevented her from killing him, Link’s dazed and disbelieving girlfriend gasps, “Who does she think she is?” “That’s my sister,” Link replies shakily, “and she’s a whole lotta woman.” Amen to that.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Coffy

Most revenge movies leave the actual revenge till the final act. 'Savage Streets' - a Winter of Discontent pick a couple of years ago - is a good example. There's plenty of set-up: the protagonist's life and relationships and what's at stake; the perpetration of the act for which vengeance must be exacted; the planning of said revenge; then, finally, payback. In Jack Hill's 'Coffy', the pre- and immediate post-credit sequence has its eponymous heroine (Pam Grier) blow two scumbags away with a double-barrelled shotgun and snarl a line of dialogue about her sister and drugs. It's an attention-grabbing opening and you might be forgiven for expecting that a flashback detailing the sibling's travails is about to ensue.

But no. Having kicked off his blaxploitation classic in media res, Hill just keeps powering forward, the narrative as relentless and single-minded as Coffy herself. This is a film unencumbered by subplot or digression. The plot is utterly simple: Coffy avenges her sister by tracing a drugs ring back to its source and, uh, eliminating everyone along the way. Even more impressively, she does so - during the early stages of her vengeful rampage, anyway - while holding down a day job as a nurse and keeping her extra-curricular activities secret from activist and wannabe congressmen boyfriend Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw). 

Things start to go pear-shaped when the trail leads to King George (Robert DoQui) who’s not an actual member of the British royal family but a fancy-pants pimp with connections to mob boss Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus). First up, King G’s other girls don’t take to Coffy at all, which leads to a Coffy-vs-a-roomful-of-hookers cat fight, the sole aesthetic purpose of which is for all participants to have their blouse or boob-tube ripped off at some stage in the proceedings. It’s a scene so needless, so ludicrously protracted and so utterly shameless in its intent that I’d be hard pressed to mount an argument against anyone who calls it in Jack Hill’s favour as Greatest Exploitation Movie Director Of All Time.

Secondly, Coffy’s attempted hit on Vitroni is thwarted by the intervention of his sleazeball enforcer Omar (Sid Haig). Although Coffy uses the situation to drive a wedge between George and Vitroni, she finds herself in woman-in-peril territory, and it soon becomes apparent that Brunswick isn’t going to be pulling any knight-in-shining-armour shtick any time soon.

'Coffy' melds propulsive storytelling with a total commitment to all things exploitative that doesn’t come at the cost of craftsmanship – Quentin Tarantino famously, and accurately, described Hill as “the Howard Hawks of exploitation filmmaking” – and it’d be a hell of an entertaining picture even if it were peopled by cheap-jack actors straight from the lumber yard. But, oh my sweet lord, 'Coffy' boasts some genuinely charismatic acting talent. Grier is magnetic: purposeful, resilient, tough, sexy as all hell, but with a recognizably human centre always underpinning her characterization. Let’s face it, she plays a nurse whose surname is Coffin, which is about the most unsubtle way of announcing one’s anti-heroine as an angel of death, and her modus operandi involves flaunting her ample curves until her antagonists drop their guard (generally about the same time as something else rises). It’s all too easy to imagine this being made a decade later with A. Gregory Hippolyte directing and Shannon Tweed in the lead role and the whole thing being glossy and static and unengaging. Grier gives Coffy a heart and the film soul.

Elsewhere, Sid Haig plays the vicious henchman as only Sid Haig can. How can I describe the Sid Haig experience? Imagine he was in a Bond movie, muscle for hire to Blofeld, and he surprised 007 in the act of infiltrating Ernst Stavro’s secret base. If Sid Haig squared off against Bond, all bets would be off and there’d be a fucking good chance of SPECTRE achieving the world domination plan.

William Elliott puts in a sympathetic performance as Coffy’s former boyfriend Carter, now that rarest of beasts, an honest cop in a tough neighbour. A scene where they almost reconnect, where (it is oh so subtly hinted) Coffy could possibly abandon her actions and let Carter pursue the matter through official channels, is underplayed and the more impactful for it. Predictably, though – for this is an exploitationer after all – the moment is violently interrupted and no such hesitation stills Coffy’s hand for the remainder of the running time.

As you’ve probably gathered, I dig 'Coffy' immensely. A phrase I keep coming back to as the highest accolade I can offer in these Winter of Discontent review is “good unclean fun”. That’s why I seek out exploitation movies. That’s why I wade through untold hours of cinematic depravity. That’s why the Winter of Discontent is my favourite season on this blog. And 'Coffy' is entirely the kind of movie that justifies it.

Black Mama, White Mama

After his Oscar night clean-up with ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, it’s my personal guess that Jonathan Demme quickly redrafted his CV and decided to leave a few things off it. ‘Caged Heat’, for instance, his directorial debut and a key entry in the “women in prison” genre. Or his “story by” credit for ‘Black Mama, White Mama’, Eddie Romero’s scuzzily entertaining slice of grindhouse starring the iconic Pam Grier, the frankly fucking awesome Margaret Markov, and the living legend and cinematic personification of disreputability that is Sid Haig.

