TCM is running a podcast on Pam Grier, and last month ran a couple of nights of her movies to promote the podcast. This gave me the chance to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before, including Black Mama White Mama.
As you can guess, Pam Grier is the black mama in the movie, a character named Lee Daniels. She's not actually a biological mother, but a prostitute who's been sent to a women's prison in some tropical island country that may or may not be the Philippines. (This one and a couple other Grier movies from the same period were filmed in the Philippines, and there are times when the Philippines flag shows up, but at other times the script seems to want us to believe that the movie is in some unnamed tropical country. And why would there be this many non-Asian people in the Philippines anyway?) Having the movie open up in a women's prison gives the moviemakers the chance to use all the tropes of the genre to good effect, such as food fights or women showering together, as well as the inmates trying to navigate the system.
One of Lee's fellow prisoners is Karen Brent (Margaret Markov), a white woman who is a revolutionary for reasons that aren't quite clear. She's got friends on the outside who can spring her, and she's planning to join up with some gun-runners in order to buy weapons from them to give to her fellow revolutionaries. The authorities would obviously like to know what sort of information Karen has. They transport her to a higher-security place. The warden has a thing against Lee because Lee spurned her sexual advances, so the warden has Lee transferred as well. And since these are two dangers criminals, they're chained together for the transfer.
Of course, you can guess what happens next. Some of Karen's revolutionary friends have found out about the transfer and come up with a scheme to get the convoy stopped so that they can spring Karen. That obviously haven't heard that Karen is chained to another prisoner. And the escape doesn't quite go to plan, either. Oh, the two women escape, but they're not able to hook up with Karen's revolutionaries. So they have to make their own way, while still chained together. This is a problem, because Karen is supposed to get the guns on one side of the island, while Lee has a contact much closer, but in the opposite direction. Karen points out, however, that it's her friends who freed them so perhaps her needs should trump Lee's.
So the two women have understandable reasons to dislike and distrust each other, although it didn't feel to me as though their being different races was as big a deal as it was for Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones. There's still no getting around the fact that the two are going to have to work together if they can't figure out a way to get those chains off of them, and as they work together, they begin to develop a grudging respect for one another.
But there are still all sorts of people looking for the two women, and those all have competing interests too. The army hires the criminal gang headed by Ruben (Sid Haig) to find the women, while Lee's pimp is looking for her since she's hidden money that she extorted from the pimp.
But to be honest, the plot here is really secondary. This is a straight up exploitation movie, like the other women-in-prison movies Grier made in the Philippines, and we watch for the fighting and the skimpy outfits, not for social issue plots like in The Defiant Ones. As such, Black Mama White Mama succeeds in entertaining, understanding that it's not going to be a great movie by tackling important social issues. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. It's a pretty darn fun one.
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