Blaxploitation and... Road House?!?

Sometimes when I'm watching movies, my mind goes off in strange directions. Today was one of those times. Last night I watched Friday Foster, and as I was thinking about the movie on one of my weekend walks with the dog, some odd things finally hit me.

Pam Grier plays Friday Foster, a former fashion model turned photographer for Glance magazine, a magazine for the black demographic run by Ford Malotte (Godfrey Cambridge). On New Year's Eve, Friday gets a couple of calls. One is from a friend Clorils, a fellow fashion model and friend of Friday's who begs Friday to help her, as something is seriously wrong. But Friday has already gotten another call, from her boss, telling her to go to the airport to cover the arrival of Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala), the only black billionaire in America, who is known as the black Howard Hughes, as he's not just wealthy but famously reclusive.

So Friday goes to the airport to get pictures of the arrival, evading security to do so. It's a good thing that she does evade security, as when Tarr does step off the plane, he's shot and wounded by a couple of men dressed as cops, led by Yarbro (Carl Weathers), who in the resulting melee does catch sight of Friday. So now her life is in danger.

Still, Friday covers a fashion show led by stylish black couturier Madame Rena (Eartha Kitt), in which Clorils is one of the models. Unfortunately, Clorils gets stabbed and killed during the show and when the police investigate they find dope in her apartment, even though Friday knows fully well that Clorils would never have been a dealer and that someone is setting her up.

Clorils was a jet-setter, going off to Washington on the weekends where she met, among others, Sen. David Lee Hart (Paul Benjamin). So she and her detective friend -- who unsurprisingly becomes her boyfriend by the end of the movie -- Colt Hawkins (Yaphet Kotto) head off to Washington to find out about the mysterious "Black Widow" conspiracy and whether Sen. Hart might have had something to do with trying to kill Tarr at the airport.

Now, as I was watching, I found myself thinking that Friday Foster seemed a bit more muted than Grier's earlier movies. And then it hit me. A lot of the blaxplotation movies reminded me of Road House (having just blogged about it) in that you watch them to see the lead character kick ass as much as you would for the plot. Getting sex appeal (depending on whether you prefer to look at women like Grier or guys like Swayze) helps, too; how much the movie is grounded in reality is entirely secondary.

Friday Foster, however, felt different in tone. There are chase scenes and the big shootout at the end, but Grier isn't kicking butt the way she does by putting razor blades in her afro in Coffy. Instead, it felt more as though the filmmakers were trying to go for a bit more serious vibe the way that other 1970s conspiracy theory movies did, such as Soylent Green or The Parallax View. (Thankfully, however, Friday Foster doesn't have the tedious focus on evil big business in cahoot with the government to hurt the little guy that other conspiracy movies did in the 1970s.)

Now, Friday Foster doesn't always work as it tries to straddle two different genres, but it's always interesting. The problem isn't a lack of Grier being bad-ass, and certainly not a lack of nudity (we see models disrobing and changing outfits, as well as Grier and Kotto taking a bath together). Instead, I think it's the writing, which gave the characters a lot of bad lines, and wildly uneven acting. Eartha Kitt, in particular, seems to be in a completely different movie, but her line deliveries are hilariously over the top. And what Ted Lange (later the bartender on The Love Boat) is doing here as a pimp is beyond me. And as always, never mind the continuity problems. (As with Road House, the signs of California filming, such as the mountains ostensibly in the Potomac valley, are all over the film.)

People who are looking for traditional blaxploitation aren't going to get quite so much of it in Friday Foster. But they are going to get a movie that's fascinating for a whole bunch of other reasons. Despite its flaws, I really enjoyed it.