Sid Haig sporting hick shitkicker country & western outfits and wearing the kind of handlebar moustache seldom seen outside of the Village People.

Like ‘Caged Heat’, ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ starts off in unapologetic WIP style. Which suggests a common theme in the early stages of Demme’s development as a filmmaker. And I gotta say, ‘Rachel Getting Married’ would have been a lot more fun with a bit of shower block frolicking and a subplot about a lesbian warden with a penchant for jail-bird jail-bait with short skirts and –


*takes cold shower*

*gets review back on course*

Um. Yes. ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ starts off in unapologetic WIP style, with hooker Leigh (Grier) fetching up at a women’s correctional facility on what I think was somewhere like the Domenican Republic. Either the script doesn’t bother establishing the locale or I was too busy marvelling at the fact that this movie was made thirty-five years ago and Pam Grier is still an absolute knockout. Talk about the thinking movie-buff’s cougar!

*second cold shower*

*bromide pill*

Okay. Right. ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ starts off in full-on WIP style with Leigh banged up for soliciting and promptly inviting the unwanted attentions of Matron Densmore (Lynn Borden) – a woman so blonde, so Aryan and so predatory she comes across like a bargain basement Ilsa, She-Wolf of the Whatever. Leigh isn’t too responsive to Logan’s overtures, but fellow prisoner Karen (Markov) cosies up to her. Karen’s our Patty Hearst stand-in for the day, a poor little rich girl currently affiliated with a terrorist group who wear berets and cultivate Che-like facial hair but don’t actually appear to do much of anything for the oppressed underclasses or whomever it is they’re fighting for.

Leigh and Karen don’t get on. A dining hall catfight pretty much sets the tone for their relationship. Things get worse when they’re chained together for transfer to a maximum security prison where Karen is to be questioned about her revolutionary activities. The prison bus is attacked en route by Karen’s comrades, but in the shoot-out Leigh and Karen flee for their lives while the terrorist cell, forced to retreat as reinforcements arrive, get separated from them.

Here endeth the women in prison bit.

Leigh and Karen, on the run, find themselves not just at odds with the personality clash, but also in terms of which side of the island they want to make a run for. Leigh’s after a suitcase full of cash she appropriated from sleazoid pimp and local crime boss Cheng (Vic Diaz) and a quick passage off the island on a friend’s boat. Karen wants to keep a prearranged rendezvous with her comrades in order to facilitate an arms deal which will allow them to something something liberate something something oppressed masses. Or maybe just Steven Soderbergh to make a two-part film about them. Or something.

In the meantime laconic copper Captain Cruz (Eddie Garcia), under pressure from his grandstanding boss Galindo (Alfonso Carvajal), enters into an uneasy arrangement with pool-playing badass and walking fashion disaster Ruben (Haig) to basically do his dirty work for them. Ruben hits the trail in the most inconspicuous vee-hickle ever driven by a good ole boy. Seriously: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Batmobile and Del Boy’s Reliant Robin look sleek, elegant and sophisticated compared to this dude’s set of wheels.

Elsewhere, Cheng – not happy with the whole missing suitcase full of cash scenario – also despatches a bunch of gun-toting heavies with gimlet eyes, cheap suits and limited acting ability to track our heroines down.

If all of this sounds needlessly convoluted for a 90-minute exploitationer, fear not. All these machinations ultimately add up to is four groups of dubious individuals, all with their own agenda, scouring the countryside for Leigh and Karen. Ethnically divided yet chained together. Running for their lives as the bad guys converge on them. In other words, ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ makes a sudden shift, after about 20 minutes, from WIP cheapie to ‘The Defiant Ones’ meets ‘The Getaway’. With hot chicks. Chained together. Who occasionally go at each other in hair-pulling, slapping, scratching girlfight stylee when tempers flare up.

Anyone deleted ‘Rachel Getting Married’ from their Netflix list yet and queued up this one instead?

‘Black Mama, White Mama’ boasts casual violence, gratuitous nudity (most of it completely unerotic), wholesale lines of dialogue that begin and end with the word “bitch”, occasional moments of absurdist humour (our heroines mug a couple of nuns for their habits and, later, kick ass and use bad language while still kitted out as brides of Christ), and more shoot-outs and explosions than you can shake a Sly Stallone comeback vehicle at. It’s populated by low-lifes, scuzz-buckets, pimps and bent cops, all of whom are taken on by tough chicks. It’s low on production values, high on the entertainment factor, unapologetic for being what it is, and has the courage of its convictions to deliver a weirdly poignant downbeat ending entirely apposite to its view of a world where corruption is everywhere and life is cheap.