Jack Hill never could get any damn respect. A talented musician and arranger who wound up directing films indirectly, after pursuing a career in scoring them, Hill is one of the least celebrated dogbodies of the Roger Corman kennel. Unlike the upwardly mobile Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and (to a lesser extent) Monte Hellman, Hill rarely gets lauded as an auteur of any stripe, much less name-checked outside of discussions of the exploitation and blaxploitation films for which he is most widely associated. Histories of independent film in the Sixties and Seventies don't include the work of Jack Hill, which is more than an injustice-it's an outright crime!

As one Internet critic so aptly put it, Hill's movies are worthwhile because they're always better than you think they're going to be. After doing piecework for Corman on such pictures as The Wasp Woman (1960), which he padded out with new scenes for TV, and Operation Titian (1963), an art forgery caper which he turned into an artist-goes-nuts psycho thriller (and which was shelved by Corman and recut as a vampire film!), Hill banged out the singularly oddball Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told (shot in 1964, released only in 1968). Going a darker route on the weird family vogue of The Munsters and The Addams Family, Spider Baby offered a nuclear family on the cusp of meltdown that prefigured the cannibal clan of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and its even money as to which clan is the more disturbing.

Although his name is as inextricably linked with blaxploitation as Jim Brown or Fred Williamson, Hill made only two features in that particular subgenre, both starring the iconic Pam Grier. Coffy (1973) was a woman's revenge picture about a grieving nurse going ballistic on the drug pushers who turned her teenage sister into a junkie. Inexplicably profitable, Coffy beget an immediate sequel, which Hill titled Burn, Coffy, Burn (in the declarative vein of the Blacula [1972] follow-up Scream, Blacula, Scream, 1973) until the bean counters at AIP decided sequels weren't good box office. Given very little prep time, Hill turned the aborted sequel into the stand-alone feature Foxy Brown (1974), which hit the grindhouses a mere ten months after Coffy's premiere. Foxy Brown (yes, that's what it says on her California driver's license) offers more of the same, with Hill working hard at nothing so much as out-doing himself and the original film's trademark audience-pleasing set pieces of ultra-violence.

As attested by Foxy Brown's opening titles (crafted without Hill's participation or consent), American International Pictures wanted a black female James Bond, although they offered up no additional funds to make it happen. Despite Coffy's wide profit margin, Hill was treated by the independent studio as the proverbial red-headed stepchild and given no bigger a budget (although both he and Pam Grier drew fatter paychecks). Consequently, Foxy Brown often looks cheap and down-at-heal, with the then-rundown Ambassador Hotel subbing for too many interiors and the film's only real flamboyance coming from the statuesque Grier, resplendent in her gull-wing collar Day-Glo blouses and rhinestone studded bib overalls. Throughout most of her career, Grier was more adept at being an icon than an actresses and her craft at times fails her here; asked to emote a combination of rage and grief, she merely seems pissed off, although she handles comic and action scenes deftly and is throughout a heroine worth whistling for. The sins perpetuated against Foxy (and by extension, Grier) still disturb today (as does Hill's politically incorrect dialogue) and there are few contemporary actresses who would put themselves through the gauntlet that Foxy endures on her rocky road to retribution.

The dynamite Willie Hutch score elevates the material, particularly the pedestrian cinematography of Brick Marquard. Jack Hill's hand (and eye) are conspicuous throughout-- as when one character's doom is nicely telegraphed by his passing an expired parking meter while two thugs draw a bead on him from behind. Hill modulates his outrages well, saving the best for last, as Foxy crashes a drug deal in a stolen airplane, julienning one villain in the propeller blades while leaving his boss to be emasculated by a cadre of Black Panther surrogates. Kudos to TV actor Peter Brown for making this notorious bit of business so richly deserved. One of three stars of the short-lived TV western Laredo, the hunky Brown makes his medallion-wearing mini-Machiavelli a thoroughly hateful character, as gutless as he is venal. Props also to Antonio Fargas as Foxy's ne'r-do-well brother, a get-over Negro who repays her for saving his life by dropping dime on her narc boyfriend, resulting in the rubout that kicks the second act of Foxy Brown into high gear.

Producer: Buzz Feitshans
Director: Jack Hill
Screenplay: Jack Hill
Cinematography: Brick Marquard
Film Editing: Chuck McClelland
Costume Design: Ruthie West
Music: Willie Hutch
Cast: Pam Grier (Foxy Brown), Antonio Fargas (Link Brown), Peter Brown (Steve Elias), Terry Carter (Dalton Ford/Mike Anderson), Kathryn Loder (Katherine Wall), Harry Holcombe (Judge Fenton), Sid Haig (Hays, pilot), Juanita Brown (Claudia), Sally Ann Stroud (Deb), Bob Minor (Oscar), Tony Giorgio (Eddie), Fred Lerner (Bunyon), Jon Cedar (Dr. Chase), H. B. Haggerty (Brandi), Boyd "Red" Morgan (Slauson), Esther Sutherland (Nurse Crockett), Jeannie Epper (Bobbi, lesbian bar bully), Jack Bernardi (Tedesco), Ed Knight (Adams), Edward Cross (Willard).
C-94m. Letterboxed.

by Richard Harland Smith