I grew up in a lower middle-class household in an upper middle-class neighborhood in Northern Kentucky but spent quite a bit of my teenage years hanging out on the streets of downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. Like most urban areas in the 1970s, there were a lot of movie theaters specializing in martial arts films and Blaxploitation flicks. Even though I was underage for most of the decade, I managed to get in to watch a surprising amount of the usually R-rated films.
One Blaxploitation film that I didn’t catch back then was MGM’s Hit Man from 1972.
The entire genre was unique to the period, aimed squarely at black audiences who wanted to get vicarious revenge on white oppression and, as such, often featured white villains. (Ironically, the films were often written, produced, and directed by white men.) The movies also featured the dreaded “N word” a lot, but then, that could actually be heard on TV at the time, too.
Today’s black-oriented films, urban or otherwise, usually pride themselves, and rightly so, on being largely realistic. These films, instead, tended to rely on African-American stereotypes, mainly the cool, fearless, sexy, super-strong, violent, hero or anti-hero…or in some cases, heroine.
These characters were generally epitomized by the likes of Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree, and Jim Brown. Hit Man, however, stars former pro football player Bernie Casey, who was probably a better actor than all of those guys. Casey’s career path actually involved only a few of the Blaxploitation pictures. For the most part, he tended to specialize in episodic television or TV movies. He is especially memorable as ill-fated real-life basketball star Maurice Stokes in 1973’s highly-praised Maurie and as the lead gargoyle in the 1972 Movie-of-the-Week, Gargoyles.
Unfortunately, in Hit Man, Casey never really is given a character to develop. He’s big. He’s tough. We’re told he’s an ex-cop, and he’s calmly but relentlessly going to find out the truth about who or what killed his brother, which happened before the picture starts. Good actor or not, he pretty much walks through the picture, seemingly ad-libbing half the time.
He does get several surprisingly explicit sex scenes with some of the lovely black actresses in the picture, including the under-utilized Pam Grier, who had not quite yet become the superstar of the genre that she would soon become.
Other familiar actors include Roger E. Mosely, later known for Magnum, PI, and, as the film’s unlikely “Big Bad,” Don Diamond, best remembered as the goofy, soft-hearted Indian, Crazy Cat, on TV’s F Troop of a decade earlier. There’s also an early, unbilled, appearance by Paul Gleason (Die Hard).
If the actual storyline, involving dirty movies, wild animals, corporate bad guys, and low-life murdering hoods, felt familiar to first-run audiences, it would likely be because it was based on the same source material used for Michael Caine’s 1971 hit, Get Carter. Both pictures do justice to the original novel.
Hit Man presents the viewer with a lot of phony-looking movie blood throughout, a lot of both black and white topless babes, and even a couple of nude shots of hunky Casey, himself. Unfortunately, there’s also a very real and, in fact, hard to fake, dog-fighting scene I could have done without.
One of the things the Blaxploitation genre is particularly known for is the funky soundtrack music found in so many of the films, which sometimes led to hit records as in the cases of Isaac Hayes with “Shaft” and Curtis Mayfield with “Superfly.” The music in Hit Man feels more like a cheap, Hollywood knock-off of that type of score, which is exactly what it is.
Finally, the film is called Hit Man, a term that has a clear connotation, and yet that connotation doesn’t apply to this film, as our protagonist is not a hit man. He’s just a guy wanting to know what happened to his brother and why everyone seems to want to prevent him from finding out. Unfortunately, I didn’t find myself caring about it nearly as much as he did.
The best part of the film was the 4K remastering, which at time as it’s own worst enemy as it shows off all of it’s budget limitations in high definition.
If you’re a fan of Blaxploitation films, you’ll likely get some enjoyment out of Hit Man with all its tropes, but I’m sorry to say it’s not a top tier example of the genre.
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