Blaxploitation Education: Five on the Black Hand Side

Apparently domestic comedies can fit within the Blaxploitation genre.

Five on the Black Hand Side
Written by Charlie L. Russell
Directed by Oscar Williams
1973

By 1973, the Blaxploitation genre had solidified into a certain set of expectations. Not every movie in the genre had to be about urban crime, but those types of films made up the overwhelming majority of what came out. After all, “exploitation” is part of the genre’s name, and low-budget movies that featured lots of violence and nudity were what was showing in grindhouse theaters at the time, whether they starred Black people or not. However, the reason Blaxploitation movies became so popular in the 1970s was because they were reaching a Black audience that was happy to see movies targeted toward them. The genre became kind of all-encompassing, with room for lots of different types of movies, including horror, mysteries, and even comedy.

With Five on the Black Hand Side, Blaxploitation expanded further than it had before to provide a comedy story focused on a family. However, this move isn’t completely unprecedented. It’s based on a play by Charlie L. Russell, but Melvin Van Peebles had already done something similar, adapting a play of his into the movie Don’t Play Us Cheap. While that was a pretty singular experience, as most things created by Van Peebles are, Five on the Black Hand Side is much more of a crowd-pleaser, and it’s focused on celebrating the positive aspects of Black life. In fact, the movie poster carried the tagline “You've been coffy-tized, blacula-rized and super-flied – but now you're gonna be glorified, unified and filled-with-pride...when you see Five on the Black Hand Side."

The movie features some light family drama, focusing on the conflicts between a father and his children, a long-suffering wife finally standing up for herself, and a wedding where everyone makes peace with each other. It provides a look at how the younger generation was starting to take steps toward independence and assert their rights, which was hard for older generations to accept, since they had not only become set in their ways, but they had built up certain systems that allowed them to function in the shadow of white oppression, and while the struggle for civil rights was admirable, it also threatened to upset an existence that had become comfortable. And at the same time, the women’s liberation movement was leading more women to ask for recognition for the hard work they had been putting in and show that their needs were also deserving of attention. But as all of this is going on, an emphasis on family and community demonstrates that people are stronger when they form bonds and work together to build each other up.

That’s the high-level take on the themes of the movie, but fortunately, its focus on individual people puts a relatable face on these ideas. We’re introduced to John Henry Brooks (who was in Ganja & Hess and had an uncredited appearance in UpTight) as he’s eating breakfast and preparing for his workday. It’s clear that he’s pretty demanding toward his wife Gladys (Clarice Taylor), who he refers to as “Mrs. Brooks,” insisting that she follow a schedule that he has set out each day in her appointment book, graciously granting her the opportunity to take a walk when she has some free time. He acts like he’s an important, powerful man, smoking cigars and making comments about major financial transactions he reads about in the morning paper, but he disappoints Gladys by saying that due to the family’s economic concerns, he can’t affort to buy a new dress for her for their daughter’s upcoming wedding. And while he puts on a fancy suit to head off to work, we learn that he’s the proprietor of a barber shop.

John Henry doesn’t seem to focus too closely on his wife’s needs because most of his attention goes toward his children. In addition to the wedding of his daughter Gail (Bonnie Banfield), which he grumbles about because her fiancé Marvin (Carl Franklin) has decided to have an African theme, he’s engaged in a sort of war with his youngest son, Gideon (Glynn Turman, who is probably best known for his role on the TV show A Different World). Instead of pursuing a business degree like John Henry wants, Gideon is studying anthropology and focusing on Black liberation, and he’s currently sleeping on the roof of the building where the family lives and refusing to talk to his father. John Henry wishes Gideon would be more like his oldest son Booker T. (D’Urville Martin, from Book of Numbers, Black Caesar, etc.). However, when we do meet Booker T., it seems like his primary accomplishment is moving out of the family’s home. He’s also something of a Black militant, getting mad when people refer to him by his “slave name” and insisting that people call him Sharif, but he seems to suppress this side of himself when he’s interacting with his father, which allows him to be perceived as the family’s golden boy.

