Coffy Film
Jenelle Centeno
Coffy is a 1973 American blaxploitation action film written and directed by Jack Hill. The story is about a black female vigilante played by Pam Grier who seeks violent revenge against a heroin dealer responsible for her sister's addiction.[7]
Produced and distributed by American International Pictures (AIP), Coffy was the third Jack Hill film to star Grier, after The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. Grier would go on to boost her career as the leading "femme fatale" of blaxploitation for the rest of the 1970s.[8][9]
After her shift, Coffy's police friend Carter offers to drive her home. Carter is a straight-shooting officer who is not willing to bend the law for the mob or the thugs who have been bribing officers at his precinct. Coffy doesn't believe his strong moral resolve until two hooded men break into Carter's house while she's visiting him and beat Carter, crippling him. This enrages Coffy, giving her further provocation to continue her work as a vigilante, killing those responsible for harming Carter and her sister.
Coffy's boyfriend, Howard Brunswick, is a city councilman. Coffy admires Brunswick for his contributions to the community. Brunswick announces his plan to run for Congress and his purchase of a night club. Coffy's next targets are a pimp named King George, one of the largest suppliers of prostitutes and illegal drugs in the city, and Mafia don Arturo Vitroni, a criminal associate of George's.
Coffy questions a former patient, a known drug user, to gain insight into the type of woman King George likes and where he keeps his stash of drugs. Coffy shows no sympathy for the drug-addled woman and abuses her as she looks for answers. With the information she gets from the woman, Coffy tracks down George and poses as a Jamaican woman looking to trick for him.
George, immediately interested in her exotic nature, hires her. One of the prostitutes becomes jealous. Later that day, Coffy and the other prostitutes get into a massive brawl. Coffy wins, which attracts mob boss Vitroni, who demands to have her that night. Coffy plans to kill Vitroni, but before she can shoot him, his men overtake her. She lies and tells Vitroni that King George ordered her to kill him, which makes Vitroni order George to be killed. Vitroni's men kill George by lynching him by the neck from his car, which they drive through an open field.
Coffy then discovers Brunswick, her clean-cut boyfriend, is corrupt when she's shown to him at a meeting of the mob and several police officials. He denies knowing her other than as a prostitute, and Coffy is sent to her death. Coffy seduces her would-be killers. They try injecting her with drugs to sedate her, but she had replaced the illicit drugs with a sugar solution earlier. Faking a high, she kills her unsuspecting hitman with a pointed metal wire she fashioned herself and hid in her hair, by stabbing him in the jugular vein.
Running to avoid capture, Coffy carjacks a vehicle to escape. Coffy drives to Vitroni's house, kills him, and then goes to Brunswick's to do the same. He pleads for forgiveness and just as she is about to accept, a naked white woman comes out of his bedroom. Coffy shoots Brunswick in the groin with a shotgun, emasculating and killing him. She leaves the house and walks along the beach as the sun rises.
According to writer/director Hill, the project began when American International Pictures (AIP)'s head of production Larry Gordon lost the rights to the film Cleopatra Jones after making a handshake deal with the producers. Gordon subsequently approached Hill to quickly make a movie about an African-American woman's revenge and beat Cleopatra Jones to market. Hill wanted to work with Pam Grier, whom he had worked with on The Big Doll House (1971). The film ended up earning more money than Cleopatra Jones and established Grier as an icon of the genre.[10]
Coffy opened at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, and grossed $85,000 in its opening week.[14][15] In its 14th week of release, it reached number one at the US box office.[16] By 1976, Variety estimated the film had earned $4 million in rentals.[4]
Over time, the film has garnered acclaim and is considered groundbreaking for its portrayal of a Black female protagonist.[12] On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Coffy has an approval rating of 79% based on 24 critics' reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The website's consensus states, "Pam Grier brings spunk and vinegar to Coffy, supported by director Jack Hill's combustible mixture of authentic grit and salacious thrills."[21] Researcher Karen Ross wrote that the film "let black audiences enjoy the sight of heroes kicking the white system and winning even while condemning the violence and recognized the implausibility. It allowed blacks the ultimate escape to cheer on the heroine that fought corruption and crime and then leave the theatre to be blighted by the racism in society."[22]
In 2003 Coffy was released on DVD,[25] and re-released on DVD on December 6, 2005, as part of the Vibe Fox In A Box collection.[26] Both DVD editions contained an audio commentary by director Jack Hill.
