Cinema of the Underdog?

So, we were talking about 'bad' movies I'd recently seen, weren't we?  Well amongst all the other weirdness I took in over the past couple of weeks, I caught a good dose of Blaxploitation.  Now, for many, the whole Blaxploitation genre belongs in the category of 'bad' movies.  While it is true that many of these films were made on shoestring budgets, with minimal resources, both acting and production wise, personally, I've always found the genre to have an energy lacking in many other, similar, films.  To be sure, I have seen some truly dismal examples of Blaxploitation, (The Man From Harlem, a film that really does play like a glorified home movie, springs to mind), but on the whole I've found them worthwhile experiences, often showcasing real talent, both in front of and behind the camera, tat couldn't, certainly in the seventies, find expression in mainstream cinema.  That's one of the attractions of Blaxploitation - it truly is the cinema of the underdog, the oppressed minority and the dispossessed.  Which undoubtedly explains its appeal across racial and cultural lines.  Certainly, when I first encountered Blaxploitation films, as a white teenager living in provincial Britain, they entranced me - I felt an outsider's sense of identification with their heroes.  They were generally downtrodden and abused, yet smart and capable, individuals who were sticking it to 'the man'.  You didn't have to be black to understand that as a teenager who wasn't part of the 'in' crowd in the late seventies.  (I hasten to add that, obviously,  I'm in no way trying to compare my provincial teenage experiences to the whole black experience).

One of the great things about Blaxploitation was the way in which it took more mainstream (and predominantly white) genres - horror with Blacula, gangsters with Black Caesar or private eyes with Shaft, for example - and filtered them through a black perspective, adding a whole layer of social commentary to familiar tropes and stories, whilst always remaining entertaining.  All of which brings us to the actual films that I watched, namely a couple of Rudy Ray Moore movies (which I'll deal with separately) and Detroit 9000 (1973).  Arguably, this latter film isn't a true Blaxploitation film, in that it has a white lead and a reasonable budget.  Even its main black protagonists aren't underdogs, but rather successful professionals.  It does, however, have a director with a background in Blaxploitation and does feature a largely black cast and, of course, is set in Detroit, a city that, only a few years earlier had been the scene of race riots and had a majority black population.  Nonetheless, it seems to have been inspired as much by tough cop pictures like Dirty Harry as much as by previous Blaxploitation crime titles.  Opening with a heist at a political fund raising function for an ambitious black politician with designs upon becoming state governor, it plays out as a gritty police procedural, with Alex Rocco's veteran detective Lt Bassett, still bitter at being passed over for promotion, (he finds that in the modern police force, just being a good cop isn't enough, promotion is instead all about politics), teamed up with Hari Rhodes' rising star Sgt Williams.  Interestingly, the film focuses less upon any racial friction between this duo of white and black cops, (Barrett hasn't been passed over in favour of a black officer, for instance, but rather a white former subordinate), and more on the wider politics of the situation.  Williams' main concern is that he is being set up as the fall guy for the police - if he finds the gang behind the robbery are black, he'll be accused of a cover up by the black community, whereas if he finds they are white, he'll have the white establishment accusing him of what we'd now call 'political correctness' in order to appease the black community.  

Ultimately, the film sets out to prove Bassett's contention that 'assholes are assholes' regardless of race.  Consequently, in the course of their investigation, Bassett and Williams find that everyone involved is crooked, corrupt or, at the very least, a hypocrite and that, in the end, self-interest always trumps race as a motivation for crime.  Even the two cops themselves aren't exempt from such scrutiny, with Williams' historical relationship with a hooker proving to be crucial and Bassett revealed to be desperate to find the financial means to send his invalid, racially bigoted, wife to a private care home.  Despite a gritty, shot-on-the-streets look, Detroit 9000 is somewhat more polished than most contemporary Blaxploitation movies, but nonetheless retains some of the slightly rough at the edges feel typical of the genre.  Director Arthur Marks moves it all along at a decent pace, with an effectively filmed chase and shoot out amongst various derelict Detroit locations, including an abandoned railway terminus and a cemetery driving the film to a morally ambiguous climax.  The acting performances are good, with Rocco, usually seen in supporting roles, often as a gangster, memorable as the gravel voiced Barrett, a man rapidly reaching the end of his tether, tired of departmental politics and torn between his duty as a cop and his duty as a husband. Finally, the lines between black and white, both literally in the racial sense and figuratively in the sense of right and wrong, are blurred.  It might not be a classic, either in Blaxploitation or wider cinematic terms, but Detroit 9000 is a highly enjoyable seventies crime movie.