With Women Of Action,Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.
“Wham! Bam! Here comes Pam!” Thus reads the tagline of Pam Grier’s 1975 film Friday Foster, the final in her illustrious line of 1970s Blaxploitation films. If one way to know you’ve made it is by achieving first-name-only status, then Grier had certainly arrived. With no disrespect to Richard Roundtree, I think it’s fair to say that while Shaft is the defining character of the Blaxploitation era, Grier is the defining actor of the genre.
In an era where white men dominated Hollywood and Black men dominated the burgeoning Blaxploitation canon, Grier forged her own path playing the title roles in 1973’s Coffy, 1974’s Foxy Brown, and 1975’s Sheba, Baby. She was a trailblazer for Black women and one of the first female action heroes in Hollywood. And even if you’ve never seen a Grier Blaxploitation film, you’ve likely felt their influence somewhere—from Beyoncé in Austin Powers In Goldmember to Quentin Tarantino’s loving homage Jackie Brownto the Marvel Comics heroine Misty Knight.
Grier’s gift as an actor is her ability to combine girlish sweetness with a tough, brassy sense of strength. She can sweet talk a bad guy one minute and cut him down with a razor blade she hid in her afro the next. Her starring Blaxploitation roles combine over-the-top dialogue, stunning costumes, and heaps of sex and violence into an unforgettable package. Yet in the rush to praise Grier as the badass she is, we can also risk repackaging her ’70s legacy into something much simpler and more straightforward than it actually was. That does a disservice not only to Grier, but to the complex roles she played on screen.
I really felt that when I decided to chase my Grier movie marathon by diving into Ben Mankiewicz’s 2022 TCM podcast about her life and career. The Plot Thickens: Here Comes Pamis a sleekly produced seven-episode series featuring some insightful stories from Grier herself, but it opens with a line that almost made me throw my phone across the room: “While little boys were playing Luke Skywalker and Han Solo,” Mankiewicz brags, “young Black girls were playing Pam Grier beating up pretend bad guys.”
It’s a sweet idea that’s also one of the most frustratingly ahistorical comparisons I’ve ever heard. To be a young boy looking up to Luke Skywalker and Han Solo means watching age-appropriate sci-fi adventure stories in which Luke and Han get to zip through space saving the day. To be a young Black girl looking up to Pam Grier means watching gritty R-rated films filled with gory violence in which Grier is raped, groped, belittled with slurs, and ogled in lengthy topless shots.
Which isn’t to say that Grier’s movies aren’t great or that the characters she plays aren’t empowering. But Mankiewicz’s desire to put a cute “girl power” bow on Grier’s career strikes me as something I see a lot from men who are eager to performatively declare their love for strong female action heroes. What they really mean is that they like how watching female action heroes makes them feel—electrified by sexy female strength in a safely fictionalized context. I’m not sure they always stop to think about the nuances of how representation actually makes girls and women feel. If the main role model that young Black girls were offered in the 1970s was a traumatized vigilante who cuts off a man’s penis and gives it to his lover in a pickle jar, I’d say that’s more of a compromise of representation than an out-and-out win.
As with the bondage origins of Wonder Woman, the context ofGrier’s career is complicated and contradictory. She got her start in “women in prison” films—sexploitation movies designed to showcase horny, naked women in exotic locations. It was part of a boom of low-budget exploitation filmmaking that emerged in response to the more permissive film rating system Hollywood adopted in 1968. While women in prison flicks were technically R-rated narrative features, they aimed to get as close to X-rated softcore porn as they could. To their credit, however, these films also center around diverse female ensembles in a way few mainstream Hollywood productions (then or now) do. Grier made her film debut playing a tough-talking lesbian in 1971’s The Big Doll House—her first teaming with director Jack Hill, who would go on to become a frequent collaborator throughout her ’70s career.
As Wesley Morris puts it in his piece on Grier, “The average women’s prison movie succeeds in every scene as both a work of sexism and feminism.” The Big Doll House is about a group of women working together to free themselves from an abusive system. Yet it also features a scene where a man simply fondles Grier’s breasts for an extended period of time. The point of the scene is that the guy is a creep, but I can’t help but wonder what it must have been like for a 21-year-old Grier to film that in an era where most of the crew would’ve been male and intimacy coordinators weren’t even a pipedream. Especially because Grier has shared that she herself was sexually assaulted three times in her life—once when she was just six, then twice in her 20s. What plays like “sleazy fun” (a go-to Letterboxd film bro praise) to some viewers can hit far closer to home for others.
