By 1973, the production and distribution of films geared specifically for Black audiences was in an energetic increase. There had already been the release of two Melvin van Peebles-directed projects, three women-in-prison films starring Pam Grier, two Shaft installments, and the iconic Super Fly, Hammer, and Blacula. All the major studios had productions in this opening wave, though independents like American International were surpassing them, effectively generating 2/3 of the films that fit the category versus the 1/3 coming from the “Big 8.” And by the end of the ‘70s, AIP cleanly earned the mantle for releasing the most films, with at least 25.
However, in a six-month period of 1973, whether by intention or serendipity, Paramount Pictures challenged AIP in terms of prolific output for audiences of color, releasing 5 films from April to September, almost neck-and-neck with the former beach-parties-and-bikers studio’s slate of 7, and more than any other of the majors that year. And though AIP would win that unplanned fight, both in immediate box office returns and in historical impact, through massive hits as Coffy, Black Caesar, and sequels to Blacula and Slaughter, Paramount’s slate still stands as interesting competition.
Paramount’s first Black-oriented picture of 1973 may have been the most unconventional film they released that whole year, even among their other uncommercial offerings as adaptations of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Richard Bach’s allegory Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Charley-One-Eye was the first dramatic film produced by David Frost after a string of comedies featuring his frequent UK TV collaborators Peter Cook and The Two Ronnies, from an original screenplay by Keith Leonard, also primarily a comedy writer (his only other ready credit is creating the ITV sitcom “Me and My Gal”), and directed by Don Chaffey, known mostly for helming light fantasies for Hammer and Disney. Filmed in the desert sprawl of Almeria, Spain, Charley feels very much like a Harold Pinter-style chamber play dressed in a western setting, as a Union soldier (Richard Roundtree) on the lam to Mexico after killing a superior officer meets and hazes a crippled, misanthropic Native American (Roy Thinnes), but ultimately forms a friendship of convenience with him as they both find themselves the targets of a determined bounty hunter (Nigel Davenport) and trouble-making villagers. As the chain of the Indigenous Man getting hassled by the Black Man who faces death from the White Man, with a pet chicken (whose name provides the title) the only peaceful, if doomed, character, it is a scorched-earth observation of how easily any creature resorts to violence. In the weeks leading up to release, Roundtree called it, “a human drama [that] will give me a little change of pace from Shaft,” and Thinnes, typecast from his role on “The Invaders,” hyped “I hope this will indicate that it’s possible for an actor to stretch himself into a character totally unlike himself.”
However, after it began it’s theatrical run on April 18, 1973, Charley left critics mostly offering mild praise mixed with bafflement, or outright hostility. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave it 2.5 stars, saying, “The story of outcasts befriending each other is hardly new, but [the leads] are quietly effective, and their work holds our interest.” Ann Guarino of the New York Daily News also gave 2.5 stars, shrugging, “Those who go for westerns, no matter what their origin, will find this one unusual.” Joe Baltake in the Philadelphia Daily News was quite nasty, sneering, “Comedienne JoAnne Worley would have a field day with the likes of Charley-One-Eye, the artsy ‘message and symbolism’ western…[it] plays like a glorified chicken joke, complete with fade-out punch line.” Sarah Smiley of the Pomona Progress Bulletin offered one of the few outright raves, writing, “the best thing about Charley-One-Eye is its classic simplicity. There is nothing unnecessary or tacked-in about it, no obligatory liberal sermon on the evils of racism, for instance, and no sacrificing of sensitive character study for a trickier, more action-oriented plot. Instead, there are simply these two men, their relationship, and the vast Mexican desert. The result is a stunning movie.” And Pierre Bowman in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin said, “On the surface, Charley looks like another black exploitation film. But it rises magnificently above that level, and is probably one of the off-beat sleepers of the year.”
Charley was given a slow rollout from April onward, with some first-run engagements happening as late as July. Despite an ad campaign that sought to rile up audiences, with a tagline that said, “Somebody sold out the black man and the red man. Somebody’s going to pay!”, it did not click with audiences of any color, reportedly grossing less that $250,000 during its run. By comparison, even the critically savaged Jonathan Livingston Seagull earned $1.6 million. Besides being turned off by mixed reviews, Black audiences were probably more interested in seeing Warner Bros.’ game-changing Shaw Brothers acquisition, Five Fingers of Death, which was the #1 film in the top 20 U.S. markets the week of Charley’s initial April 18th release. Nonetheless, it kicked around in drive-ins for most of the summer, popped up as a second feature for a couple years after, and then almost vanished from circulation completely, resurfacing quietly 8 years later in TV airings on the then-Paramount-co-owned USA Network beginning in April 1982. Paramount would later release another Black-oriented film produced by David Frost, Leadbelly, a biopic of the blues pioneer directed by Gordon Parks, in 1976.
There was little time to dwell on Charley’s failure to launch since there was another Charley waiting to emerge a month later. The year before, while Paramount was enjoying the huge phenomenon of The Godfather while also inflaming Italian-American activists, they also had a surprise hit with the comparably lower profile but equally inflammatory revisionist western The Legend of [Black] Charley, starring former supporting actors Fred Williamson and D’Urville Martin as escaped slaves turned avengers, a $750,000 production which grossed over $10 million and established Williamson as a bankable leading man. Naturally, a sequel was quickly greenlit with Williamson and Martin, shot in Tucson in the fall, and on May 16, 1973, The Soul of [Black] Charley was ready for release. Larry G. Spangler, who produced the previous entry, took over directing duties, with a bigger budget of $850,000 and 2.35 Panavision framing, plus music by Don Costa and Lou Rawls, and compared the sequel to Duel in the Sun in the press, complete with announcing a search for a “black Jennifer Jones” during shooting; Anzanette Chase was originally intended as Charley’s paramour, but then replaced with “Room 222” star Denise Nicholas. In an on-set interview with Bob Wischnia for the Arizona Republic, Williamson proclaimed, “It just so happens our first movie was 75% correct because there was a man named Charley Tyler who actually existed and went through the same things that [my character] goes through,” and hinted that the sequel could lead to a television series.
The Soul of [Black] Charley opened well in selected cities, but did not perform nearly as large as its predecessor over the course of its run; while a final tally was not readily found, it had only grossed $321,177 by June 6. One possible disadvantage Williamson did not have the year before was having to compete with Clint Eastwood, whose High Plains Drifter had opened in April, and had worked its way to the being #1 in the big cities in late May. Also significantly, a week before its first playdates, the first Bruce Lee movie to reach America, The Big Boss (as Fists of Fury), had opened in several cities that Soul was scheduled for, and in the weeks that followed, in tandem with indie surprises as Duel of the Iron Fist and Deep Thrust, martial arts was siphoning off the vengeance audience. Like the first film, Williamson predicted correctly that it would not receive good reviews from critics, but surprisingly, the aforementioned Joe Baltake who had dismissed Charley-One-Eye proclaimed the sequel better than its predecessor, saying, “Fred Williamson is both solid and stolid.” In odd convergence, Charley-One-Eye had been paired with Legend during its first drive-in bookings, and later on, became the second feature to Soul once that was released; in some markets, all three films were screened together in all-night Charleythons for several years. Before Soul was released, Spangler and Williamson were already planning to go independent of the studio system, and a third collaboration, politely known as Boss, went into production in 1974, with D’Urville Martin returning as well, though to avoid IP disputes with Paramount, Williamson and Martin’s characters were renamed and no direct allusions to the previous films were made.
While Paramount executives were dissecting what happened with their sure-fire sequel, they were probably shocked to unexpectedly have what looked like another sure-fire sequel handed to them on a plate ready to serve. The previous summer, Warner Bros. acquired the Sig Shore-produced Super Fly, starring Ron O’Neal as high-living cocaine dealer Youngblood Priest, and the stylish drama with an unforgettable Curtis Mayfield soundtrack made for under $500,000 had become the highest-grossing Black audience favorite of the time, returning an initial $24 million on first-run, and millions more in a reissue. Much like Fred Williamson’s hero, Shore and O’Neal plunged immediately into making a sequel, with a $1.5 million budget allowing for overseas shooting, O’Neal taking over directing duties, and a screenplay by Alex Haley, with Priest, now bored with respectable retirement in Rome, agreeing to funnel weapons to African rebels to help them overthrow a white ruling body. In early May, WB eagerly publicized that Super Fly T.N.T. was forthcoming on June 15. However, by the end of the month, after pressure from several activist groups, WB announced they were dropping the film, with Paramount swooping in to take over distribution and fulfill the promised June release date.
