The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974)

          Three years before the miniseries Roots (1977) became an unexpected ratings blockbuster and opened many Americans’ eyes to the breadth of suffering that Africans and their U.S.-born children endured during a century of American slavery, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman explored similar subject matter and earned a reputation as one of the best TV movies ever made. (Accolades showered upon the film included nine Emmy awards.) Based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is purely fictional, depicting a 110-year-old woman as she recalls her life from the Civil War in the 1860s to the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. Gaines’ clever structure, which involves a journalist asking Miss Jane Pittman for her memories, allows the film to present vignettes that illustrate myriad forms of abuse, oppression, and prejudice. Through each harrowing episode, themes of dignity and perseverance dominate, so the movie offers both an indictment of racist social structures and a tribute to the people who survived life within those structures.

          At the beginning of the picture, Jane (Cicely Tyson) is physically frail but mentally sharp, so she’s able to oblige a request from New York reporter Quentin Lerner (Michael Murphy) for a description of her life. Most of the film unfolds in flashbacks, with Valerie Odell playing the title character as a child in a few scenes and Tyson handling most of the performance. Some of the experiences that Jane describes are historic, as when a plantation owner grants young Jane her freedom, and some are horrific, as when racist vigilantes attack a group of ex-slaves, leaving Jane to fend for herself in unfriendly territory. Each time Jane finds joy, tragedy follows. Her happy marriage to Joe Pittman (Rod Perry) ends prematurely, and her guardianship of an orphan named Ned (played by three different actors) takes a dark turn. Jane recalls the tribulations of Reconstruction, during which northern carpetbaggers plundered the demolished American south, and she describes how working as a sharecropper following emancipation was simply another form of slavery. Yet the filmmakers never take the easy path of suggesting that Jane was some pivotal historical figure--excepting her incredible strength of character, she is an everywoman representing the African-American experience. Only at the very end of the story do the filmmakers gift Jane with “importance,” thanks to a climactic scene that encapsulates Jane’s mode of quiet defiance.

          Finding fault with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is not an impossible task, but only the most hard-hearted would try. The film’s politics are humane, and the story’s engagement with history is meaningful and unflinching. If no one real person actually had all of Jane’s experiences, so what? The stories of thousands who lived through the nightmare of slavery and its aftermath remain untold, so this fictional character speaks for them. Tyson does fine work, even when slathered in award-winning old-age makeup created by Dick Smith and Stan Winston. She plays every scene with emotion and sincerity, resisting many opportunities for cheap sentimentality and instead sketching a portrait infused with pride and resilience. The supporting cast is fine, the script by Tracy Keenan Wynn is efficient, and the direction by John Korty is unobtrusive, but the experience of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is all about watching Tyson channel decades of suffering through a prism of embattled self-respect.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman: RIGHT ON

The Black Gestapo (1975)

          Unfortunately, this violent blaxploitation saga does not deliver the sharp analogy to Nazi Germany promised by its title and poster, because the paramilitary group at the center of the story is never shown flexing political power. More specifically, the filmmakers provide so little context for group’s activities that it’s difficult to determine whether the group even has power. In the weirdly insular world of The Black Gestapo, uniformed gangs move freely throughout L.A. while carrying automatic weapons, organizing rallies, and roughing up victims. No explanation is given for how the titular paramilitary group came into being, so most viewers will spend the first third of the picture just trying to figure out what the hell is happening. Then, once the movie reaches a tedious middle stretch pitting the group against the Mafia, things get even more confusing—and even more gruesome. During Mafia scenes, The Black Gestapo degrades to rape and a harrowing vignette in which the film's villain castrates an enemy with a straight razor. Suffice to say the film’s political perspective—if it even has one—is as messy as the crime scene following the castration. Actually, one could take the analogy even further by saying The Black Gestapo has no balls, since the movie ultimately becomes a simplistic revenge flick about a deposed leader seeking payback against a former subordinate.

          The gist is that General Ahmed (Rod Perry) founded something called the People’s Army for unknown reasons, presumably to do with empowering oppressed African-Americans. Soldiers in the all-black People’s Army wear khaki uniforms and red berets while functioning as vigilante do-gooders. Ahmed’s second-in-command, Colonel Kojah (Charlie Robinson), determines that more must be done, so he employs violence to intimidate enemies. Hewing to the old absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely line, Colonel Kojah transforms his squad into stormtroopers, switching to SS-style uniforms and seizing power from Ahmed. All of this trudges along somewhat incoherently until the film's final act, during which Ahmed stages a one-man assault on Kojah’s compound. This last bit, which comprises about 25 minutes of screen time, is fairly exciting in a Charles Bronson sort of way; Ahmed uses fancy weapons, martial arts, and trickery to literally defeat an army before confronting Kojah in a hand-to-hand brawl. Although The Black Gestapo is clumsily filmed, with cheap production values and way too many quasi-fisheye shots, the movie provides a decent dose of brainless violence once the filmmakers cease their futile attempts at storytelling.

The Black Gestapo: FUNKY

The Black Godfather (1974)

Once the blaxploitation genre reached full flight, many low-rent producers were content simply adding the word “black” to an existing title and then spinning a rudimentary story to justify the new hybrid moniker. The Black Godfather is ostensibly a riff on The Godfather (1972), so both films depict a transfer of power within a criminal empire. Yet while The Godfather is cinematic masterpiece, The Black Godfather is execrable. The acting is terrible, the music score is chaotic, the story is lifeless, and to describe the characterizations as nonexistent would be to give them too much credit. Rod Perry, an amiable but unskilled actor best known for playing the second-in-command cop on the TV series S.W.A.T. (1975-1976), stars as J.J., a street punk who gets taken in by a crime boss after J.J. is wounded during a brazen robbery attempt. The crime boss, Nate Williams (Jimmy Witherspoon), grooms J.J. as an underworld apprentice. Once J.J. rises to power, he clashes with a white gangster, Tony Burton (Don Chastain), who has flooded black neighborhoods with heroin. You see, J.J. is a criminal with a conscience, and he wants to draw the line at hard drugs (a nuance stolen from Marlon Brando’s character in The Godfather). The narrative of The Black Godfather is pedestrian, but it should have been sufficient for generating passable escapism. Unfortunately, writer-producer-director John Evans’ work is incompetent on nearly every level—his scenes lack focus and rhythm and shape. Furthermore, Evans fails to include enough action to keep the story moving (instead lingering on uninteresting dialogue scenes), and he has difficulty presenting story events in a coherent manner. Actors suffer for the lack of guidance, so the embarrassingly bad Witherspoon, for instance, comes off like a camera double running lines before the real actor arrives. (As a result, his character may be the mellowest hoodlum in all of blaxploitation.) In the lead role, Perry simply seems confused. He’s calm in one scene and enraged in the next, with very little narrative explanation for his mood swings. If you’re hankering for a blaxploitation riff on gangsters, stick with Larry Cohen’s vivacious Black Caeasar (1973), which is high art by comparison with The Black Godfather.

The Black Godfather: LAME