After getting to know the family members, the movie builds up some conflicts, but it betrays its nature as an adaptation of a play by featuring a number of long scenes in which characters give each other lengthy speeches. Fortunately, these are generally pretty entertaining and well-acted. One standout moment sees Gladys doing laundry along with her neighbor friend Ruby (Virginia Capers, who was also in Trouble Man), and she delivers a long monologue in a single take while she’s also loading a washing machine, punctuating her delivery by slamming some coins into the machine as she declares that she’s going to leave her husband.

The barbershop also provides several scenes that are very play-like, with John Henry, his coworkers, and various customers shooting the shit with each other. It’s a great depiction of the cultural importance of the setting, which has long been a place of community and bonding for Black men. Here, it provides a real boys’ club atmosphere, with no women allowed in the establishment and the men complaining about women in general. Interestingly, one of the other barbers is played by Richard Williams, who had previously played a pimp in both The Mack and Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!, but here he fills the role of the younger guy who occasionally disagrees with his employer’s old-school male chauvinist attitudes.

These scenes also provide some fascinating little glimpses of characters who make brief appearances to show off some linguistic flourishes that Russell included in the script. A guy named Rolls Royce (Frankie Crocker, who was in Cleopatra Jones) shows up to make some flowery proclamations about the greatness of his existence, but he’s really there to collect money for the neighborhood numbers game. Even better, a guy who calls himself Fun Loving (Tchaka Almoravids; this was apparently his only film role) comes in and delivers a rhyming monologue about his sexual prowess, with lines like “Fun Loving is my name, and loving is my game. I'm the bed-tucker, the milk-shaker, the record-breaker, and the population-maker, the humdinger, the gunslinger, and the baby bringer…I'm the man who walked the water and tied the whale's tail in a knot. I taught the fish how to swim, crossed the burning sand, and shook the devil's hand…I walked 49 miles of barbed wire, and I use a cobra snake for a necktie.” It’s the kind of thing that Rudy Ray Moore would later make famous in Dolemite, serving as an inspiration for many rappers.

The movie deals with various family conflicts, including the aforementioned ongoing dispute between John Henry and Gideon, as well as an argument between Gideon and Booker T. in which the former gets angry at the latter for dating white women, which he sees as a betrayal of their race. But the real conflict kicks off when Gladys decides that she’s had enough of John Henry’s controlling nature, and at the urging of Ruby and another neighbor friend, Stormy (Ja’net DuBois, who would later star on the TV show Good Times), decides to issue a list of demands to her husband, which range from addressing small annoyances like how he slurps his coffee to insisting that she be allowed to provide manicures in his barber shop.

This leads to a standoff, with Gladys’ friends picketing the building and occupying the barber shop. Gideon takes Gladys’ side, while Booker T. joins John Henry but tries to get his mom and brother to see reason. Eventually, Gail’s husband-to-be enters the scene and talks everyone down, telling everyone that while the tactics of resistance might be an important way for Black people to assert their rights, families need to focus on how much they love each other and find ways to resolve their differences.

Everything eventually gets settled in a big wedding scene that features everyone decked out in African-style clothing and dancing joyously (including in a Soul Train line). The family reconciles, John Henry relents and agrees to change his rigid ways, and everybody walks away happy. It’s a beautiful depiction of Black happiness and community, the kind of thing that was probably rare to see on screens back in the 1970s and is even rarer nowadays.

As a corrective to the more exploitative elements of Blaxploitation, this is somewhat successful, focusing on the importance of family and community and showing that there’s a whole lot more to Black culture than crime, drugs, and struggles to be free of white oppression. The movie does seem to grumble at the ways younger people are pushing for changes too quickly, with both Gideon and Booker T. coming off as kind of misguided as they speak positively about Chairman Mao or make arguments against race-mixing. But at the same time, the story is about people being willing to make difficult changes for the benefit of others, and it provides a much-welcomed depiction of Black joy. As much as I like the dramatic explorations of the issues and struggles of Black people that Blaxploitation movies focus on, it’s good to consider other aspects of Black life and remember what exactly people are fighting for.

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
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams