The Black Godfather (1972)

You don't know the internal battles I go through that stop most of my posts from being about Blaxploitation movies. I'd write about them 2-a-week if i could. Blaxploitation, how I love thee. Maybe someone people's lives stems from the post-ironic hilarity and I can appreciate that but i actually want to applaud most of these films as great meat-and-potatoes cinema. If I had my own cinema (Only a lottery win away-I already know where it would be), we'd show these films every Friday at midnight. These movies are just pure. They keep their story and plotting simple and keep characterisations on high importance. Or at least higher than story or plot; characters are always memorable. They are at least the in premier league of a exploitation movies. By it's very definition, exploitation movies feature either violence, sexuality or other adult content. All Blaxploitation movies feature all those things. They feature style of violence that is gritty and real but never gratuitous. They're sexually vibrant colours without being pornographic. They teach us how we SHOULD swear and they give realistic portrayals of drug-use... and selling. Naked women manufacturing crack sounds glamorous. These movies make it look ugly.
Today, I watched a very curious example of the genre, The Black Godfather. No, it's not the Black version of the gangster classic but you'd be within your rights goals that guess; there are Blaxploitation versions of Get Carter, White Heat and isn't Foxy Brown- just Miss Marple with guns, drugs and prostitution?
The Black Godfather is just a simple story of a black gangster who mobilises Black Panthers to rid his area of the Mafia so they stop selling drugs in his community. 'Numbers' and prostitution are fine by him. It's basically Black Dynamite without the jokes.
I want celebrate this film because it obviously been made with a small budget; it's not handheld photography but there's no action photography or 'set-pieces' either and yet it's eminently entertaining and watchable, this film about a gangster with strict scruples.
So the acting is more than a tad hokey and the thought of a successful criminal kingpin that WON'T sell drug seems far-fetched- I like hearing cool black guys swear and watching them beat-up bad white people. And the music in these movies are the best. James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield. The music in this film by Martin Yarborough could take a Pepsi taste test with any other film, you care to mention.

I watched The Black Godfather (1968) on LoveFilm Online
My 2011 in Movies will return with Knife In The Water (1959)...