Super Fly T.N.T. performed the best of Paramount’s Black quintet, doing a respectable $3.6 million during its summer run, though obviously far shy of the $20 million its predecessor delivered the year before. While the film was likely felt to be review-proof – columnist Jack O’Brian quipped in his June 25 wire musings, “[it’s] being blasted by all the black intellectuals – and is the hottest film in America this week,” – there were critics applauding the sequel, including Gene Siskel, observing, “the character of Priest is as significant to the black community as any white movie-star character is to white America, and his transition into a fuller person is much more important than any story line.” This summer, though, Priest had heavy competition, going head to head with MGM’s Shaft in Africa, which drew $4.2 million, and more strikingly, AIP’s Coffy, which outgrossed both films combined with $8.5 million. Not to mention the non-stop martial arts attack that brought Bruce Lee in Fists of Fury (as The Chinese Connection) and Jimmy Wang Yu in The Hammer of God into the arena. WB did not attempt to fill that void in their calendar with any comparable genre picture, preferring to wait a month for their anticipated Max Julien’s Cleopatra Jones to open on July 13, which would just barely beat it’s rival Coffy’s take with $9.4 million. T.N.T. stayed a frequent filler title through the ‘70s, got its first TV exposure through the short-lived In-Home Theatre subscription service in 1981, and received cable airings on USA Network in 1985. In 1976, Paramount would have a sequel dump incident of their own, choosing not to release the Dino DeLaurentiis-produced Drum, the follow-up to their 1975 hit Mandingo, offloading the film to United Artists and replacing the hole in their schedule by picking up, at the prodding of Alan Carr and Robert Stigwood, an English-dubbed version of Rene Cardona’s dramatization of the 1973 Uruguayan soccer team cannibalism incident Survive! The swap benefited Paramount beyond expectation, as Survive! grossed three times as much as UA did with Drum, ($21.1 million vs. $7.3 million), and its success caused UA to abandon a rival project about the Uruguayan incident they were developing from the survivor-approved novel Alive by Piers Paul Read.
The last two films of Paramount’s Black-centered slate were scheduled to open in New York on the same date, September 18, and each of them carried a direct tie to the most successful and critically lauded Black-centered film they released in 1972. The Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues had garnered five Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Diana Ross, served as an auspicious debut for Motown Records founder Berry Gordy as a film producer, and revived the reputation of director Sidney J. Furie, whose previous two films for Paramount, The Lawyer with Barry Newman and Little Fauss and Big Halsy with Robert Redford, had been indifferently received. Thus, both director and producer were given a wide berth for their follow-up projects. Furie retained four cast members from Lady, including Billy Dee Williams (in a role once intended for Steve McQueen) and Richard Pryor, and was granted a $1.5 million budget, for Hit!, an epic globetrotting adventure of a federal agent who, after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose, attempts to destroy the entire network that supplied the narcotics through an unusual collective of recruits. Meanwhile, Berry Gordy’s respected rival, Sussex Records founder Clarence Avant, nicknamed “The Black Godfather,” recruited TV director Stan Lathan and former “Sesame Street” actor/writer Matt Robinson to help produce Save the Children, a film documenting the concert performances held for the Black Exposition at the Chicago Amphitheatre, mounted by Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, in the fall of 1972. The performers included several Motown artists – Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and the Jackson 5 – so many that Motown handled releasing the double-LP soundtrack, and likely helped broker Paramount’s acquisition of the film.
