Blaxploitation Education: Thomasine & Bushrod

A Black version of Bonnie & Clyde isn't distinct enough to stand out.

Thomasine & Bushrod
Written by Max Julien
Directed by Gordon Parks, Jr.
1974

Since many Blaxploitation movies could fall under the general genre of “crime,” it might have made sense to look at what types of crime movies were successful in the past and see if it would be possible to do something similar, but with a uniquely Black perspective. That seems to be the idea behind Thomasine & Bushrod, which tells a similar story to Bonnie and Clyde. There are a couple of problems with this, however. One is that Bonnie and Clyde is a true story that provided a great “lovers on the run” narrative. Thomasine & Bushrod is fictional, so it’s hard to make it seem like something other than a knockoff; either it’s going to pale in comparison to the more exciting true story, or it’s going to be more outlandish and unrealistic. Unfortunately, the filmmakers went with the former choice.

There’s also the problem of the inevitable comparisons between the two incredible actors that led Bonnie and Clyde, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, and the stars of Thomasine & Bushrod, who are far from terrible, but definitely belong in the B-movie world of Blaxploitation. Vonetta McGee is no slouch, having stood out as the romantic lead of Blacula, Hammer, and Melinda, along with memorable roles in Detroit 9000 and (to a lesser extent) Shaft in Africa, but she’s just not in the same league as Dunaway. Max Julien, star of The Mack and the writer of this movie, has a certain presence, but if you ask me, he’s much more irritating than charismatic. It’s generally enjoyable to see them in the roles of bank robbers in love, but they’re not characters that I’m itching to spend more time with, and it doesn’t seem like an especially big tragedy when they’re gunned down at the end.

That actually could be another point of contention, since Blaxploitation movies tended to have their characters survive the ordeals that they suffered and lived to keep fighting The Man. They sometimes went so far as to rewrite stories to make this happen, such as when Hit Man differed from Get Carter, another movie that shared the same source material, by having its hero not get killed in the end. But with a Bonnie and Clyde riff, you kind of have to have the characters die in the end, if only to fulfill the trope of doomed romance. Any other ending would have felt false, even if it would have fit better into the Blaxploitation mold.

But really, the biggest problem here is that Thomasine & Bushrod doesn’t do enough to create a uniquely Black version of its story. There are some hints that the characters have to deal with racism, but much less so than one would think in the Jim Crow South. In fact, the level of racism that most Blaxploitation characters face in movies that take place in the 1970s is much more explicit and intense than what we see here. Really, characters of any race could be swapped in here without having to change too much, and that’s a problem for a movie in a genre that’s meant to be all about the unique concerns and perspectives of Black Americans.

As for how this movie actually plays out, Thomasine (McGee) is a bounty hunter in Texas in 1911, an era in which cars are just starting to become common enough that people who can afford them are beginning to use them instead of horses. After catching a wanted white man by pretending to be a prostitute (he’s one of several people in the movie who says she’s especially pretty “for a colored woman”), she sees a poster offering a reward for somebody she appears to recognize: J.P. Bushrod (Julien).

We then follow Bushrod for a bit; he’s been working breaking horses, but he’s also on the lookout for a white bank robber named Adolf the Butcher who killed Bushrod’s sister. He wanders into a town where it seems like he’s going to have some confrontations with racists (outside town, there are a couple of Black boys who have been lynched next to a sign warning people who look like them to stay away), but while he has a heated exchange with a jerk during a poker game, everybody backs down after he pulls his gun; apparently he’s such a well-known outlaw that even these murderous white people don’t want to mess with him.

Bushrod learns that someone claiming to be his wife has checked in to the room where he’s staying at the local saloon, and sure enough, it’s Thomasine, who seems like she’s there to take him in, but no, they’re actually old friends/former lovers, and she’s just there to warn him that he’s wanted (and also for a booty call). The next morning, Bushrod sees that Adolf has come to town intending to rob the bank, and he goes to confront him. While he’s successful in killing Adolf and his men, Bogardie (George Murdock, one of those recognizable actors who regularly played sheriffs, cops, and other authority figures), the U.S. Marshall who Thomasine had come to warn him about, shows up to arrest him. But Thomasine saves him at the last minute, and the two of them run off together to live as outlaws.

