Running Numbers: Blaxploitation Filmmaking and Chester Himes’ Harlem Cycle

• In Event: Circuits of Pleasure: New Visions of Black Cinema

Abstract

In Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, Ed Guerrero compares the advent of the VCR in the late 1980s to the rise of the paperback novel, in the context of increased informal circulation systems: “a film that otherwise could be permanently marginalized can now be passed from person to person, viewed in small groups, viewed repeatedly, and easily taught and appreciated in classrooms” (206). As affordable media, both paperbacks and VCRs increased the circulation of both art and entertainment beyond a small, privileged community of elites and, ironically, made it feasible for commercially profitable genre fiction and films to be elevated to canonical status in the classrooms of the U.S. academy. The advent of video-recording technology and affordability of VHS rental tapes in the 1980s and 1990s had a similar winnowing effect, preserving and distributing a de-facto canon of the best-known and more commercially successful films for later viewers to discover, appreciate, and share. The wide availability of such films eventually jump-started a new phase of the black film industry where African American directors once again shone the spotlight on Himes’ paperback genre fiction.
This paper takes as its focus the mutually constitutive relationship between Blaxploitation films and the popular crime genre fiction written by the expatriate African American novelist. Both films and fiction were produced and imagined for, as well as marketed to, a primarily-black audience, though they had huge cross-over appeal. I contend that despite being Hollywood products, Blaxploitation films celebrating “black-focused themes and narratives” (Guerrero) and portraying a distinctive black visual aesthetic during the height of the Black Arts Movement, the two Blaxploitation film adaptations of Chester Himes’ novels, the financially successful directorial debut by Ossie Davies, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and the money-losing Come Back, Charleston Blue, directed by Mark Warren, advanced the careers of black artists—writers, actors, and directors—as co-creators of a new urban argot whose influence continues to this day.
Though Himes’ fiction was foundational to this vision, to some degree, his involvement with the films’ actual production was indirect, through the writing of the source material. Although the film rights to both 1970s films were optioned by Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. himself, who then asked Himes to adapt the novels into screenplays, this arrangement ultimately did not prove successful. However, as an early example of cross-over movie advertising, the source novel for the second motion pictures, Pink Toes, was re-released by the publisher bearing the movie’s new title, thereby attesting to the mutually-beneficial arrangement of black-directed films based on African American urban fiction. The continuing availability of Cotton Comes to Harlem and Come Back, Charleston Blue first in VHS, and then in DVD, gave rise to a whole new generation of Blaxploitation fans and Chester Himes readers and paved the way for a neo-Blaxploitation resurgence of sorts with the 1991 adaptation of A Rage Comes to Harlem, also directed by an African American, Bill Duke.

Author

• Vivian Halloran, Indiana University-Bloomington (IN)