Blaxploitation Education: Hit Man

A somewhat unmemorable noir that's only occasionally entertaining.

Hit Man
Written and directed by George Armitage
1972

As the Blaxploitation scene developed throughout the 1970s, there were a lot of options for different kinds of stories that could be told. While the genre went in various directions, including Westerns and horror films, it most often involved urban crime stories. Fortunately, that’s a fruitful source of inspiration, with movies that can range from action-packed revenge tales to murder mysteries. Noir is an especially fitting subgenre, and putting characters in situations where they need to navigate shadowy underworlds and interact with a variety of criminals is a great way to explore the issues that hit home with Black audiences.

Of course, not every movie is completely successful in that regard. Hit Man has its moments, but it seems to meander through its story before picking up steam in its final stretch and delivering some memorable violence. It’s an adaptation of the novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis, which was also the basis for the Michael Caine movie Get Carter. I’m not sure how much was changed from the source material, but it seems like the movie might have been trying to build and explore a setting full of interesting characters before tying everything together and setting its main character on a path of revenge. However, I found following this simmering plot to be something of a chore rather than an interesting journey.

Bernie Casey, who will show up in at least a few other movies in this series, as well as the Blaxploitation spoof I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, stars as Tyrone, a guy who shows up in Los Angeles to investigate his brother’s death. It seems like he’s going to be on the case as soon as he gets off his plane, as he heads straight to a whorehouse to interrogate the prostitute his brother had a relationship with. Plus, we see that he’s being followed by some thugs who will likely be impeding his investigation. But then the movie gets bogged down in elements that don’t seem to be directly related to the case, and it only slowly gets back to the main action.

We get an extended scene in which Tyrone gets drunk along with his brother’s business partner, with them driving around town while chugging from a bottle of liquor and somehow managing not to get into an accident. There’s a funeral scene in which Tyrone tries to comfort his brother’s daughter Rochelle (Candy All), who seems to be upset when her dad’s prostitute girlfriend shows up to pay her respects. There’s some business about Tyrone getting a hotel room and flirting with the proprietress of the place, which just seems to be setup for one of the film’s many sex scenes. There’s also an upsetting scene in which he attends a dog fight; this was before the days when filmmakers were required to make sure animals wouldn’t be harmed, and it sure seems like the real thing.

It seems like Tyrone might have given up on his investigation if the thugs who have been following him didn’t start threatening him, trying to get him to return to his home in Oakland instead of looking into the matter further. Of course, their threats don’t work, and he continues to delve into things, learning more about the various players that his brother may have been involved with, most of whom seem to be a part of the city’s porno movie industry. He meets up and plays handball with an Italian guy named Zito (Don Diamond), which gives him the chance to connect with one of the actresses, Gozelda (“Pamela” Grier), who gives him a little bit more information about how all of this fits together. After getting attacked yet again by one of the thugs who has been threatening him, Tyrone is pointed in the direction of Theatis Oliver (Edmund Cambridge), a theater owner who seems to be making a play for power.

All of this barely seems to be an investigation; Tyrone just reacts to threats from other characters, has sex with various women, and only gains information when somebody foolishly attacks him. He only stumbles across the answer to the mystery when Gozelda takes him to see a movie of hers, which happens to include a scene featuring Rochelle, who was apparently forced to participate in the film against her will. This allows him to put the plot together: Oliver showed Tyrone’s brother the movie featuring his daughter in hopes that he would take violent revenge against Zito, the producer who forced Rochelle to participate, but Zito’s men ended up killing him instead.

Having figured things out, Tyrone decides to get revenge on everyone involved, and this is where things finally pick up, with a bunch of memorable violence. After some earlier scenes that established that some of the characters hang out at a safari park, Tyrone heads there to confront one of the bad guys, and he releases Gozelda in an area where lions are roaming free (Pam Grier didn’t die very often in these movies, but when she did, it was memorable). He kills Oliver and makes it look like Zito did it, leading Oliver’s men to massacre pretty much everyone in Zito’s operation, filling them full of bullets and allowing for lots of orange-colored blood to splatter everywhere. Finally, Tyrone tracks down the guy who killed his brother and chases him through an industrial setting before the guy gives up pathetically and gets blown away. And unlike in Get Carter, which famously ended with Michael Caine’s death, there’s a sniper who is ready to kill Tyrone, but he decides not to after learning of Zito’s death, allowing the Blaxploitation trend of heroes surviving at the end of their movies to continue.

This movie isn’t terrible, but I found it much less compelling than many other entries in the genre. It does seem to be trying to establish a setting that’s full of characters with complex motivations, but few of them are very interesting. Tyrone strikes a memorable figure, with 70s style that includes lots of wide collars and flashy hats worn at a jaunty angle, but he’s kind of boring otherwise. Most of the other characters do little to stand out, seeming like a bunch of interchangeable gangsters and thugs. Although Pam Grier is the most interesting of the women who are involved in the plot, she had yet to achieve the badass persona she would later perfect. The final few scenes of the movie are pretty entertaining due to their violence, but it takes a long time to get there.

While the Blaxploitation market had not yet become oversaturated, a movie like this does seem to be something that was created to fill a niche without fully developing it into an interesting, memorable story. Maybe I’m being too hard on it; as an adaptation of a novel, it may have seemed like a good way to develop a rich world full of criminal characters while providing a mystery plot that would allow for exciting action. It seems like writer/director George Armitage (who only directed a few movies, including Grosse Pointe Blank, a favorite of mine from the 90s) was trying to build something complex, but he just didn’t succeed, for whatever reason. It ends up being more of a swing and a miss than a flat-out failure. Oh well, there’s plenty more in the genre that I’m sure to enjoy.

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