Walk the Walk (1970)

          Walk the Walk is unusual—it seems improbable there is another grungy movie about a middle-aged Black seminarian forming an intense psychosexual bond with the blowsy white prostitute who feeds his heroin habit. Alas, Walk the Walk bears little resemblance to serious cinematic portrayals of addiction, such as Dusty and Sweets McGee and The Panic in Needle Park, both of which were released in 1971. Bizarrely conceived and cheaply produced, Walk the Walk feels like an exploitation flick even though, in its most interesting moments, the picture endeavors to tell a resonant story about characters trapped in soul-crushing spirals. Walk the Walk is too sloppy to qualify as serious cinema, and too thoughtful to get dismissed as trash. It‘s either schlock with the soul of a real movie, or vice versa.

          Bernie Hamilton, a few years before achieving prominence with a regular gig as a police captain on Starsky & Hutch, stars as Mike, who inherited heroin addiction from his mother and now seeks salvation through religious training. When his usual dealer gets busted, Mike connects with Judy (Honor Lawrence), an aging hooker who sells dope as a side hustle. Immediately taken by Mike’s intelligence and sensitivity, she tries and fails to seduce him, then promises that someday he’ll need to pay for a fix with romance. Had writer-director Jac Zacha found a producer willing to develop this material into a grim character study, Walk the Walk could have become something offbeat and touching. Instead, Zacha hooked up with Kroger Babb, who produced a few social-problem exploitation flicks in the ‘50s; the script Zacha cowrote with Babb pairs the Mike-Judy storyline with silliness involving a Satanic cult, the cartoonishly swishy leader of which recently changed his name from “Big Daddy” to “The Unholy One.”
           Accordingly, viewers intrigued by the Mike-Judy dynamic must slog through a whole lot of nonsense. In one sequence, Judy officiates a hippie wedding (after Judy asks, “Dost thou take this broad to be thy wife,” the groom replies, “I can dig it”). In another sequence, Mike gets chased through a desert by two cultists, leading to a shot of Mike inadvertently ripping the female cultist’s shirt off as she falls from a high hill. (Presumably Babb was eager to juice the picture with nudity, however fleeting.) Adding to the movie's fever-dream quality is a score comprising shapeless acid-rock grooves (as opposed to a proper score that matches the flow of the storyline). And because this is a random ‘70s oddity, the ending is an ambiguous freakout. It’s hard to know whether the makers of Walk the Walk cynically attempted to weave counterculture signifiers into their movie, whether they couldn’t tell bad ideas from good ones, or both.

Walk the Walk: FUNKY