You’ve
seen films in the “Blaxploitation” genre before undoubtedly, and while Willie
Dynamite has all the trappings of one - the story centers on a pimp, it has
a funk-centered soundtrack (courtesy of the great jazz trombonist J.J.
Johnson), drugs and violence are commonplace, there are corrupt white cops -
it’s got things going on that I’ve never seen in another film in the genre.
Namely: it draws an explicit parallel between pimping and capitalist enterprise
early in the film, and when a social worker and a Muslim cop work to bring down
Willie Dynamite for the good of the community, the film doesn’t invest its
energy in just seeing the downfall of a bad man, it’s interested in seeing what
happens to him after his fall as well, in seeing if he can be rehabilitated.
Pimping is paired with American
business in the very first scene, as the Martha Reeves title song introduces us
to Willie Dynamite on the soundtrack while Willie’s “stable” fans out on-screen
into a business convention in New York City. The film cuts back and forth
between Willie’s “stable” working their territory and a television monitor in
the convention center extolling the virtues of small business enterprise,
explicitly linking them together. Later, when one of Willie’s younger star
performers, Pashen, hasn’t met her quota, Willie admonishes her with a
combination of threats and coercion, noting “This is a business baby, a
production line. And just like GM, Ford, Chrysler, Willie’s comin’ through!” Pashen
is subsequently busted and while in jail a social worker, Cora, tries to
convince Pashen to exit the life of prostitution she’s entered - and tries even
harder to try to bring down Willie, stating to her D.A. partner “I wanna see
him finished. Wiped out!” Outside of this, the leading pimp in the city, Bell,
holds a meeting of the city’s pimps. With heat coming down hard on all of them
from the police, he offers to break up the city’s territory so there are no
conflicts over turf but Willie declines to participate, gunning for the #1
position himself by saying “Man, I thought we was all capitalists. Free
enterprise, you dig?”
Willie is at no point softened or made likeable by his behavior,
and yet we hold an interest in him in his efforts to retain control of his
territory despite the encroachments by Bell and the other pimps, the pressure
exerted on him by the police, and Cora’s efforts to undermine his “stable” -
we’re instinctively prepared to watch a flashy and ostentatious bad guy take a
fall in a film like this. But what we’re not prepared for is the coda to that,
in which Willie learns again how to be a human being, thanks to the dual
efforts of Cora and the Muslim cop Pointer, who both admonish him through the
film for the damage he does to the black community. The acting is above par all
around - Willie is played with the exact right amount of arrogance, confidence,
and anger by Roscoe Orman (a face probably most familiar as Gordon, from Sesame
Street); Cora, played by Diana Sands (Beneatha Younger in the famous filmed
version of A Raisin in the Sun), mixes a checkered past into her earnest
and driven social work; and Pointer is a small but pivotal role played by
Albert Hall (Malcolm X, Cry Freedom, Ali, Apocalypse
Now). Others fill out the more typical roles of the Blaxploitation genre
with aplomb, and sometimes (especially in the case of Roger Robinson’s Bell) an
extra-memorable flair.
Produced as the first picture by the partnership of Richard Zanuck
and David Brown, who’d go on to produce two early Spielberg films, The
Sugarland Express and Jaws, and a string of big hits in the 80s, the
film is treated not as the bargain basement affair or exploitation quickie that
afflicts many genre films. Though it bears all the marks of Blaxploitation, the
core of the film remain the arc of Willie’s fall and what happens next, not
flashy action scenes or stylized cool. In the end, does he still have his
dignity? Is he still a human being? Yeah, the film says, and that's why I think
it's pretty great.
- Patrick Brown
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