(The following is the first of what will hopefully be many stream-of-consciousness reviews from Quentin Tarantino's L.A. Grindhouse Festival at The New Beverly. Place bets now as to how long I stick with this.)
"Hey, I don't have to take this. I'm a rich nigger. I thought you paid these poo-butts off. You beat-walkin' motherfuckers..."
If you're going to run a two-month grindhouse festival, you might as well kick it off righteous with some serious dick-swinging swagger. And if it's swinging-dick swagger you're after*, you can't do much better than Michael Campus's The Mack, an ode to the power and the glory and the spiritual ruination of "The Game" that'll be sadly relevant so long as hip-hop culture continues to celebrate the patently ridiculous ho-pimpin' lifestyle. (Not that I'm 100% morally opposed to this; it's just that a little variety would be nice. And rhyming about slinging keys does not count as "variety". Just once, I'd love for someone to boast about their art dealing expertise.)
What's been fascinating about The Mack as the years have worn on is how it's gradually turned into an unflattering portrait of pimping thanks to Campus's technical ineptitude - i.e. messy mise-en-scene, murky lighting and clueless staging (the scene where Slim gets "stuck" is so confusingly done that it looks like a blown take). Though The Mack was intended as a sobering news flash from the mean streets of Oakland (written in prison on toilet paper by Robert J. Poole), it was much more successful at the time of its 1973 release as a ho-smackin', shit-talkin', Cadillac Eldorado-rollin' piece of ghetto entertainment. Urban dwellers both black and white got a charge out of seeing these very familiar, garishly outfitted motherfuckers strut across the big screen (even today, an ace pimp always looks like he's playing to a camera, real or imagined), and they especially warmed to the coked-up camaraderie shared by Max Julien and Richard Pryor, both of whom probably accounted for one stone-cold sober take combined. But no one gave a shit because the fellas' substance-enhanced banter - if you want to call it that; it's mostly two guys mumbling into each other's jacket lapels - gave off a killer contact high (or maybe that was just the skunky smelling fog lingering over the theater).
Now, was Julien, who plays Goldie, the smoothest mack to ever patrol the boulevard, a great actor? At the risk of infuriating Tarantino, I'm going to say no, but what he lacked in thespian chops he made up for with his stoned charisma, which remains inimitable. As for Pryor, this was 1973; everything coming out of his mouth had the potential to be the funniest shit you'd ever heard. And I mean everything. The guy even puked funny (as evidenced by his classic drunk bit in That Nigger's Crazy). And while he's never really coherent enough in The Mack to string together a complete sentence (if you've seen the movie, you know this ain't hyperbole), Pryor still makes you laugh just by marveling at how supremely fucked up he is.
My favorite parts of The Mack, aside from the crap game scene whence the above quote originates, are the delightfully unpredictable appearances of Goldie's blind oracle (played by Paul Harris, whom you might recall as Gator from Truck Turner) who's just full of knowledge about the game, dropping gems about how any fool can control a woman's body, while a great pimp can control their mind. (Goldie, being a wise player, takes the blind man's word as gospel, subjecting his bitches to far-out mind control sessions at a local planetarium - a brilliant idea that's never gone out of fashion). The guy's like the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Oaktown; if only he'd been around in the 1980s to mentor Drew Gooden.
As a socially conscious dispatch from the ghetto, The Mack, with its confluence of gritty verisimilitude and earnest moralizing (the latter provided by Roger E. Mosley as Olinga, Goldie's Black Panther-ish brother), is damned affecting compared to the other major blacksploitation efforts of the early 70s. Granted, the sight of Goldie's mama in the hospital after sustaining a point-blank pistol shot that should've blown her dome clean off is comical, the Olinga deus ex machina during the final confrontation with the dirty cops doubly so - there's still a powerful sincerity to the work that compensates for these flaws. Plus, the milieu it captures is depressingly devoid of glamour compared to such period fetish works as Goodfellas, Casino and Dead Presidents. Campus's camera is always up in someone's face, packing the frame with sweaty visages and dope-heavy eyelids that aren't the product of make-up. And the infamous Player's Ball, brilliantly parodied in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, is so dimly lit one can barely see well enough appreciate the pimps' threads, which are a long way from Bill Blass and Oleg Cassini. (That said, the pre-Ball picnic and softball game, shot in broad daylight, is worthy of Eisenstein). The movie's scope is as small-time as its protagonist's ambitions; unlike today's hip-hop videos, where broke-ass pretenders roll around in rented Bentleys and luxuriate in some rich white guy's mansion they pass off as their own, Goldie's ride and living situation never exceed his means. He's got too much pride to be fake. In that respect, The Mack shames garbage like State Property. It's entertaining while still being real - which the hip-hop culture it inspired ain't been in a long time.
If you're waiting for a more thorough assessment of The Chinese Mack... I don't know if such a thing is possible. That's not true, of course. Tarantino could probably do forty-five minutes on it. Here's hoping he weighs in at a later date 'cuz I just ain't got the wherewithal.
(I should also note that Tarantino's print of The Mack featured the Alan Silvestri soundtrack recorded for the home video release, which was kind of a bummer.)
*Grow up.
Comments