It’s a messy gray area, one also housing Blaxploitation films, which similarly emerged in response to the social change of the late 1960s. That was a decade where the most prominent Black characters of the time—Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Diahann Carroll on Julia, Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek—were largely “aiming to attain white respectability,” as Lemba de Miranda puts it. Blaxploitation films were a rebellious attempt to do something different. They offered the catharsis of watching Black characters “vilify the white man and beat him at his game.” And they did so while catering to an underserved Black audience who’d seldom gotten to see films with predominantly Black casts.
Like “women in prison” movies, Blaxploitation films blend radical politics with over-the-top sex, violence, and nudity. The genre’s origins emerged from three films made by Black directors: Ossie Davis’ action-comedy Cotton Comes To Harlem in 1970, Melvin Van Peebles’ X-rated Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and Gordon Parks’ Shafta few months later. Soon, however, white filmmakers and studios were looking to get in on the financially successful trend by releasing their own Blaxploitation films.
As with much of her early career, Grier’s entry into the Blaxploitation genre came in a rush. Larry Gordon, the head of production at the low-budget filmmaking company American International Pictures (AIP), had lost the rights to a female-led Blaxploitation script called Cleopatra Jones. Frustrated, Gordon hired Hill to get a woman-led Blaxploitation film into cinemas first. Hill called up his old friend Grier to collaborate on the script and star in the lead role. Coffy was shot in just 18 days and beat Cleopatra Jones to theaters by two months in the spring of 1973. Word-of-mouth made it a box office hit and turned Grier into a burgeoning icon.
You can feel the difference in production schedules in the final projects. Where Cleopatra Jones is sleek and manicured (and so good I’m going to save it for its own entry in this column one day), Coffy is evocatively gritty and rough around the edges. Grier plays a woman who works as an emergency room nurse by day, only to seek violent revenge against drug lords and mob bosses by night. The movie opens with Grier blasting a guy’s head off with a shotgun and only gets more intense from there. But it’s not just the action that’s memorable. There’s a real sense of pathos to Coffy’s superhero-esque identity struggle between the kindly healthcare work she wants to be and the violent vigilante she feels she must become to avenge her heroin-addicted little sister, who now lives bed-ridden in a juvenile rehabilitation center.
Coffy was quickly followed by Foxy Brown, a lesser film with a much bigger cultural footprint—probably because Grier’s Ruth West-designed costumes are some of the most eye-popping looks in cinema history. Foxy Brown was originally supposed to be a direct sequel to Coffy until Hill was instructed to rework it into a standalone story at the last minute, something the film never really recovers from. As Hill jokingly told Mankiewicz, “The development process was just me sitting down with a little bit of coke and whatever came into my head.” That makes it the sort of film that’s way more fun as a trailer than a full-length feature.
The biggest problem with Foxy Brown is that it mistakes strong action for strong characterization. Though many of Grier’s most overtly badass moments and lines come from the film (including the idea that she’s “a whole lotta woman”), we learn almost nothing about Foxy other than that she loves her brother and her boyfriend. She’s iconography more than a flesh-and-blood character. It doesn’t help that the film takes a particularly dark turn with a rape scene that largely seems to exist to show off Grier’s chest—something that almost all of her exploitation films are eager to highlight.
Indeed, while researching this piece I discovered that AIP had an internal marketing strategy called “the Peter Pan Syndrome,” which argued that younger kids will watch anything that older kids watch (but not vice versa) and girls will watch anything boys watch (but not versa), therefore “to catch your greatest audience you zero in on the 19-year-old male.” There are more than a few moments in Grier’s Blaxploitation career thatfeel detrimentally aimed in the 19-year-old male direction.
In fact, part of the reason that female action heroes didn’t really emerge until this permissive post-Hays Code era is because that’s when Hollywood realized it could sell female action heroes as risqué sexualfantasies for men. Though studios have always been happy to offer male power fantasies to male audiences, they couldn’t conceive of a female power fantasy until they figured out how to aim it at 19-year-old boys (a line of thinking that, frankly, continues right on through to today). And while Grier herself has said she was comfortable doing nude scenes and enjoyed getting to celebrate “Black female feminine sexuality,” it’s always worth keeping in mind that male action stars seldom need to (literally) expose themselves in the same way to get work.
