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| Fred Williamson in Black Caesar |
Cast: Fred Williamson, Gloria Hendry, Art Lund, D'Urville Martin, Julius Harris, Minnie Gentry, Philip Roye, William Wellman Jr., James Dixon, Val Avery. Screenplay: Larry Cohen. Cinematography: Fenton Hamilton. Production design: Larry Lurin. Film editing: George Folsey Jr. Music: James Brown.
Larry Cohen's Black Caesar is often clumsily put together, as in the big scene in which the protagonist, Tommy Gibbs (Fred Williamson), is shot on the streets of New York, stumbles for several blocks, commandeers a taxi that he somehow forces to drive on the sidewalks, goes several places for help, and even rides the subway, without showing any signs that he's bleeding from the wound. Some of the dialogue and acting are inept and many of its scenes are derivative and even laughable. But it's also immensely watchable, thanks in large part to Williamson's charisma and the rawness of its unabashed treatment of racism -- every taboo epithet for several ethnic groups is spoken at some point in the movie. The title, of course, is an homage to Mervyn LeRoy's 1931 classic Little Caesar, about the rise and fall of a gangster. The movie views that 1930s melodrama through a Blaxploitation lens, much the way Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983) filtered Howard Hawks's 1932 classic through the experience of Cuban expatriates in Miami, though more successfully.
