Three classics from the often under-appreciated history of black American movies

After watching film historian Elvis Mitchell’s excellent Netflix documentary Is That Black Enough for You?, in which he takes a deep and exhaustive dive into the wealth of too often overlooked classics from the history of black American cinema, I was spurred to discover more of the films mentioned.

Here are three classics of the often misunderstood and under-appreciated long history of black American movies that offer a healthy historical corrective to the idea that the current surge of black representation on screen arose from nowhere and which stand on their own cinematic merits as not mere historical oddities but fascinating and powerful films.

Full of determined performances, memorable soundtracks and hard-hitting social commentary they’re also undeniably entertaining and the work that black directors, producers and performers produced in this brief but prolific period would go on to inspire the next generation to even greater heights.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL:

• Ganja and Hess — YouTube

One of the strangest and most mercurial films of any era, multi-hyphenate Bill Gunn’s take on the vampire film remains a touchstone in the history of American movies. Shown in lavish restorations by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, remade in 2014 by Spike Lee as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and written about with reverence by generations of film critics and academics it’s a hard to describe but one-of-a-kind experience.

Gunn was a playwright, actor, novelist and film director who was approached in 1972 to head what production company Kelly-Jordan Enterprises hyped as the most ambitious black movie ever made — a $350,000 vampire film that would open up a new direction in the then fashionable blaxploitation universe towards the underexplored genre of horror.

Long before Jordan Peele, Gunn recognised the potential for horror to be a means of taking a hard hitting look at the politics of race in the US and used the idea of vampirism as a metaphor for “black assimilation, white cultural imperialism and the hypocrisies of organised religion”, delivered in a singularly frenetic and wide-ranging aesthetic that foreshadowed the postmodern, reference-heavy 1990s era films of Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino. It’s also a pioneering depiction of unapologetic black desire and sexuality.

He also took the genius decision to cast Duane Jones — the pioneering black hero of horror master George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead — in the lead role of Dr Hess Green, a rich, ancient vampire who is afflicted with bloodthirst after his stabbing many centuries ago by a dagger used by the ancient Black civilisation of Myrthia.

Though Green does his best to avoid hunting except when he absolutely has to, his age-old routine is severely disrupted by the arrival on the scene of a new assistant — the suicidal alcoholic George Meda, played by Gunn himself. When Meda dies, Hess is left at the mercy of his bloodthirsty widow Ganja who soon leads him down a fateful and terrible path towards becoming the monster he’d spent so many centuries avoiding.

Multi-layered, wide-ranging in its broader sociopolitical concerns and always visually intriguing and aesthetically daring it’s a film that continues to intrigue and enchant in new and exciting ways and still has much relevance to the tumultuous racially charged politics of the current generation.

TRAILER: 

THE STONE COLD CLASSIC:

• Cotton Comes to Harlem — YouTube

Legendary actor and director Ossie Davis took a no-holds barred, high-jinks comic approach to the detective genre in this 1970 cult-classic. Starring Raymond St Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge as “Coffin Ed and Gravedigger, two detectives only a mother could love”, it’s a frenzied police procedural about the investigation into the dodgy dealings of a Harlem preacher and fraudster who takes money from his flock in return for promises of land parcels in Africa.

Based on a novel by pioneering black crime writer Chester Hines, the film stands a hugely enjoyable romp on its own merits while also serving as marker for much of the style and celebration of black heroes that would go on to characterise the brief but memorable peak period of blaxploitation.

Thanks to the combination of Davis’ light but winking touch and the hugely enjoyable time that his super cop double-team evidently have in taking down the man, it still turns out five decades later to be an enjoyable, rollicking rollercoaster of a ride that finds just enough time to also stop and make some pertinent and all too prescient points about black life in America.

TRAILER:

THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH:

• The Spook Who Sat by the Door

Not necessarily the most visually daring or aesthetically innovative film on this list but certainly one of the most ideologically revolutionary. Director Ivan Dixon’s 1973 adaptation of the righteously angry novel by Sam Greenlee is a film so crazy in conception that it’s still hard to believe it was bankrolled by a major studio in any era.

Starring Lawrence Cook, it’s the story of a cunning plot by the CIA to recruit more black people in an effort to counteract its bad image in the black community, that goes spectacularly wrong when the stooge they think they’ve hired as window-dressing turns out to be a hard-studying revolutionary bent on using his training to train poor, angry black youth into a revolutionary army intent on destroying the CIA.

Whether you believe the conspiracy theories or not, it’s still undeniably strange that after much hype and pre-publicity the film swiftly vanished from theatres just weeks after its release. Some still maintain that this was the result of interference from the FBI and though it remained criminally unseen for decades, the internet has brought it back to light as a wonderfully Herbie Hancock soundtracked but curious memento of a previous but all too relatable time in American history when the lines between mainstream profit and counterculture revolutionary disaffection were briefly blurred and almost satisfactorily exploited by both sides of the cultural divide.

TRAILER: