CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

By: Brian Berger
August 25, 2019

One of 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating some of our favorite action movies from the Seventies (1974–1983).

FRIDAY FOSTER | d. ARTHUR MARKS | 1975

The first thing to understand about Friday Foster is that “CP time” doesn’t stand for Communist Party. What it does mean is — well, let’s wait on that. If possible, I suggest watching this hugely enjoyable and frequently impressive movie without preconceptions, for while it wouldn’t have existed without many “blaxploitation” movies preceding it, Friday Foster is in many ways something else: a black political conspiracy satire? But with a little sex in it?

How this happened is an intriguing mystery. The film’s name and broad concept — black woman model turned fashion photographer — comes from an eponymous syndicated American comic strip created and written by (white) cartoonist Jim Lawrence, and illustrated by a Spanish artist, Jorge Longarón. Whether the film’s (white) screenwriter, Orville Hampton, took anything more specific from the comic is unknown but he probably didn’t have to. He’d been a prolific writer of B-movie and television scripts since the 1950s, with flashes of more ambitious fare, like the remarkable — and still underknown — interracial drama One Potato, Two Potato (1964), for which he earned an Oscar nomination. If this movie’s script is nothing special — it’s no Three Days of the Condor (also 1975), for example — it doesn’t interfere with the many wonderful performances.

Credit for the film’s vivacity must go to the film’s (white) producer and director Arthur Marks, formerly of Perry Mason fame and more recently a B-movie director — including two pretty good, and themselves somewhat offbeat, blaxploitation pictures, Detroit 9000 (1973) and Bucktown (1975), the latter including numerous actors also in Friday Foster. Some people will prefer Bucktown Pam Grier but not me, not least because her Friday Foster co-star, Yaphet Kotto, is a much better actor than action-icon Fred Williamson — and funnier too. Not that Friday Foster lacks for violence or vivacity: assassination, a funktastic fashion show, google-eyed death scenes and a climactic shoot-out all have their parts, but the screams don’t drown out the laughs either.

Scene after scene, this incredible cast delivers: Ted Lange, then of black sitcom That’s My Mama fame; awesomely sweating Carl Weathers before Rocky; Scatman Crothers just after opening Ralph Bakshi’s Blaxploitation busting Coonskin; scene-stealing Godfrey Cambridge in his last film appearance before his untimely death the following year. Blacklisted Eartha Kitt, appearing in her first movie since 1958, didn’t like Friday Foster — she did it to just get back onscreen — but you’d never know it: she’s scintillating. The cinematography, editing, music, unfussy Los Angeles-area location shooting — even the actor’s wardrobes — are all of interest. Sure, it’s not Shampoo — to name that year’s and every year’s untoppable L.A.-set sex-and-politics picture. But it makes you wonder what a black version could have been like.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

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