ART of Action, the latest offering from the ever adventurous young LUMI programmers at Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast, is an action-packed all-nighter running tomorrow evening right through until Sunday morning.
It all starts at 11pm, and for those with serious stamina, a total of five films have been lined-up for screening through until breakfast. The treats in store include Polite Society, The Heroic Trio, Fallen Angels and Monkey Man, but for me the real delights are to be found in Jack Hill’s 1974 blaxploitation masterpiece Foxy Brown, screening at the ungodly hour of 4.30am.
LUMI's Action-Packed All-Nighter ROUND 4 🥊
— Queen's Film Theatre (@QFTBelfast) November 22, 2024
Foxy Brown (Pam Grier) poses as a sex worker to infiltrate a gang of mobsters who butchered her boyfriend.#FoxyBrown, Sat 30 Nov.
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The incomparable Pam Grier plays an angry woman who takes a job as a high-class prostitute to exert a little bloody revenge on the evil mobsters who murdered her undercover cop boyfriend, who’d been ratted out by her feckless brother Link (played by Antonio ‘Huggy Bear’ Fargas of Starsky and Hutch fame).
A fast-paced, female empowerment fable that allows Grier to beat a bunch of jive-talking street hustlers and drug pushers to within an inch of their lives, throwing out sassy one liners as she goes, it’s a hugely entertaining slice of 1970s cinematic sleaze.
A hasty follow-up to Hill and Grier’s previous exploitation opus, Coffy, which made Grier, a former switchboard operator at Roger Corman’s American International Pictures, a cult superstar, and marked out Hill - who fanboy Quentin Tarantino once called the “Howard Hawks of exploitation” - as a superior craftsman in a world of hacks, it works on several levels.
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As a straight-ahead urban thriller, it delivers the goods, ramming home the street-wise violence, funky threads and wah-wah pedal guitar sounds the genre is still revered for.
Despite its seedy setting in a world of colourful pimps, preening prostitutes and dodgy drug dens, Foxy Brown also works as a kind of forward thinking proto-feminist adventure, where a strong no-nonsense female character won’t take any guff from anyone and is left to call all the shots and deliver the blows on her own from start to finish.
In a genre where women were usually objectified as mere playthings for the male leads to toy with, that’s no mean feat.
Story-wise, Foxy Brown is little more than a re-hash of Coffy, in which Grier also masquerades as a call girl to avenge a family death, but the tone is a little lighter here - and that, combined with the super-cocky attitude that the film’s star exudes throughout, makes it something truly special.
It’s easy to see why Tarantino fell for Pam Grier so strongly that he crafted Jackie Brown in her image
It’s easy to see why Tarantino fell for Pam Grier so strongly that he crafted Jackie Brown in her image, as she cruises through the inner-city backstreets with a funky swagger and a knowing sneer that suggests she’s having a ball setting the underworld thugs she meets to rights.
With Grier firing on all cylinders, an array of cartoonish villains to see off and a super slinky soundtrack from Willie Hutch to groove to, Foxy Brown is just right for a little late night/early morning cinema action - so long as you can stay awake, that is.
