Blaxploitation Education Extra: Black Mama, White Mama

Another side trip to a Filipino women's prison to spend time with Pam Grier.

Black Mama, White Mama
Written by H.R. Christian (story by Joseph Viola and Jonathan Demme)
Directed by Eddie Romero
1973

1973 was the year Pam Grier became one of the major stars of the Blaxploitation genre, although apparently she had one more stop to make in the “women in prison” genre before she could join the pantheon. She had previously been featured in movies like The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, and The Big Bird Cage, but in those, she had been part of an ensemble. In Black Mama, White Mama, she gets elevated to co-lead, although watching the film, it almost seems like a step backward for her, since she doesn’t get to do a whole lot.

The film is ostensibly a remake of The Defiant Ones, the 1958 film starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as a couple of prisoners who escape while chained together and have to make their way through the American South. But Black Mama, White Mama only barely resembles that plot, as if the filmmakers came up with a reason to have two women of different races chained together and called it a day. There’s no examination of racism or the characters’ different backgrounds outside of a cursory comment or two, and instead, we just get a rudimentary chase plot that provides the opportunity for lots of shootouts in which the women aren’t really involved.

This is really just another example of the women’s prison movie genre, and not an especially good one. The film, which was produced by Roger Corman’s American International Pictures, was shot in the Philippines like the movies mentioned above, and its opening scenes kind of speed-run through the cliches of the genre. There are the expected skimpy prison uniforms, a shower scene that devolves into a tickle fight, a lesbian guard who tries to exploit the prisoners, and a fight in the cafeteria. After that fight, which takes place between Lee Daniel (Pam Grier) and Karen Brent (Margaret Markov, whose career mostly seems to be notable for this movie, another similar film called The Hot Box, and a later appearance alongside Grier in The Arena), the two women get chained together so they can be transported to a maximum security prison. And well, you can guess what happens during the trip.

Karen is the girlfriend of a revolutionary leader who is fighting against the oppressive rulers of the unnamed country where the movie takes place (characters just refer to it as “this island”), and after escaping, she wants to join up with her boyfriend and continue the fight. Lee, on the other hand, has been working as a hooker for a local drug lord, and she has stashed some money away, so she wants to go retrieve it so she can leave the island forever. This puts them at odds, leading to a few arguments and halfhearted slap-fights before they decide to work together to try to make it to safety and hopefully unchain themselves along the way.

The more interesting character is Ruben, a local criminal who gets hired by the police to help track down the escapees. He’s played by Sid Haig, who served as a great foil for Grier in several movies (including The Big Doll House), but the two of them don’t even appear onscreen together here. He gets to flex his muscles by doing things like stopping a couple of police who are following him and his men, dragging them out of their car at gunpoint, and forcing them to strip so he can compare the sizes of their penises. Later, he shows up at the home of a guy who works for him, takes his two daughters into a bedroom, and engages in a bit of topless fun where they ride him around the room like a horse (he stops at one point to turn a picture of Jesus face-down). Haig is clearly having a great time, getting to dress in flamboyant cowboy outfits and shout ridiculous lines at everyone he meets. I wish the rest of the movie shared his level of energy.

But no, it’s just one series of chase scenes and shootouts after another, without much interesting characterization for the two leads. Pam Grier still hadn’t settled into the groove she would later find (she doesn’t even get to show the glimmers of charisma that made her stand out in small roles in Cool Breeze and Hit Man), and she seems to struggle to believably convey emotions. Part of the problem is that she’s just not given very much to work with. Her character’s backstory is so rudimentary that it could have been a placeholder in the script that was intended to be fleshed out later. The difference between this and The Big Doll House is that the previous film was directed by Jack Hill, who was happy to fill his movies with schlocky elements but also took care to develop characters people could care about. Here, director Eddie Romero (who made several other “B” movies like Beast of Blood and Mad Doctor of Blood Island, as well as The Twilight People, which featured Pam Grier as a panther-woman) seems happy to provide the expected cliches and little more.

I wouldn’t really call this a Blaxploitation movie, since it takes more than just having one Black character to be a part of the genre. There were plenty of Blaxploitation movies that were cheap and featured basic plots, but they at least tried to say something or included relatable, recognizable characters. Black Mama, White Mama provides almost nothing of the sort (Sid Haig aside), and it ends in a bloodbath that seems pointless, given that the generic revolutionaries (one of whom wears a jacket with a large swastika on the back) don’t seem to have any stated purpose. They’re like the movie itself: soulless and lacking any reason to exist.

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
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come