Darktown Strutters 1975

Here's a standard "weirdo" 70s film that was covered a lot on early film blogs. Its produced by Roger Corman's brother Gene and its a very typical blaxploitation comedy. So typical that its kind of an anomaly in how much of an anomaly it is (is that possible?)

There are 2 kinds of blaxploitation films - the first are made by black filmmakers and the others by white filmmakers. While black "black cinema" is usually realistic, political, reactionary and artistically charged, the other kind is usually exploitative genre trash meant to denigrate the first kind. Darktown Strutters is unique in its attempt to honor black radicalism while still playing to miseducated white male potheads. Its a queasy mix but it has a few moments of success. But showing blacks as ineffectual, mindless clowns, even ironically, is not as positive or interesting as showing them as humans or educating them or their critics.

"Strutters" focuses on a black female character named Syreena as she searches for her mother Cinderella in a ghetto Wonderland full of racial stereotypes. Its campy, offensive, ironic, satiric and ambituous, but its execution is far below its conception. Civil rights inspired a lot of brilliant and dangerous racial comedy in the 1970s but really only a few masterful comedians pulled it off. There's nothing worse than seeing black actors playing unfunny, corny, embarrassing comedy by white creators designed to highlight white racism to black people. Its supposed to be a reversal of harmful social programming but its usually too tall a task for cheap grindhouse hucksters.

"Darktown" is inspired in its surrealism, anarchy and embrace of social change, but its very timid and opinionless. It follows whatever Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Mel Brooks or National Lampoon would do without actually extrapolating on or understanding the motions. But there's enough residual energy to make 2/3rds of the film watchable.

One big problem is the film takes on the task of a black female protagonist but reducess her to a flat, predictable and boring Mary Sue. The actress Trina Parks brings a lot of energy and grace to the performance but none of her skill is cultivated into a character. She's directed to just swivel her hips endlessly, bug her eyes, shout "cute" ghetto English and always get the better of everyone. Contrast with Jack Hill's direction of Pam Grier. This film isn't interested in its protagonist beyond her identity politics. The film has no real respect for black women and certainly isn't playing for black women in the audience. Mainly it empowers them on-screen to provoke white male bigots, so essentially the film is for and about them. This is the Catch 22 of so many critical attacks on "the patriarchy".

We get an ironic gross-out slapstick deconstruction of 1970s race politics with a great shell but not enough enthusiasm to carry it. I recommend the artful low-budget production design and its a curiosity showing how far American liberal media has come, but this is no feather in the cap of anyone. Its like a giant cinematic metaphor for the N-word: appropriating all of this disgusting, embarrassingly cruel human history into a cute ironic insult does NOT work.