PKazee
Though SOUL OF N*GGER CHARLEY is more professionally constructed and filmed, I found it less interesting than LEGEND OF N*GGER CHARLEY. To begin with, Fred Williamson is actually called upon to do a bit of acting in LEGEND. Though the character transition is rushed, Williamson initially portrays Charley as hard-working and respectful (his Master has always treated he and his mother with kindness), and later (after having his promised freedom stolen away from him by the cruel, presumptive heir to his Master's estate), as a defiant, avenging hero. In SOUL, on the other hand, he's pretty much a defiant hero from beginning to end, his performance varying only when called upon to show a bit of sadness and remorse near the end.Further, LEGEND struck me as the more balanced of the two films. In SOUL, there is not a single white man in a featured role who is not portrayed as a villain. In fact, even in smaller roles, the only white men who are not evil are the Quakers who appear very briefly, denying Charley their assistance due to a vow of non-violence. Contrast this with LEGEND in which three of the six white men in featured roles (the original Master, the Sheriff, and the farmer who married a half-breed) are not portrayed as racist. They may be ineffectual, but they're not evil men.All that said, the story in LEGEND is padded and truly scattered. I would definitely watch it again though... something I cannot say for SOUL.Finally, I must note the irony that the version of LEGEND on the BLAX FILM disc censors the words "shit" and "ass", but not N*GGER, whereas IMDb allows both "shit" and "ass", but not "the N-word", despite its being in the title of the film!
tieman64
This is a review of "The Legend of N***er Charley", "The Soul of N***er Charley" and "Boss N***er", a loose trilogy of films set in the pre-Civil War South and starring Fred Williamson as N***er Charley, a runaway slave. The first film, directed Martin Goldman, finds Charley as a plantation slave who kills his master and goes on the run. He teams up with Amos, another ex slave, and spends much of the film dodging bullets, evading bounty hunters and shooting caricatures, all dumb, racist white guys. The film ends with Charley heading further out West, desperate to find some peace and live as a free man. Released at the height of the blaxploitation craze, in the wake of surprise hit "Shaft" and almost a decade before "Roots" (where "black" suddenly went "mainstream" and "prestige"), "Legend" turned out to be one of the highest grossing movies of 1972. A sequel, "Soul of N***er Charley", quickly followed.The best of the series, "Soul" finds Charley as a near-mythical folk hero, a muscular black man who fights for right and has no qualms smashing the faces of racist white guys. The plot concerns Charley's battles with a Southern Colonel who oversees his own private slave trade, exporting slaves to Mexico where they're beaten and forced to work for a colony of Southern aristocrats.The final film in the series, "Boss", was released in 1974, at the tail end of various civil rights and black power movements. Like its predecessors, its aesthetic is an absurd mix of action, exploitation, Italian Opera, western, comedy, race baiting, casual vulgarity and mid century urban nihilism. Like all the Charley films, and most blaxploitation films in general, the film isn't racially progressive, isn't a celebration of racial pride, but is rather a kind of vile, venting of black rage on white figures of power. Organizations like the NAACP and various black civil rights activists actively fought against the blaxploitation "movement", considering these films racist at worst, at best detrimental to efforts toward equality. In truth, the films were largely no more dumb than the "positive image" films (usually with Sidney Poitier as an upstanding black guy who schools racist whites) associated with the Black liberation film movements of the 1960s. Blaxploitation simply substituted angelic, gentlemanly blacks with violence, degeneracy, sex and escapist race bashing. It turned condescension into a kind of empowered irreverence. Both approaches attracted millions, but were equally dopey, putting forth fantastically unrealistic solutions to genuine problems, misunderstanding the systemic causes of racism and glorifying either the loutish elements of the black community or pandering to white ideas of what a "good black man should be". Virtually all these films were produced, directed, financed or green-lit by whites, for whom the dollar was always the bottom line. If more blood and nudity sold more tickets, then so be it. Story be damned. It would be almost a decade before black directors like Charles Burnett and Spike Lee came on the scene.Today "blaxploitation" is an adjective. In the 70s it was a pejorative. Blacks, of course, were for a long while demonised in cinema. DW Griffith is the poster-boy for early Hollywood racism, with his Ku Klux loving "Birth of a Nation" and a bevy of other films ("One Exciting Night") which set in stone a series of racist caricatures. Ironically, Griffith's "Birth" was released the same year as "Darktown Jubilee", the first all black film with major roles for black actors. Today "Jubilee's" been lost. But from it you can trace a gradual relaxing of racist attitudes, until you reach Jules Dassin's "Uptight", 1970's "Cotton Comes" and two influential satires by Melvin Van Peebles, "Watermelon Man" and "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song". From these four films, blaxploitation would be born. Before directing "Song", Melvin suffered severe disillusionment with Hollywood, fled to France, became radicalised and spent some time drifting in a desert. With "Song" he actively set out to "undermine Hollywood's view of the world". But while the film did cause stirs – it was endorsed by the Black Panthers, it fired up radicals, got attached to polemical manifestos, was celebrated as a "new" type of avant grade expression, was predicted to launch a "cinematic revolution" - the political and cinematic shake-up people expected didn't happen. Instead, Hollywood, recognising that there was now money to be made off black audiences, began bankrolling a plethora of black movie projects, most of which were blood and guts action (and sex) movies high on juice and short of substance. Any threat that Van Peebles may have posed was soon nullified. This led to term "blaxploitation"; blacks for bucks.Like most exploitation films, the Charley series is explicitly about revenge. Revenge against slave masters, businessmen, sheriffs and white folk in general. "We've got us some more whites to catch!" is Charley's catchphrase, as he struts about to funk and disco tunes, acts cool, has casual sex and perforates dumb whites. Two of the rare masterpieces in this genre are Pontecorvo's "Burn!" and Jacopetti's "Farewell Uncle Tom". Both are by Italian directors and predate the American blaxploitation movement, which was heavily influenced by trashy Italian B movies, westerns, grind-house and Kung Fu. Because of their unique historical position, partaking of fascism but not scapegoated into petrification to the extent that Germany was, Italian film-makers tend to consistently approach issues like slavery and the Holocaust with rare skill.Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of exploiting exploitation movies. He's done Kung Fu with "Kill Bill", blaxploitation with "Jackie Brown" ("Across 110th street", "Sheba Baby", "Foxy Brown", "Coffy"), American pulp with "Pulp" and Naziploitation with "Basterds". His "Django Unchained" seems ready to pillage Corbucci's "Django", the Charley movies, "Mandingo" and "Farewell Uncle Tom".6/10 - Worth one viewing.