They seem to accidentally stumble into a career as bank robbers. While they’re in a town, they stop to admire a shiny car, and its rich white owner (he owns the whole town, including the bank, as he informs them) shows up and acts condescending toward them, offering to give them a ride. When his wife complains, he says “You know what ol’ Abe Lincoln said; we gotta be nice to our negroes!” First, they ask him to give them a tour of his bank, sayhing that they might want to deposit some money, and while he’s showing them the interior of the safe, Bushrod apparently decides to rob the place on the spur of the moment, pulling out his gun and demanding that he give them all the money he has.

The pair decide to take the guy’s car and run for it (how Bushrod learned to drive is never explained), bringing the rich guy along as a hostage or something. They joke that he seems pretty angry, which Bushrod thinks must be because “Abraham Lincoln lied to him!” However, he gets angry enough that he tries to strangle Thomasine from the backseat, but Bushrod runs the car off the road and fights him off, and Thomasine ends up shooting him. This leads to a scene in which Thomasine is upset because Bushrod didn’t listen to her and leave the man behind, but after she yells at him and hits him, he slaps her across the face and tells her to stop telling him what to do all the time.

The idea here seems to be that the two of them have a tumultuous relationship, but the rest of the movie doesn’t really show them as being at odds with each other very much. They embark on a spree of bank robberies, which are mostly depicted through montages, including a bunch of sepia-toned old-timey photographs. As Bogardie tries to track them down, he talks to several people who note that Thomasine seemed like she was ordering Bushrod around, and he didn’t seem to like it very much, but that just doesn’t come across in most of the scenes where the two of them are together. Instead, they seem to be pretty happily in love, especially after they settle down in an abandoned cabin they find.

They also gain an accomplice rather abruptly in the form of Jomo (Glynn Turman, from Five on the Black Hand Side), a Jamaican criminal that Bushrod had known in the past. He shows up to save them during a shootout with a convenience store owner, having never been mentioned before that point, and then he spends the rest of the movie hanging around with them, only to meet an ignoble end at the hands of Bogardie, who is closing in on them.

There’s some talk throughout of the pair taking a Robin Hood approach to bank robbery, giving most of the money they steal to the common folk who need it. This briefly seems like it’s going to be a source of conflict after Thomasine complains that Bushrod is giving away all of their money, but it ends up not being a big deal, since I guess they can always just rob another bank (it does lead to a nice line in which it’s revealed that their wanted poster says “Known to have many friends among Indians, Mexicans, poor whites, and other colored people.”). The plot just seems to proceed fairly nonchalantly until it’s time for everything to end, which comes, of course, after Thomasine announces that she’s pregnant, and the two of them decide to settle down in Mexico. But it’s not to be, since the tragic end of the movie is waiting.

I’m probably being too hard on this movie, but it can’t help but pale in comparison to its inspiration. It’s generally enjoyable enough, although I probably would have liked it better if it had a more appealing lead actor. It just doesn’t sell the drama very well, and while there are plenty of fun bank-robber antics (I liked a moment where the pair walks through a door wearing fancy clothing and introduces themselves, as if they’re entering a high society dance, before pulling out guns to reveal that this is just another robbery), too much time is spent on montages and slow motion scenes of Thomasine and Bushrod splashing water on each other in a stream while the movie’s treacly theme song (by Arthur Lee) plays in the background.

Ultimately, there’s not enough conflict between the characters to maintain interest in what’s going to lead to their downfall, and there’s not enough of a sense of urgency to anything that happens. When the end comes, it doesn’t seem like an inevitability, but just the point at which it was time for the plot to wrap itself up. I know that not every movie can be a home run, especially in the low-budget world of Blaxploitation, but I still felt that this one came up short, missing some obvious opportunities to be more interesting, more fun, and, well, just better. Fortunately, there’s always another hidden Blaxploitation gem waiting to be uncovered.

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
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena
Black Belt Jones
Sugar Hill
Tough Guys
Foxy Brown