In April 2015, an extras-filled Blu-ray was issued from Arrow Video in the UK (Region 2/B only).[28] Arrow's edition contained new interviews with Pam Grier and Jack Hill, "Blaxploitation!", a video essay by author Mikel J. Koven on the history and development of the genre, a booklet featuring new writing on the film by critic Cullen Gallagher, and a profile of Pam Grier by Yvonne D. Sims, author of Women in Blaxploitation,[12] illustrated with archive stills and posters.
While I remember blaxploitation films from the 70s, I never actually saw one until recently. Coffy is a movie that (despite its obviously dated fashions and music, which in a sense, add to its cool), in my opinion, holds up as well as any revenge film made. The current political climate simply adds to its relevance.
Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A label more popular than scholarly, Blaxploitation captures the wave of low-budget, black-character-centred films that emerged from Hollywood in the first half of the 1970s. This cinematic movement was simultaneously reactionary and progressive, manifesting in the same instant both restrictive effects and liberating gestures.
On the one hand, Blaxploitation was the product of a studio system that was still white-dominated, with relatively few African-American executives, producers and directors. The films were not so much clear political statements as nakedly commercial ventures, characterised by low production values and familiar genre codes.
But on the other, the movies highlighted African-American agency and creativity. Crude and cartoonish though many of them were, they were nevertheless more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King in atmospherics, with protagonists who preferred to defeat whites than build multiracial alliances.
In her day job, Coffy is a nurse engaged in emergency care. Outside working hours, however, she embarks on a one-woman crusade to annihilate the drug dealers who have rendered her young sister comatose and brought misery to many in the black community.
Coffy fights back heroically, surviving injury and laughing in the face of death as she erases drug pushers, bent cops and corrupt politicians. She is not only physically adept, but mentally agile too.
At the same time, however, fantasy is part of any liberatory politics. If the actual prospects of an African-American woman triumphing as thoroughly as Coffy does are negligible, the spectacle of her unimpeded resistance to the unjust is still inspirational.
This finally, perhaps, is the value of Blaxploitation movies such as Coffy. In the face of a long history of African-American pain, from chattel slavery to the violence galvanising Black Lives Matter in our own moment, these films alter the mood and start to imagine what a better society might look like.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
Coffy is a one-woman vigilante force, out to even the score with those that have hooked her sister on drugs. Using her feminine wiles (along with deadly weaponry), Coffy sets about ridding the streets of low-life drug dealers, pimps, deviants and society's scum in the kick-ass action film Coffy.
The Coolidge Corner Theatre is an independent, nonprofit cinema and cultural institution with four screens and the capacity for over 700 audience members. Since 1933, audiences in the greater Boston area have relied on the Coolidge for the best of contemporary independent film, repertory, and educational programming.
While the plots are essentially identical (angry vigilante woman poses as a prostitute to infiltrate the drug trade, gets caught, and still murders ALL THE BAD GUYS), the wild adventures that accompany that path are not. The violent action, funky style, raw naughtyness, colorful characters, and slightly different tone make each film a different pleasure to treasure. Foxy Brown is a bit less brutal than its predecessor, and more self-aware.
I usually give Olive Films a pass when it comes to special features; due to the age and obscurity of many of their picks we should feel lucky to get them at all. But for Pam? These sting a bit, especially considering that both films are available in the UK in stellar feature-packed editions. Man, oh man, do I wish they had received similarly royal treatment at home.
You are known for films with very strong female characters that are also complicated. Do you think what you were doing them was more progressive than what you see in some of the female-fronted action movies that are being done today?
c80f0f1006