Still, as Gloria Steinem noted on Here Comes Pam, “She may have been sexualized, but she was nobody’s victim.” Though Grier had no formal acting training and had never even auditioned for a movie before The Big Doll House, she threw herself into learning on the job during her “women in prison” films. While her young co-stars partied in the Philippines, she sought guidance from fellow actor/frequent co-star Sid Haig and poured over Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, which Roger Corman had given her as a gift. If you binge Grier’s early films, you can feel the evolution of her skills as an actor culminating into something special. Though Grier started her career locked in prison, she developed an onscreen persona too big to be contained behind bars.
In an era where women were often portrayed as arm candy or damsels in distress, Grier got to be the central hero with male love interests who were either treated as sidekicks or killed off to motivate her story. The prototypical Grier heroine is an independent, “liberated” woman who gets her own theme song, wears her hair in natural styles, and wears a glorious array of bell-bottomed outfits. She uses her sexuality to get close to the men she wants to take down, but unlike in rape-revenge or “women in prison” films, she’s not seeking personal vengeance. Instead, she’s fighting to avenge her loved ones and protect her community—both from the immediate dangers of pimps and drug pushers, and also the broader systemic corruption of police, politicians, and business moguls.
Grier’s heroines sit at the cross section of the Black Power movement and women’s lib, but they’re also rooted in the specific injustices faced by Black women. White men abuse them, Black men betray them, and white women are just as likely to be their enemies as their friends. Yet Grier’s characters rise above those indignities with the conviction and authority to swagger into a room and deliver lines like, “This is the end of your rotten life, you motherfucking dope pusher” or “Death is too easy for you, bitch, I want you to suffer.” Like the best Blaxploitation films, Grier’s vehicles are filled with socially subversive imagery, like a scene in Coffy where a Black cop stops and frisks a white man or a moment in Foxy Brown where Foxy belittles a powerful white male judge for his tiny penis.
Action-wise, Grier’s most fun moments come in Sheba, Baby, the only non-R-rated Blaxploitation film of her career. She plays a Chicago-based private investigator who returns home to Louisville when her father’s business is threatened by some local gangsters. “Dad, I know you think I’m doing a man’s job,” she tells him, “but I’m not going to sit on the sidelines just because I’m a woman.”Over the course of the film, she gets to threaten a goon with death-by-rollercoaster,hold a guy at gunpoint in a car wash, and ride a Jet Ski on her way to shoot a guy with a spear gun. If you were going to introduce a kid to Grier’s filmography, it would probably make sense to start with this one, since it’s the most cartoonish in vibe.
My favorite performance of Grier’s ’70s career, however, is in her final Blaxploitation film, Friday Foster. Based on a comic strip character of the same name, Friday Foster is a plucky magazine photographer in the vein of Lois Lane or Hildy Johnson. And while she’s less overtly involved in the fighting and shooting than some of Grier’s other characters, she’s strong in the sense that she’s got great, cohesive characterization. Where Coffy, Foxy, and Sheba push Grier into tougher, brassier directions, Friday is girlish and playful in a way that feels closer to her real-life personality. You can sense this lightheartedness bubbling under her earlier roles and it’s nice to see it intentionally brought to the surface here.
Friday Foster showcased Grier’s range as a movie star, but it also sadly coincided with a decline in her career. As Blaxploitation faded in popularity, Grier struggled to find more leading roles. The slinky “sleaze” of the exploitation genre that allowed Grier to break into movies now marked her as “not a serious actor” in Hollywood—something other women who worked in the genre struggled with too. As director Stephanie Rothman put it, “The irony was that I made [exploitation films] in order to prove that I had the skills to make more ambitious films, but no one would give me the chance.” It wasn’t until two decades later that Tarantino finally corrected the historical record by putting Grier front and center in his critically acclaimed Blaxploitation homage Jackie Brown.
Still, even in the years when she wasn’t working, Grier’s impact on the action genre was rippling through the industry. At the start of the 1970s, there was no such thing as a female-driven action franchise. By the end of the decade, Wonder Woman,Charlie’s Angels, and The Bionic Woman were airing on TV while Princess Leia and Ripley were barking orders on the big screen. Grier was a huge part of that shift, along with fellow female Blaxploitation stars like Tamara Dobson, Jeanne Bell, Gloria Hendry, and Teresa Graves. Though Grier’s career is filled with compromises and contradictions, her defining legacy is that of a woman who never backs down from a fight. As the Foxy Brown trailer puts it, “Have no fear, Pam Grier is here.”
Next time: Charlize Theron got her action movie start in the infamous flop, Æon Flux
