American International Pictures had a funny habit of resurrecting dead exploitation heroes when their exploits proved sufficiently profitable to ensure a sequel. Like Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and Blacula (1972) before him, Fred Williamson's high-stepping Black Caesar (1973) crawled out of his grave for an instant follow-up just ten months later. Sitting pretty on the original film's $2,000,000 profit (roughly quadruple its budget), producer Samuel Z. Arkoff green-lighted Hell Up in Harlem (1973) so fast that he had time to recall release prints of Black Caesar to remove William's onscreen death, which this continuation depicts in its opening frames as just a thorough ass-stompin'. (Tommy Gibbs' comeuppance at the hands of the local toughs his rise-to-power inspired remained intact in European prints and on later VHS tapes and DVDs.) Largely improvised and shot guerilla-style in New York and Los Angeles around a frequently absent Williamson (then starring in Universal's That Man Bolt, 1973), Hell Up in Harlem ain't pretty or graceful but it sure is a lot of fun.

It feels like a thankless job to work up praise for a film discounted by its architect as unnecessary. "We shouldn't have made the film," Larry Cohen told Andrea Juno and V. Vale in an interview published in Re/Search: Incredibly Strange Films in 1986. "But that's what happens when greed gets in the way." Truth be told, Cohen is being too hard on Hell Up in Harlem and, implicitly, too easy on Black Caesar. With its origins in the classic Warner Brothers gangster films (its specific model being Mervyn LeRoy's 1931 classic Little Caesar), Black Caesar is the more formulaic and plodding, requiring Williamson to do little more than dance in shoes first owned by Edward G. Robinson. Inspired by nothing so much as continued profit, Hell Up in Harlem is more free-form and anarchic. Like blaxploitation's King Henry IV, Pt. 2, the film brings back all the familiar (surviving) characters, throwing them into the mix to adapt or die. Hell's ultra-violence and double digit body count look ahead to Brian De Palma's 1983 Scarface remake (particularly the mansion siege, which favors the home team in this incarnation) and Abel Ferrara's King of New York (1990), whose climactic taxi cab bleed-out feels informed by the shoot-out that brings Black Caesar to a close and sets the stage for Hell Up in Harlem.

In later years, Fred Williamson has downplayed and even diminished the importance of director-writer-producer Larry Cohen as the driving force behind these two films. While the Black Caesar canon certainly benefits from The Hammer's iconic presence it's clearly Cohen's sense of the absurd that makes Hell Up in Harlem more fun than it ought (or needs) to be. A former joke writer and stand-up comic, Cohen structures Hell as a comedy of errors, setting up the dapper but vainglorious Williamson as his straight man/fall guy while raining chaos on his head as if he were some uptown Mr. Hulot on a holiday that Death forgot to take. Of the many preposterous setpieces that Cohen pulls out of his hat, the most jaw-dropping involves Williamson running down turncoat Tony King (soon to play his own imperiled black godfather in the criminally obscure Report to the Commissioner, 1975) in a foot and car pursuit that turns into an airplane chase when the antagonists book tickets on separate flights from New York to Los Angeles, only to settle their beef man-to-man in the baggage claim of LAX.

Producers: Larry Cohen, Janelle Webb
Executive Producer: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Peter Sabiston
Director: Larry Cohen
Screenplay: Larry Cohen
Cinematography: Fenton Hamilton
Film Editing: Peter Honess, Franco Guerri
Music: Fonce Mizell, Freddie Perren
Cast: Fred Williamson (Tommy Gibbs), Julius Harris (Papa Gibbs), Gloria Hendry (Helen), Margaret Avery (Sister Jennifer), D'Urville Martin (Reverend Rufus), Tony King (Zach), Gerald Gordon (D.A. DiAngelo), Bobby Ramsen (Joe Frankfurter), James Dixon (Irish), Esther Sutherland (The Cook).
C-95 min.

by Richard Harland Smith