REVIEW: BLACK CAESAR

(I guess I should post a SPOILER WARNING here, since some of you probably have not seen this movie.)

Black Caesar is the story of the rise and fall of Tommy Gibbs. It's a story about the hard lessons you learn in the hard streets, and it's a tale that resonates even to this day.

Fuck, who am I kidding? Black Caesar is a crazy blaxploitation movie with lots of people getting shot four times in the chest and Fred Williamson fucking up literally every person he meets. The only person in this movie he doesn't violently manhandle at one point or another is his own mother, but then she dies anyways because she's heartbroken he's such a bad son.

The movie opens with young Tommy, a shoeshine boy in Harlem, assisting in a mob hit. The guy he's shining is a target, so Tommy holds his leg while an assassin walks up and puts a bunch of bullets in him. The hit goes so well that the gangster assassin hires him to deliver an envelope to McKinley, the most evil Irish cop Harlem has ever seen. McKinley accuses Tommy of stealing bribe money, knocks the kid down a flight of stairs, and actually beats him with a nightclub while he's falling. That's hardcore. At the bottom of the stairs McKinley continues the beating, and Tommy is sent to jail with a busted leg.

Maybe being savagely beaten by a racist cop was a crime in the seventies, because I don't see how a cop could send someone to jail for stealing his bribe money. Or I don't know, maybe he could, since every single white person in the movie is a racist and has an uncontrollable need to throw as many different racial slurs into a sentence as possible. In one conversation alone, this Italian guy calls Tommy a nigger, a spade, a jungle bunny, and a spook. Of course, Tommy gets back at this guy later when he basically murders every person he knows. That's justice, Harlem style.

Anyway, after he goes to jail, the next time we see Tommy he's gone from skinny little kid to full-on Fred Williamson mode, strutting down the street in a new suit while James Brown music plays. He's officially turned badass. Then he walks into a barbershop and shoots a guy in the face, in case you had any doubt.

Tommy and his friends decide to take over Harlem, and apparently this is best accomplished by shooting every white person they can find. It's kind of like that song Garrett Morris did on Saturday Night Live ("I'm gonna get me a shotgun and kill every whitey I seeeeee") except they really do it. I should go back and count exactly how many white people die in this movie, because it's a lot.

At one point, in the scene a friend appropriately labeled "Operation: Gorilla-Raid the Fucking Crackers", Tommy's men show up at some mobster cookout. They jump off the roof and just let loose. There's like five solid minutes where all you hear is machine guns and screaming. Just to show you these people mean business, the director cuts away to the buffet table, where a Thanksgiving-size turkey explodes. Nothing is safe.

Then the guys throw all the bodies in the pool, because that'll just look fucked up to whoever finds it. One of the best parts of the scene, though, is when all the black guys dramatically jump off the roof, one of them just kind of slips and falls sideways into the bushes. I had to watch it three times to make sure it was really there. It's totally awesome because you know that guy was totally like "What'd I miss?" when he got up, and his buddies where like "The fuckin' pool is fulla dead bleedin' honkies. The fuck you think you missed?"

"Well can I have some turkey then?"

"Fool, we shot the turkey."

As cool as Fred Williamson is though, eventually he lets all the power of being Black Caesar go to his head, and his friends don't like him anymore and he has to rape his girl when he wants sex. If the movie were divided into three chapters, the third and final chapter would definitely be called "The White People Strike Back", because after a while McKinley gets really fed up with this black guy who thinks he's hot shit and just decides to have all his buddies shot. He sends out this hitman that looks like Donald Trump to kill Tommy's men. He shoots one of Tommy's friends and makes his getaway in a horse-drawn carriage. This is New York City, and you're telling me nobody can catch a murderer in a carriage? All you have to do is just shoot the horse, or maybe just walk up to the carriage and pull the guy out or something, since it's not like those things go very fast.

If you want to know just how tough Tommy Gibbs is, though, Donald Trump shoots him in the stomach and he wanders around the city for an entire day with no medical help at all and is still in good enough shape that he beats the shit out of McKinley in one of the best scenes of the movie.

McKinley thinks he's got Tommy dead to rights. He's all like "Shine my shoes, nigger". So Tommy starts shining his shoes, and you're thinking what the fuck, right? This guy is too badass to just be this cop's bitch all of a sudden, even if he is shot in the stomach. But then he takes down McKinley and starts violently spreading black shoe polish on his face, because nothing Fred Williamson ever does can be described as delicate in anyway. Then he gets McKinley to sing "Mammy" while he beats him up.

"SING MAMMY FOR ME! COME ON!"
"MAMMY! AAAAHH! MAMMY! MAMMY!"

It's one of those really satisfying scenes where you're really glad the hero of the movie is sadistic and mean enough to give the bad guy what he really deserves. Then Tommy beats McKinley's face in with the box of shoe shining equipment and everything in the world is okay.

Well, maybe not, because the movie doesn't really have what I would call a happy ending. Tommy Gibbs eventually dies from his gunshot wound after being accosted by a bunch of children in the ghetto he grew up in.

NEXT ON THE LIST:

HELL UP IN HARLEM

Tommy Gibbs is back, mother fuckers! And this time HE MEANS BUSINESS! Fred Williamson returns in the sequel to Black Caesar, somehow still alive and kicking ass. I've never seen this one before, but from the poster it looks like Black Caesar meets James Bond or some shit, which means it will be completely awesome. Stay tuned.