A Piece of the Action by Eithne Quinn

Author:Eithne Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Representing Ghetto Producers

In many of Hollywood’s black-oriented films of the postwar years, as already suggested, the theme of racial discrimination was dramatized through stories of blacks’ exclusion from and attempts to enter the workplace. From the important critique of racist working-class job sectors in A Raisin in the Sun and Nothing but a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964) to Poitier’s upstanding professionals of the 1960s, race-themed films variously staged the exclusion from and entry into labor markets. However, there had been little serious thematic engagement with black business culture—themes that had dropped off the cinematic landscape with the demise of black-made race films in the early decades of the twentieth century.86 Nor indeed did black enterprise feature much in the earliest black-oriented films of the 1970s. With the exception of Van Peebles’s film Watermelon Man, in which the hero sets up his own black insurance business, impasse-era films tended to present race and class critiques of small businesses and precarious work in the informal economy. Cotton’s beset black detectives work hard for their modest public-sector salaries, while preacher Deke O’Malley’s attempts at underground wealth creation ultimately amount to extortion. Angel Levine’s numbers running—an illegal enterprise that had a long history as a source of underground wealth generation in Harlem, as Belafonte well knew—is presented as basically a dead-end hustle. Mrs. Copee in Landlord is frustrated by her tiny tenement-sited beauty salon. Shaft, in 1971, presented an early post–civil rights businessman as a slick, self-employed private detective operating in both black and white worlds. But narrative emphasis rests on his lone sleuthing, at least one step removed from the black community. Further powerful stirrings arrived with Sweetback, as I argued earlier in this chapter: though his currency is sex, not money, the sense of black economic self-determination was powerfully warranted by the hero being played by Van Peebles.

However, it was Super Fly and Mack that most influentially engaged the thematic terrain of black subcultural enterprise—albeit through the socially harmful businesses of drug dealing and pimping. These films narrated the barriers to and adaptive chances for black male business activity within white-dominated power structures, projecting onscreen the predicaments, mindsets, and fantasies of black subcultural youth. Acclaimed film Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973) is the other iconic film that contributed to the flowering of portrayals of black underworld entrepreneurs at this moment. But as a remake of the classic 1930s white ethnic gangster film Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), it was far less socially embedded in subcultural black business culture than the two main case studies here.

Super Fly tells the story of four Harlem cocaine dealers: Eddie (Carl Lee), Scatter (Julius Harris), Freddie (Charles McGregor), and Priest (Ron O’Neal). Priest and Eddie are business partners who, starting from nothing, have expanded their distribution operation, and the narrative focuses on Priest’s attempt to pull off a huge $1 million drug haul so that he can go straight. In their classic investigation of racial inequality, the sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro explore the shortage of self-employment and wealth-generation opportunities for black Americans.

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