Blaxploitation Education: Hit!

Billy Dee Williams gets to be a tough guy in a movie that could have used some more grounding.

Hit!
Written by Alan Trustman and David M. Wolf
Directed by Sidney J. Furie
1973

In the 21st century, a lot of ink is spilled lamenting how much dumber our society is when compared to the past, which is part of the rose-colored view that nostalgia provides when making it seem like society is in a constant state of downfall. I think these claims are incredibly overblown, and as one example of how things weren’t necessarily better in the past, I don’t think filmmakers these days could get away with some of the lazy plotting they used to. This movie provides an example: its main character is a “federal agent,” but what agency he works for and what exactly he does is unspecified. Maybe he works for the same agency as Cleopatra Jones, but regardless of what he does, he has what seem like endless resources at his disposal, even when he’s conducting an independent operation. This is something we’re just supposed to accept without questioning; if he flashes a badge, he can get away with anything! If a movie tried to do the same thing today, half the internet would come out of the woodwork to complain about its plot holes.

Here, the agent in question is Nick Allen, played by Billy Dee Williams, and he’s out for revenge after his daughter died of a heroin overdose. When he goes after the dealer who sold the drugs that killed her, the guy protests, claiming that he’s just a worker, and if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. So Nick decides that he’s going to try to do something about the larger drug trade by taking down the kingpins who are running the whole operation. When he tells his superior about his plans, the guy wants no part of it and says he’s just going to look the other way while Nick goes off and does his own thing.

As Nick proceeds with his quest, the plot sort of takes the form of a heist movie, except with the ultimate goal being a series of assassinations rather than a theft. Most of the first half of the movie covers Nick recruiting a group of people to help him carry out his plans, then we get to watch them take violent action. His team consists of Sherry (Gwen Welles), a junkie prostitute who he convinces to join him by offering a choice between the carrot of a non-stop supply of heroin and the stick of criminal prosecution; Barry (Paul Hampton), a former soldier who apparently ran some sort of criminal operation during his service and who is pressured into complying when Nick claims that he’ll sic the IRS on him to collect back taxes; an elderly couple (Janet Brandt and Sid Melton) who committed some unspecified crime in the past and are looking to atone after the overdose death of their son; Dutch (Warren J. Kemmerling), a cop whose penchant for violence against drug dealers seems to always undermine his ability to successfully prosecute them; and Mike (Richard Pryor), a former sailor in the Navy who also wants revenge after his wife was raped and murdered by a junkie.

We learn pretty much right away that the leaders of this drug cartel are a bunch of bougie French people, which seemed to be a trend in the 1970s, what with this and The French Connection (not to mention the French mastermind of the “slavery” ring in Shaft in Africa). How Nick (and Dutch, whose surveillance skills are put to use to plan the assassinations) figure this out is never explained. Instead of doing an actual investigation and working his way up the chain of command until he identifies the leaders, Nick just figures out who they are off-screen. Again, this is something we’re just supposed to accept without any questions about the mechanics of the plot.

So, Nick goes about effectuating his plan by gathering his team together, training them on an operation that will require precise timing, slipping into the kingpins’ home city of Marseilles, and killing everybody in ways that are mostly quiet (except for the climax, which involves Nick blowing up a car with a rocket-propelled grenade). There is a little bit of excitement along the way, mostly from a couple of other government agents who are trying to put a stop to Nick’s scheme (they apparently work for his boss, who may or may not have given the approval to assassinate him as a rogue agent; like much of the rest of this movie’s plot, their motives are unclear).

While this is ostensibly a Blaxploitation movie, you may have noticed that it has precious little to do with the concerns that usually affect characters in this genre. While the opening, which sees Nick’s daughter hang out with her older boyfriend, score some drugs, and die after taking them, does make it seem like there will be some street-level concerns about how normal people are affected by the drug trade, this is quickly left behind in favor of Nick being a flashy, charismatic, resourceful agent who is putting his international schemes in motion. In the end, the movie really only barely skirts the edges of the Blaxploitation genre, mostly due to its star and Richard Pryor’s supporting role (which is very enjoyable; he gets in a lot of good lines and generally serves to keep things light and enjoyable).

The movie is from many of the same people who created Lady Sings the Blues, including director Sidney J. Furie, and it features some of the same lazy plotting disguised as artsiness. All of the scenes featuring the cartel kingpins are in French without subtitles, the better to make them seem like snooty, out-of-touch villains who do not care in the slightest about the people whose lives are being destroyed by their product. But this really serves to obfuscate the details, forcing the audience to just trust that their schemes and Nick’s plan to take them down make sense.

So if we’re left without much of a plot structure to hang the movie on, it has to live and die by the performances. It does that well enough, with Williams seeming driven to pursue his goal at all costs, using his charisma to convince people to do his bidding but occasionally letting the mask slip so we can see the true fury behind his actions. In the most emotional scene in the movie, his team has discovered that he’s acting on his own without the sanction of the U.S. government, and most of them decide to quit, since they can’t risk being caught and going to jail. His way of convincing them involves refusing to give Sherry the dose of heroin that she needs, and when they beg him to ease the pain of her withdrawals, he accuses them of being willing to just look the other way when thousands of other addicts are going through the same thing. It’s a pretty manipulative tactic, and I kind of wish someone had called him on it and noted that he’s really out for revenge rather than justice, but that would probably make this movie too morally complex.

This ends up being a decent 70s action movie, but it didn’t provide what I’m looking for in a Blaxploitation film. Its concerns are so far removed from the issues that affect actual people that you could have plugged just about any movie star of the time into its lead role without changing anything about it. Unlike Gordon’s War, which was also about the fight against drugs, there’s no attempt to reckon with the way urban communities are affected by these issues. And there are few of the stylistic elements that had come to define Blaxploitation movies by this point, like flashy outfits or a funky soundtrack (the score, by legendary composer Lalo Schifrin, is fine, but it’s what you would expect in a standard 70s action movie, not something with the rhythm and groove that really got audiences behind the heroes of this genre). Plus, there’s no attempt to consider what it means for a Black man to serve the U.S. government and whether his “mission” is actually helping people in his community. Fortunately, the next movie I’m covering will be taking a different approach to a similar idea, and it will most likely give me much more to consider. Here’s hoping it won’t disappoint me like this one did.

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