Hit! received the greater visibility of the two September drops, opening in L.A. and other markets on October 3. While some critics dismissed it as yet another one-man-against-drugs story, or complained about its 134 minute running time, it drew some rave reviews, particularly from Charles Champlin, who noted, “the movie succeeds extremely well…no one demands footnotes for ‘Mission: Impossible’ and they’re not required here; you either surrender to the game plan or you don’t,” and from Alex Ben Block of the Miami News, who proclaimed it “a helluva film,” compared Williams’ performance to that of Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye, and said of co-star Gwen Welles, “no less than brilliant. She deserves serious consideration as best supporting actress…she is frail, and fragile as a potato chip.” Hit! earrned $2.7 million in first-run, breaking even but not quite breaking out, and resurfaced frequently in the bottom half of several Paramount-brokered drive-in combos before it received a network television premiere as “The ABC Late Night Movie” on August 26, 1980. Furie made his next film for Paramount, a 1975 adaptation of Gail Parent’s novel Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York with Jeanne Berlin, but would not return to the studio again until directing the 1992 Rodney Dangerfield comedy Ladybugs.
Save the Children received a slower rollout, reaching San Francisco on September 26, Chicago and Montreal on October 5, Los Angeles on October 24, Pittsburgh on November 14, and some smaller markets not until early 1974. Almost all critics praised the performances, but some took issue with what they the felt was filler. Gene Siskel, however, proclaimed it one of the best films of the year, along with another concert film, Mel Stuart’s Wattstax, praising the juxtapositions of music and life scenes as, “making the movies political statements as well as conventional entertainments.” As part of the distribution agreement, all box revenue was earmarked for Operation PUSH, which may explain why grosses are not readily found for its theatrical run. The movie also earned Stan Lathan a Best Director award from the Jamaica Film Festival in 1974. Save the Children has never received a home video release, and has been rarely seen since its 1973 theatrical run; the Motown soundtrack album has also been long out of print and never reissued on CD or streaming services. Several clips from the film are featured in Reginald Hudlin’s 2019 Netflix documentary on Clarence Avant, The Black Godfather.
In the present day, of the Paramount Black quintet of 1973, only Hit! is the easiest available to modern viewers, offered on several streaming services and on BluRay. Super Fly T.N.T. received a VHS edition in 1993, but is not on DVD, Blu, or streaming platforms. Charley One-Eye is available to stream, but caution is advised on which platform to watch it on: the YouTube version is provided by Paramount, and, while an old SD 1.33 cable TV master, is clean and the complete 107 minute cut, but the version offered by Amazon, Tubi, and Pluto TV, provided by Global Media Digital TV, is a truncated cut with no credits, the title is newly videoburned over the first scene. (This surely unauthorized edition’s presence on Pluto TV is particularly galling since this channel is owned by Paramount!) The Soul of [Black] Charley has not been released on any physical media nor is it streamable; the previous Legend of [Black] Charley is streamable, but again is a crapshoot for picture quality, as Paramount is offering a licensed SD 1.33 version on YouTube and Amazon, a peculiar TV cut with lab-altered credits, where major swears are muted but the big slur repeatedly stays intact, while again Global Media is servicing the title to Pluto and Kanopy in an unauthorized modification. For all the speculations as to what has kept these in various stages of limbo, the simplest answer is probably music rights, as all feature needle-drops from major label artists that, in the licensing contracts, were only cleared for theatrical and broadcast television exposure, and require expensive new licensing.
Paramount continued to produce and acquire Black-centered features for the remainder of the ‘70s, albeit without as much aggressive momentum as they displayed in 1973. Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, the studio’s fortunes were bolstered by a steady flow of hits starring comedian Eddie Murphy. In 2001, Paramout’s corporate parent Viacom would pay $3 billion to acquire cable network Black Entertainment Television, and amidst the resulting synergy between the studio and the channel have been recent feature films as Nobody’s Fool with Tiffany Haddish and What Men Want with Queen Latifah. And the last time Paramount had a film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, it was for Denzel Washington’s 2016 adaptation of the August Wilson play Fences. As such, while that summer of 1973 may not have yielded any blockbusters, it certainly helped advance the mindset that not only Black is Beautiful, but Black is Bankable.
