D2D #61 again: Black Fist (1975, Timothy Galfas & Richard Kaye)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #3 under the title Bogard.)
Damn, I really need to update this thing more often.
First off, the explanation of the number. In going through the Dusk to Dawn tapes, I found out that the Scum of the Earth trailered at the end of Vol. 7 is not the 1962 Herschell Gordon Lewis nudie-scandal flcik (which I have seen) but a retitle of S.F. Brownrigg’s Poor White Trash II (which I haven’t seen). So I’ve gotta knock the number back one. Waah. Now, to the film:
It’s films like this that hurt the most - films where you can tell someone was aiming for quality but had neither the resources nor the talent to pull it off. Black Fist starts out as a standard underdog-boxing programmer, except the boxing is underground, illegal and bankrolled by the Mafia. In short order, though, it reveals its true intent as a film about a black man struggling against the iron hand of The Man (as represented by those Mafia dudes and a racist crooked cop played with great vigor and snake-oil charm by Dabney Coleman). The boxing/street fighting, it turns out, is incidental and used solely as a device for main character Leroy Fisk to make it for himself in a white man’s world; once he’s accrued a bit of cash dancing for Whitey, he cuts ties and opens his own business. Whitey, of course, won’t let a black man get free that easily. Though covered in a veneer that’s a bit drive-in friendlier, Black Fist is spiritually not dissimilar to other shots of racial radicalism like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
So I admire the intent in taking a product intended for a black audience and trying to give them, rather than the mere sight of an asskicking black dude, a metaphorical primer on social resistance. (The original title suggests not only the fighting man that serves as the film’s lead but the Black Power salute, an allusion that is surely intentional.) The execution, alas, is inept enough to knock the teeth out of the message. Neither Galfas nor Kaye (who, from what I understand, did some reshoot work at some point during this film’s long trip through the damper theaters of its era) demonstrate anything beyond a tele-bland visual competence and less than that in controlling actors - Coleman is terrific, and Richard Lawson proves a charismatic lead, but some of the supporting performances are quite painful. The bullet in the heart for the film, though, is its inadequate coverage in any scene more complex than a dialogue exchange. Time and again, action scenes are muffed because the directors were unable to find a way to capture the action, leading to poorly edited sequences where guys almost punch one another. The second half of the film with Leroy on the warpath is nearly unwatchable; there’s one scene in particular, involving a brawl in a hotel room, that boils down to the participants scuffling offscreen while the camera stares at a white wall. Leroy, the righteously furious hand of vengeance for Black America, deserves better.
