COFFY & FOXY BROWN

by Kevin Koehler

Blaxploitation generally makes me uncomfortable, probably because I’m a white guy – blaxploitation is not really made for me. The granddaddy of them all, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (a film I can’t help believing is awful even as my white guilt demands I think otherwise), begins with a rather unsubtle pronouncement of purpose: “Dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man.” But what if you are the Man?

The genre is also so difficult to critique because it walks a very precarious tight rope; how much of blaxploitation is exploitation for blacks and how much of it is exploitation of blacks? Sweetback is important, historically-speaking, for having been written, directed, and produced by a black man, making money, and bringing black issues further into the national debate. It’s also shoddily-constructed, trades on racial stereotypes (principally those that involve black sexual potency), and opened the door for cynical, money-grabbing garbage even worse than it was, pictures that glorified pimps, drug dealers, beating women, and killing people.

Coffy and Foxy Brown only glorify killing people (as long as you do it in an interesting way, like with the prop of a single-engine airplane or driving your car into their living room), so they’re considerably more innocuous than their blaxploitation contemporaries. Between the two, there are some superficial differences in plot (Foxy Brown was actually developed as a sequel to the earlier film), with Coffy being the more subversive (and better) picture, but they are essentially the same movie.

In each, Pam Grier stars as a woman wronged, seeking vengeance on a criminal syndicate she deems responsible for the death/hospitalization of a loved one. Using her wits and shapely form, Grier goes undercover as a prostitute to gain access to the bad guys, ultimately delivering Biblical justice and leaving a trail of bloody bodies behind her.

Once you get past the graphic violence and bare bosoms, they are also peculiarly conservative (not that there is anything intrinsically anti-conservative about violence or bosoms). In marked contrast to films like Super Fly and Dolemite, the pushers and pimps are the villains of the piece, jackals who prey on the black neighborhoods, undermining them from within. There is a strong distrust of government and traditional authority figures, like police officers, politicians, and even civil rights leaders (in Coffy, a black politician uses racial issues to cynically advance his career and line his own pockets); Coffy/Foxy Brown instead advocate personal responsibility, even vigilantism for the betterment of one’s life and community. Sexual predators suffer cruel death and literal/figurative castration at Grier’s hands – no fancy trial by jury required here.

Coffy/Foxy Brown are not without their prurient charms. Grier’s voluptuous assets are on frequent, extrinsic display (more so in Coffy if that’s what you’re interested in); one doesn’t so much leer as marvel at her unique proportions. Action set-pieces are generally entertaining with the villains (such as the hillbillies of Foxy Brown’s “ranch”) carrying a genuine sense of violent menace.

But let’s not get carried away. Quentin Tarantino once called Jack Hill “the greatest living American director,” which is a fairly silly thing to say as nothing truly complex is attempted, much less conveyed in any of his pictures. Others have labeled Coffy/Foxy Brown as some form of revolutionary piece of feminism; that kind of praise is likewise misplaced. Lesbians are treated with a dated, reactionary gusto – they are coercive (even rapists) with large thighs and should be avoided (Hill and Grier treated the subject of sapphic love with equal sensitivity in The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage, and Black Mama, White Mama). Even if Pam Grier is capable with a gun, she is still a sex object along with every other woman in both films. Like Russ Meyer, Hill doesn’t empower women so much as act out his fantasies about large-chested women who can beat him up. Pam Grier in the cathouse, wrestling with the other whores and tearing off their clothes is hard to call erotic; rather, it possesses the absurd existential dilemma of your grandfather’s porn. People masturbated to this?

Interesting footnote: Jack Hill was a USC classmate of Francis Ford Coppola – the two worked together as apprentices under Roger Corman on 1963’s The Terror. Shot in only four days, the picture also marked an early screen appearance by Jack Nicholson. Hill admits he thought Jack was a terrible actor at the time.

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