Willie Dynamite

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Willie Dynamite from the heyday of blaxploitation films.

The story chronicles the fall from heights of a pimp, Willie. As we first see Willie, he’s on top of the world, commanding the finest stable of hookers in the City, driving a pimped-out purple Cadillac with gold trim and fur-lined seats, wearing real fur. He sends his girls out to work, with especial orders for his newest, finest, Passion, who doesn’t seem to understand that she’s an independent businesswoman. Willie gives her a pep talk worthy of an Amway distributor; after all Willie is a capitalist, he is the finest example of the market’s entrepreneurs.

After this Willie meets up with the other top pimps of town. Bell, who seems to have a rivalry going on with Willie, proposes they all join forces, pooling their cop-bribes and divvying up the territories. Bell has big business in mind, a sort of pimps’ conglomerate. But though the others are all eager for it, Willie is determined to go it alone. ‘I like the competition!’ he exclaims. ‘It’s what capitalism is all about!’

But things quickly turn bad for Willie. The cops start hassling him every chance they get. His women get run in, especially Passion; his car is towed wherever he parks it. One salt-and-pepper cop team comprised of a Black Muslim exercise in self-righteousness and a tired old white cop who only wants to brutalize suspects on his way to retirement, seem to be on Willie’s ass everywhere he turns.

Passion meanwhile is being tempted to leave Willie’s employ by a social worker, the black DA’s girlfriend. Passion seems interested at first in a life of modeling and maybe acting, but she scoffs at the paltry sums involved. She knows she can make five times as much on her back for Willie.

The social worker takes this as a challenge. She busts into Willie’s girls’ apartment and start undermining his authority with them. Later she returns and finds his secret stash of bank books. She copies down all the amounts and accounts, feeds them through the DA to an IRS agent, and gets Willie’s accounts frozen.

Willie can only find solace at his mom’s home. His mom is not too well, but all the family gather there every week for Sunday dinner. They only know Willie is a musical impressario and his girls, they think, are a singing group. Willie lavishes gifts on his mom and doesn’t disabuse his relatives of their illusions.

But Bell makes moves to grab Willie’s girls; he also tries to kidnap Willie, but Willie turns the tables on him and leaves Bell naked under an overpass in the Bronx.

Without cash, Willie goes to a rundown neighborhood to get his secret stash of dope, to sell for cash. The pair of detectives are hot on his trail, and Willie has to do some fancy running through torn down buildings and vacant lots to escape, in what is the movie’s finest, most realistic, sequence.

But the end is near for Willie. Bell gets all his girls, and his thugs work Willie over; the cops drag him in for another petty bust, and in a final indignity, Willie must watch as the street punks strip his Caddy.

At his hearing, Willie knows he can beat the rap, because the cops had no warrant to enter his apartment. But his mom shows up in the courtroom and suffers a heart attack.

When he gets out of jail the next day, Willie goes wild. Doped up, he goes for Bell with an automatic, but only shoots up his car. Visions of Passion, who was scarred by the dykes in the jail, haunt him. When he gets back to his place, there’s his nemesis the social worker. She tells him his mother is in the hospital – he gets there and apologizes for himself to his mom, only to see her die.

He breaks down in his car. In the film’s best-acted scene, Willie and the social worker have their final confrontation back at his place. She doesn’t rejoice to see him brought down. She was a girl like Passion herself, she confesses. Willie gives her an envelope, ‘for Passion. Make her all right again.’ And he says, speaking perhaps of Passion or himself, ‘cut and bruises heal in time.’

He goes outside to find his Caddy being towed again. But he doesn’t seem to care now. When a young kid asks him if the car is his, Willie answers, ‘No – not any more.’

The movie has strong and weak points. The script is trying to touch on too many bases at once. Willie as the entrepreneur is a good satire on the success movements; this is then dropped for standard crime movie conflicts with rival pimps; then we move on to being hassled by the man (perhaps at Bell’s urging, though this is never made explicit; these cops are tough and almost lawless, but they are not shown to be corrupt). Then there is the more melodramatic side story of Passion and the social worker, action scenes like the chase through the tenements, a revenge bit against Bell, mom’s heart attack…

The direction is television level, just getting the camera to give basic coverage. Lighting is also adequate but not expressive. Costumes and makeup are all good (apart from the f/x for bruises, which are weak).

Acting is quite strong, all the cast is good for their roles. The general acting style is a little broad and over the top, but not out of line for a crime genre picture. And the intentions are all good.

Music is only so-so, very typical of the early 70s. But somebody had the idea they wanted to copy Superfly and its use of songs as a sort of Greek chorus. Though not up to Curtis Mayfield’s score, the three songs give us the opening – Willie on top – second curtain – Willie’s lowest point – and end, the hoped-for rise to come.

The weakness lies mostly in the movie’s lack of authenticity. Compared to Superfly, this seems like a typical Universal TV cop drama with some cusswords. Zanuck and Brown produced out of Universal, which enabled the production to have the money for decent costumes and shooting schedule, DP, and so on. But the drawback to having a couple of white Hollywood execs make a blaxploitation picture is that at the top of the production, there is no understanding of the black experience. Those two didn’t know their audience. So the result is rather like today with grandfathers shepherding pictures aimed at teens. ‘Give them some of this and some of that, the kids seem to go for that crap,’ you can imagine them saying, over and over again, in script notes and production meetings.

This was not all that different from what happened when just a couple years earlier Hollywood had tried to make hip drug movies about the counter-culture.

(14 April 2009)