Blaxploitation Education: Truck Turner

Isaac Hayes, of all people, stars in an especially entertaining example of Blaxploitation action.

Truck Turner
Written by Oscar Williams and Michael Allin
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan
1974

While there’s a long history of popular musicians trying their hand at acting, to varying levels of success, I wasn’t holding out much hope that Isaac Hayes would be able to headline an action movie. His on-screen debut, Tough Guys, didn’t exactly sell him as the next great singer-turned-actor, since he spent most of that movie seeming like he was struggling to stay awake. Sure, he would show up a few years later in Escape From New York, and he had a long-running role as the voice of Chef on South Park, but those seemed more like novelty roles rather than something that required much in the way of acting skill. So color me surprised that not only is he pretty good as the title character in Truck Turner, but the movie around him turns out to be one of the more entertaining examples of Blaxploitation action films that I’ve seen.

It helps that the movie surrounds Hayes with a lot of talented actors, and it’s pretty stylishly shot and edited as well. And Hayes also provided the soundtrack, so you know it’s going to have plenty of great music serving as a background to the action (including a fun theme song and a cheesy love ballad). But he also holds everything together as a classic Blaxploitation tough guy who believably beats up and shoots a lot of people while also throwing around plenty of quips, serving as a romantic lead, and being serious when the time comes for it. He’s still well below Jim Brown or Fred Williamson in terms of acting skill, but as a star in this type of movie, you could do a whole lot worse.

Hayes plays Mac “Truck” Turner, which was apparently his nickname in the past when he was an athlete, but he had to retire after getting injured. Now he works as a skip tracer, hunting down and bringing in criminals who have skipped bail. The actual mechanics of this job aren’t depicted in an especially realistic fashion; apparently a bounty hunter’s license gives Truck and his sidekick Jerry (Alan Weeks, who was in Black Belt Jones) carte blanche to engage in crazy car chases and fire their guns all over the place when tracking down bad guys. But that just means that this is a heightened reality where tough guy action heroes can run around town fighting flamboyant pimps. You can’t complain about that.

We get an idea of Truck’s day-to-day lifestyle in the opening scenes of the movie, when he and Jerry drive to pick up a guy serving in the army who is on the run from the law. When some guards refuse to let them on the base to pick up the guy, Truck just drives through their barricade, hoping that when they start shooting at him, they’ll hit his left rear tire, because he needs to have it replaced (sure enough, this is immediately followed by a scene in which the antagonistic guard is forced to change the tire). When the major running the base is reluctant to turn the prisoner over, Truck informs him that the guy is a child molester, and the media wouldn’t be too happy that the military is harboring him. On the way back, Truck’s prisoner insults him, calling him racial slurs, and when Truck threatens to shove his teeth down his throat, the guy says “Sure, you’re real brave when I’m wearing handcuffs.” The movie immediately cuts to Truck, having taken the guy’s handcuffs off, beating the shit out of him. The hero beating up racists who are clearly inferior to them in every way is exactly what you want to see in a Blaxploitation movie.

The movie’s real plot kicks in when Truck and Jerry get called in by a lawyer (played by veteran character actor Dick Miller, who previously showed up in The Slams, which was also directed by Jonathan Kaplan) to track down a client of his who failed to show up in court, a violent pimp named Gator (Paul Harris, who previously played a pimp in The Mack). When they find him, they end up having a lengthy car chase, and he manages to get away by running through a bar and offering to pay money to the patrons if they’ll beat up the guys who are after him. While this provides an entertaining bar fight along with the car chase, it also serves as a way to bolster Hayes’ character. When the fight ends, and all the other guys realize what happened, one guy remarks that there’s no way he would’ve accepted the deal if he’d known it was Truck Turner that they would be fighting.

Through some investigative skills (including getting a tip from an old mentor who appears to be a retired pimp, played by Scatman Crothers), as well as intimidating an associate of Gator’s by hanging him out of an apartment window, Truck and Jerry manage to track their prey down once again, where they have a shootout that ends with the pimp dead. One would think this was the end of the matter, but as we see when a bunch of other pimps gather for Gator’s funeral, things are just getting started.

Even though Gator didn’t seem like an especially charismatic guy, he apparently had quite the roster of high-class prostitutes working for him. Dorinda, his girlfriend and the madam who apparently ran this stable of women, is out for revenge, wanting to have Truck Turner killed. In an especially surprising and memorable bit of casting, she’s played by Nichelle Nichols, who gained fame as Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek. She really goes nuts here, reveling in the role of a fierce, intimidating woman who bosses all the other pimps around and bullies anyone who gets in her way. When she’s yelling at the women about the need to follow her orders, she complains about two members of the stable who left, saying “They better learn to sell pussy in Iceland, because if I ever see them I’m gonna cut their fucking throats!” Later, when she’s selling the pimps on the value of her stable, offering the women to whoever kills Truck, she says “These are all prime cut bitches, $238,000 worth of dynamite! It’s Fort Knox in panties!”

As if the movie didn’t already have a murderer’s row of enjoyable actors filling out its supporting cast, it throws in one more by having Yaphet Kotto (Across 110th Street) play the pimp who decides to take Dorinda up on her offer. He mostly plays things seriously, although he does have a kind of off-putting personality, and he gets to bark a few memorable lines when things don’t go his way. There are a bunch of twists and turns as various characters try to murder Truck and get killed for their trouble, and it all leads up to a shootout in a hospital that may have served as an inspiration for Hard Boiled (a character even picks up and carries a child at one point while shooting). What we see here is nowhere near the level of action that John Woo would later craft, but we do get some funny moments where Kotto gets to show how evil he is by knocking people off crutches and out of wheelchairs. And it ends with a surprisingly artistic moment, as Kotto stumbles away after getting shot, with the camera holding tight on his face and moving with him in a manner that’s similar to the types of shots that Spike Lee would later use in many of his movies.

This movie is far from great art, and it might not even be in the top tier of Blaxploitation movies, but it’s pretty damn entertaining. It’s a pure action movie featuring a badass who’s ready to take on anyone who tries to hurt him or those he cares about, and it’s fleet and fast-moving, speeding from one shootout or car chase to the next while filling the scenes in between with snappy dialogue and memorable performances. It deserves to be remembered as more than just a curiosity that starred someone who was better known for his music than his acting career. I know I’ll be recommending it to anyone who might be interested in some of the hidden gems of Blaxploitation.

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
Thomasine & Bushrod
Black Eye
The Take