Dancing queen… Foxy Brown (1974), Pam Grier at the BFI

I’ve seen a number of Q&As at the BFI but I don’t recall anyone dancing their way onto stage before nor holding the audience quite so rapt with energy, positivity and joy. Pam Grier is from a humble background but she’s a self-made force who, having decided to attend UCLA in the late sixties to become an actress, got a gig singing and playing organ with Bobby Womack, jamming with Sly Stone and one James Marshall Hendrix all in the first week of her stay in LA. Life is what you make it and her references to assaults in her early youth are an indication not of the scars left but the response given, and how she used every set back to propel herself forward.

You can’t just applaud Ms Grier, you have to stand up and cheer as well, quite something from a English audience but she is infectious and energetic, skiing, climbing and horse riding as well as continually film-making in her early 70s… “every day I wake up and I’m still breathing is a good day…” is something for all of us to take to heart. This was the kick off for a season of Pam's films at the BFI, the tagline is Foxy, Fierce and Fearless and that is no lie... 

We’d just watched Foxy Brown and it is certainly one of those films that, as with Shaft, Trouble Man and her earlier film Coffy (1973), epitomises seventies’ attitudes towards sex, ultra-violence, retribution but she says for her it represented independence and the chance to move further from the woman who arrived in LA with $33 and a bucket of chicken to her name. Foxy is without doubt a woman of agency, “you take care of the Justice and I’ll deal with the Revenge” she tells her crew of men towards the climax, and she overcomes every situation using guile and force while, always, retaining her femininity as she says.

Pam makes an entrance!

You might watch this film for Pam Grier and her style and beauty; but she also kicks ass, literally a master of martial arts, judo and kung-fu and the Hammond B3 organ; this is some prodigious talent. She does her own stunts which led to her breaking her leg in Coffy and the crew having to make-her cast look like her other boot. She’s not quite the authoritative actress of Jackie Brown and later work but she is absolutely a star holding the narrative together almost on her own. She’s on screen for almost the whole film which, has echoes not just of American action films but also Get Carter albeit she’s in better shape than Michael Caine’s Carter and it’s not even her full-time job.

We don’t know quite what Foxy does for a living, which is a legacy of the film’s origin as a follow up of sorts to Coffy, but she must do it very well. She can handle herself as the film’s superb sub-Bond title sequence shows, Foxy subverts the sexism of this style though, not just cleavage and curves but plenty of kick and a definite challenge to the audience… the female gazes back at her audience.

Foxy has humour to offset any hint of earnestness and the fashionable ultra-violence. No one’s more intentionally funnier than Pam’s brother Link – short for Lincoln – as crafted by Antonio Fargas who never misses a beat. Link getting in all kinds of trouble in his attempts to monetise the opportunities of supply and demand in his quest to move up from drug-dealing. He’s only a cog in a much larger wheel with the supply fed from a twisted white sister "Miss" Katherine Wall, a superbly wired Kathryn Loder, who could easily have been playing in one of Grier’s earlier Roger Corman films. Katherine is a super villain, by day a millionairess fashion tycoon, and by night pulling the strings on the city’s class A drugs and prostitution.

The Odd Couple... Kathryn Loder and Peter Brown

Helping her maintain this big business is a weirdly-smooth Steve Elias (Peter Brown) who, whilst being the object of Miss Kathy’s infatuation – she loves it when he hurts people – has his own agenda beyond falsified reciprocation. He’s too shallow even for the hollow and there’s a wry sequence when he’s telling his sugar mommy how much he loves her whilst rolling his eyes at the thought. It is so interesting that the baddies are professional class white people, definitely an observation about the power structure of the criminal classes, as well as the end-users who drive the wider drugs business.

At the film’s start, they have sent their goons Eddie (Tony Giorgio) and Hays (Sid Haig) to extract monies owed from Link who has to call in the aid of big sis. She duly arrives in the nick of time to swat the thugs and take her wayward brother home. Link is nothing if not faithless though. Jackie is romancing an undercover detective Michael Anderson (Terry Carter) who has just undergone facial surgery to change his appearance after infiltrating the drug syndicate. His bandages are removed, leaving Foxy with a still handsome boyfriend but the effort is sadly wasted as Link recognises his sister’ supposedly new paramour.

Here’s a chance for Link to re-finance and he can’t resist selling his sister’s man down the river exchanging £20,000 in exchange for Mike’s life. Foxy is naturally aggrieved and resolves to avenge her fallen lover just as soon as she’s kicked Link around his apartment.

The great Antonio Fargas and Pam

She poses as a call girl to gain entry to Miss K’s legion of lovelies-for-lease and pals up quickly with Claudia (Juanita Brown) in order to learn the ropes and dig deeper. Claudia’s trapped in this world and longs to get back to her daughter and Foxy persuades humiliate a well-placed client, Judge Fenton (Harry Holcombe) who was willing to go easy on the gang’s foot soldiers in exchange for favours but ends up trouser-less in hotel humiliation. Misfortunes are always deserved in Foxy Brown and there’s a karmic quality to her vengeance.

After this there’s no going back and after sending Claudia off to safe haven, Foxy is caught by the syndicate after Link once again fails her, this time fatally. It’s looking bleak for Foxy who is sent off to the “Farm” to be force-fed heroin before being sold off to sex slavery. She’s tortured and raped by two extravagantly-odd white characters and tied to a bed with a growing addiction in the middle of nowhere, there’s only one way out and that’s flicking the razor blade used to cut the heroin into her mouth, using it to cut her ropes, pulling together a make-shift weapon from some coat hangers that rip the face of one abuser allowing her to immolate the second and make her escape in their car… She is, like James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, a resilient master of graceful ingenuity!

It follows that the finale will be equally explosive as, Foxy gets positively medieval on various evil asses as her long-term admirer Quentin Tarantino would put it...

That look!

Jack Hill directs with dynamism and whilst he ticks all of the boxes for sex/blaxploitation he also allows his star to provide the template for female action heroes to come. There’s a reason we cheered Pam Grier today, she’s a hero on and off screen. She transcends the material and commercial imperatives, as well as the script, to present a character as iconic as Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel.

The music from Willie Hutch is to this film as Isaac Hayes’ is to Shaft and perfectly encapsulates the sass and the soul of Foxy Pam. As she proved in the flesh, she’s still “superbad” and in any language that’s extraordinarily good!

Full details of the Pam Grier season are here on the BFI site. Formidable!

 

The quiet before the storm...