Blaxploitation Education: Tough Guys

Despite an indeterminate number of tough guys, this isn't bad for a micro-budget Italian-produced riff on Blaxploitation.

Tough Guys
a.k.a. Three Tough Guys
Written by Nicola Badalucco and Luciano Vincenzoni
Directed by Duccio Tessari
1974

By 1974, Blaxploitation was popular enough that makers of low-budget films around the world were trying to get in on the action. Tough Guys, which was produced by the legendary Dino De Laurentiis, appears to be a quick and cheap crime movie from Italian filmmakers, but it does its best to cop some street cred by having Fred Williamson play a minor role, while also serving as the acting debut of Isaac Hayes, who also provided the soundtrack. And despite its less-than-stellar pedigree, it ended up being pretty good, at least for something that looks like it was shot with a camcorder (or whatever equivalent existed in the 1970s).

There is a little bit of confusion about how many tough guys there actually are in the movie, although that may have come from slapping Fred Williamson’s face on the poster because he was getting more famous, even though his role in the film is fairly minimal. Hayes’ theme song, which has some nice instrumental work but isn’t his best lyrical achievement, refers to “two tough guys,” which turns out to be more accurate. In fact, there’s really one especially tough guy, and Hayes is a little bit of a second banana, although he does make his character stand out by what could be described as underplaying but is more likely the awkwardness of being a non-actor.

The real tough guy here is Father Charlie, a Catholic priest in Chicago who goes on a quest to find out why one of his parishioners was killed. He’s played by Lino Ventura, an Italian actor who was fairly well-known in France, having appeared in movies like Army of Shadows and Elevator to the Gallows. As an ex-con who has gone straight and devoted his life to God and serving his community, he’s not exactly happy about the need for violence, but it doesn’t take much for him to start throwing punches, and the movie gives him plenty of chances to take on large groups of thugs.

The plot involves a bank robbery that was being investigated by Charlie’s friend, who was an insurance adjuster. However, just as he managed to track down one of the robbers, the two of them were gunned down by an unknown assailant. So now Charlie is trying to find out what happened and who was responsible, while various other players are trying to determine where the money has been hidden. During his investigation, Charlie ends up teaming up with Lee (Hayes), a former cop who lost his job after he left the scene of the robbery to help his girlfriend, who promptly left him afterward. Lee is also trying to find out what happened to the stolen money, if only to provide himself with some answers about the incident that ruined his life.

Charlie and Lee make a pretty good duo, following up on various leads and usually leading with their fists, but stymied at every turn by an assassin who is methodically taking out everyone involved in the robbery. Charlie is kind of a hothead, always ready to throw down with anyone who challenges him or beat some answers out of various thugs, but he keeps an air of priestly dignity about himself, acting somewhat disappointed at the depths to which he’s forced to sink.

As mentioned above, Hayes mostly underplays his role, acting almost amused at the crazy situations he finds himself in. At one point, after Lee and Charlie best some thugs who try to kidnap them on behalf of a local mafia leader who is involved in all of these shenanigans, he calmly instructs them to stand on a curb at the edge of the river, and when they don’t react right away to his order to jump in the water, he casually fires a couple of bullets at their feet. In another scene, the mafia is successful at kidnapping Lee and Charlie separately (using the old bag-over-the-head routine, like Borat tried to do with Pamela Anderson), and they bring Lee in first. When the don says that Charlie should be getting there soon, and the sounds of fisticuffs are heard in an adjoining room, Lee remarks “Now that’s a familiar sound,” and upon opening the door, we see the late stages of a brawl in which the priest has managed to overcome his kidnappers.

The only exception to Lee’s lackadaisical attitude comes in a scene where he and Charlie track down one of the bank robbers’ girlfriends (played by Paula Kelly, who was also in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Trouble Man, and Cool Breeze), and they find that she is the same woman who lured him away from the scene of the robbery, meaning that she was in on the scheme the whole time and had been playing him from the start. He’s so enraged that he smacks her across the face several times, calling her a bitch and demanding that she give them some answers. It’s an upsetting bit of violence from a character that we’re supposed to be rooting for, and even if his level of anger is somewhat understandable, given that she broke his heart and ruined his life, it’s so far beyond the pale that it just about makes his character unredeemable. It doesn’t help that Hayes doesn’t have the acting chops to pull off his character’s anguish, so it makes him seem like a madman who could snap at any moment rather than a good police officer (if you believe such a thing exists) who was pushed too far.

Fred Williamson, for his part, gets a lot more mileage out of his character. In one of the first scenes of the movie (which makes it seem like he’s going to have a much larger part than he ends up playing), he’s shooting pool in a bar when an underling comes in to tell him that someone is looking for his partner. The guy surprises him, so Williamson grabs him and slams him on the pool table, revealing that he had a knife hidden in his pool cue and was ready to defend himself from potential attackers. He’s also wearing an outfit that consists of a matching set of red leather pants and jacket over a bare chest, which does not seem like the most comfortable attire. He mostly hangs around the periphery of the movie, and being the only other recognizable name in the cast, it’s clear that he’s going to turn out to be the main villain. Whenever he does show up, he seems cool and charismatic, a smart planner who is doing everything he can to come out of this scheme on top.

While this isn’t a great movie, it’s a pretty fun one, providing an action-packed tour through the Chicago underworld with plenty of interesting twists and turns. It makes its characters smart enough to survive in a setting where all the odds seem to be against them, providing some nicely thought-out details, like a scene in which Charlie and Lee are caught by the police standing over the body of a man who had just been shot, but Lee proves their innocence by pointing out that the shell casings on the floor show that the man was shot by a .45 automatic rather than Lee’s .38 revolver. Despite the goofy premise, the limitations of Hayes’ acting skills, and that one outlier of a scene involving violence against a woman, the whole thing works much better than it has any right to. It certainly doesn’t have the depth of the best Blaxploitation films, but if you have to accept an Italian-made substitute that includes some of the genre’s recognizable elements, you could sure do a whole lot worse.

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