Blaxploitation Education: Black Gunn

Jim Brown vs. racism! I know who I'm betting on.

Black Gunn
Written by Franklin Coen
directed by Robert Hartford-Davis
1972

Watching Blaxploitation movies from the 1970s from the perspective of someone in the 2020s is often an odd experience. While racism certainly hasn’t disappeared over the past 50 years, it sure seems like people were more open about it back then, at least judging by the ways they were depicted in these films. White characters dropped racial slurs left and right, and while the Black heroes that led these movies usually ended up prevailing and getting some moral justice, they took a lot of that racist treatment in stride, as if it was something they were used to. But they (and their audiences) were clearly sick of that nonsense, and they were happy to get one over on The Man.

That undercurrent runs through many of these movies, and it can range from a general feeling of oppression and mistreatment to explicit expressions of Black revolutionary ideas. As I’ve mentioned before in this series, it had to be cathartic for audiences to see people who looked like them turn the tables on their oppressors. And white racists, who at the time were finally starting to lose their ability to get away with inflicting violence against Black people whenever they felt like it, made the perfect villains. The bad guys in these movies seem increasingly pathetic, struggling desperately to hold on to power they never deserved to have in the first place, and usually dying violently at the hands of people who rose up to stop them with righteous fury.

At its outset, it seems like Black Gunn is going to take on the issue of racism pretty directly. It starts with a group of Black men robbing an underground gambling operation led by the Los Angeles mafia (they wear white hoods to try to sow confusion about their identities, but it doesn’t work very well, given that the guy on the inside who helps with the scheme is a Black janitor, and one of the robbers gets killed and unmasked while escaping). The robbery was committed to obtain funds for a local revolutionary group known as the Black Action Group, with plans to buy weapons that will be wielded by Black veterans returning from Vietnam, as well as ex-cons who have been part of the new Jim Crow regime that was starting to flourish in the wake of the Civil Rights era.

The leader of this group is Scotty Gunn (Herbert Jefferson, Jr.), brother of a prominent nightclub owner known only by their shared last name. Since Gunn is played by Jim Brown (Slaughter), you know who’s going to be the real hero of the movie. He’s pretty rich and successful, and he’s willing to help Scotty out, even if he’s not quite ready to join the movement yet. After Scotty shows up at Gunn’s house in order to hide the stolen money in his safe, the two of them have a pretty intense conversation in which Gunn asks him what his group’s plans are. Scotty says, “We believe in taking it to The Man. Blowin’ up the fancy home that he lives in, his banks and his police stations, and makin’ him get off his ass and do somethin’.” When Gunn asks, “You ever think that The Man can bring it right back to you?” Scotty replies, “He can try. But we declare our right on this earth to be men. By any means necessary.”

The mafia, in the meantime, is willing to do whatever it takes to get back the stolen money, but more importantly, some ledgers that Scotty stole that detail the payoffs they’ve made, since this information could bring a bunch of their people down if it was given to the authorities. The leader of the Los Angeles operation, Capelli, is played by future Oscar-winner Martin Landau, and while he seems to want to keep his hands clean and maintain his image as a used-car salesman who is recognizable from TV commercials, he has some thugs who are much more open to violence. They’re led by Ray (Bruce Glover), a mulleted asshole who looks like a professional wrestler from that era and who seems downright gleeful as he spits out racist dialogue and terrorizes anyone he encounters. When he visits the B.A.G. headquarters, he says he’s taking a public opinion poll on whether slavery should be reinstated, then he has his thugs hold a little boy hostage until he gets the information he’s looking for.

Before long, both the mafia and the police have gotten word that Scotty was responsible for the robbery. A couple of cops show up to question Gunn and see if he knows where Scotty might be, and one of them says that if this problem isn’t cleared up, it could lead to problems that will “make Watts look like a Saturday night in Disneyland.” Later, the local Congressman (Gary Conway) shows up at the club along with a guy who is clearly a member of the mafia, and while he doesn’t seem to be involved in criminal schemes, it’s clear that he’s there as part of an attempt to gain some information from Gunn. During their conversation, the Congressman claims that he believes in treating everyone from his district equally, regardless of their race. Gunn takes the opportunity to point out some pretty glaring inequalities that exist in the United States, noting that while there were around 20 million Black people in the country at the time, there was a total of one Black senator.

Based on all of this, it would seem that racial tensions would be central to this movie, but as it goes on, much of that falls by the wayside, becoming more about one guy taking a stand against the criminals who wronged his family. After a scene in which Ray ambushes Gunn at his home, trying to force him to have a meeting with Capelli, there’s a shootout that sends the mafia thugs fleeing. But the next morning they leave a present by the front door: the body of Scotty. That sets Gunn off on a mission of vengeance in which he teams up with the guys at B.A.G. to figure out who gave up his brother’s location, tracks down Ray for a nice beatdown, and then takes the fight to Capelli for a big shootout.

While the action is generally pretty fun (seeing Jim Brown beat Ray’s ass right after he provokes him with more racial slurs is definitely a pleasure), it’s a little bit disappointing to see what seemed to be an incisive look at racial politics devolve into a pretty basic series of shootouts and car chases. This could have been an interestingly complex story that touched on the futility of trying to use violent means to win people over to the side of oppressed minorities, the need for members of the community to work together to encourage positive change, and the difficulty of working within a system that is corrupted by criminal influence. Alas, the world would have to wait a few decades before we would get the likes of The Wire.

As it is, this movie isn’t terrible, but there’s not a lot to make it stand out from other entries in the genre. Jim Brown does his best to deliver an emotional performance, but he struggles with scenes that require crying over his brother’s death and doesn’t always manage to sell the idea that his character is conflicted about standing up for the Black community until he gets pushed too far. He does exhibit some anger and a drive for vengeance at times, especially in a scene where he confronts the drug dealer who sold his brother out to the mafia. But before long, he seems to fall back into the persona of a cool, collected guy who is ready to take on everyone and win. That sort of thing worked much better in Slaughter than in this more down-to-earth story.

By the end of 1972, more and more Blaxploitation movies were getting pumped out to fill the demand that the studios were discovering, so I expect I’ll be watching more movies like this that seem to be kind of quickly thrown together. But I’m hoping to see some positive trends develop, including the continued evolution of some of the genre’s key stars (including Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and a few key female players who are soon to arrive on the scene), as well as more exploration of themes that resonated with the Black community. Fortunately, even in the weaker entries, I’m finding plenty of interest to discuss, so it’s likely that these explorations will continue to be fruitful.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man