Penitentiary

Penitentiary arrived at the tail-end of the blaxploitation movement, its combination of prison flick and boxing movie first hitting cinema screens in the last month of 1979. Almost a decade separated it from those twin breakthroughs of Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Gordon Park’s Shaft. The former demonstrated the potential blaxploitation had for politically engaged filmmaking, the latter for drawing in massive audiences. Despite further serious minded works emerging from time to time, such as Ossie Clark’s Cotton Comes to Harlem, it was bums on seats that would hold greater sway. Genre movies ruled the roost, especially those of a violent persuasion and starring the likes of Pam Grier or Fred Williamson. Genre hybrids also came into their own - Blacula, Black Belt Jones, and so on - prompting blaxploitation to become almost a parody of itself and head into decline. Its name would be evoked at regular intervals - with the appearance of a Spike Lee or a John Singleton, the rise of hip-hop cinema instigated by New Jack City, or the ‘comeback’ of Jackie Brown - but at some point in the late seventies, blaxploitation effectively died.

Given its late arrival there is the temptation to view Penitentiary as something of an anomaly. However, look deeper into its production and you realise that the unlikelihood of it all goes much further. Behind the camera was Jamaa Fanaka, a student at UCLA’s film school since the early seventies. Common practice sees those on the course produce two shorts in order to graduate, and so it was with Fanaka’s first project, a 20-minute oddity best described as Goethe-meets-Superfly and entitled A Day in the Life of Willie Faust, or Death of an Installment Plan. For his second, however, he took the unprecedented step of producing a feature as an undergraduate. The end result was Welcome Home Brother Charles, aka Soul Vengeance. Fanaka served as writer, director, producer and editor, a combination that resulted in a distinctive style and a reluctance to pull punches. This was blaxploitation, and it was genre filmmaking too as the alternate title suggests, but of a brand far closer to Van Peebles and Sweet Sweetback than it was the likes of a Truck Turner or a Foxy Brown.

Thanks to Fanaka’s presence at UCLA during the seventies, he is as likely to be grouped in with the L.A. Rebellion movement as he is with blaxploitation. The term was coined by film critic Clyde Taylor and encompasses the work of Fanaka’s fellow African or African-American students who were similarly beginning to break into features. Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, for example, directed Bush Mama (both set and filmed in Watts) and Harvest: 3,000 Years (produced in his home country). Another, Charles Burnett, followed his student shorts and a role as camera operator on Welcome Home Brother Charles with Killer of Sheep, now widely recognised as a classic. The other key figure is Julie Dash, who became the first African-American woman to direct a feature film with 1991’s Daughters of Dust. All of them were, and continue to be, political filmmakers, which has lent Fanaka’s work an additional edge by association. Critics and cultists have been more willing to consider the subtexts of his output despite the genre and blaxploitation surfaces. Brother Charles is more than an action movie or a horror flick, it also speaks of racial prejudice and notions of masculinity. Likewise his second feature, Emma Mae, later clumsily retitled to Black Sister’s Revenge in a move which somewhat muddies its intentions of providing a gender-twist to Brother Charles’ concerns.

Nevertheless, the fact that Emma Mae can be re-sold as Black Sister’s Revenge or Brother Charles as Soul Vengeance does separate Fanaka’s work from those of his fellow L.A. Rebels. Killer of Sheep, for example, could never be seen as anything other than a slice of social realism; the seriousness of its tone is immediately discernible. Fanaka, however, is a more slippery character and so it is that we find Penitentiary (and its 1982 sequel, which he also wrote, directed and produced) now released as part of Arrow Video’s budget Arrowdrome! range, a self-proclaimed “fleapit” for the “violent, horrific, sleazy, exploitative”. The blurb on the back sleeve makes such marketing even clearer, with choice terms like HOOKER, CHEAP, VIOLENT, HELLHOLE, GRINDHOUSE and BLAXPLOITATION all laid out in purple capitals. Nowhere - not even in the booklet - are the UCLA connections mentioned or the fact that Penitentiary was Fanaka’s submission for his Masters thesis. (Emma Mae had been, but there was little hope of financing a next feature so he decided to stay on longer at the university and make one more. In the process he became the only person to make three features at UCLA as part of the curriculum!)

Not that Arrow are wrong to emphasise the spurious elements. Penitentiary opens with a young black hitchhiker (Leon Isaac Kennedy) getting hassled by a group of white bikers. Two scenes down the line and he’s brawling with them which results in a stint in the local pen. As the sleeve notes correctly identified this prison is indeed a hellhole. The inmates appear to be mostly concerned with ownership, though it’s never made quite clear as whether this meant in a homosexual way or a manner which harks back to the slave trade. Kennedy is thus a “buck” who needs to be broken, culminating in the next bout of violence. And there’s plenty more to come as - a plot development or two later - boxing matches are arranged between inmates with the prize being time with a local hooker. For some reason, the all-female penitentiary next door has agreed to allow some of its women along to watch these matches prompting the occasional spot of sexual congress in the toilets too. Fanaka is also sure to cross-cut these moments with the boxing, thus satisfying the need to mix up sex and violence so common in exploitation cinema.

Though Penitentiary doesn’t opt for anywhere near the full house of prison movie clichés, it does suffer from the usual collection of stereotypes: everyone is either overly macho, crazy, high, a comic relief drag queen or the token old guy. There’s also plenty of jive being spoken oftentimes by some very wobbly performers. Such aspects don’t really do Fanaka any favours as it becomes easy to switch off and view the film simply as a piece of trash. Yet to do so would be to ignore the low-budget grit which, for all the inexperience of some of its cast members, does lend Penitentiary a certain toughness and a certain immediacy. The prison is an outright scary place whilst the violence is often brutal and drawn out. One particular tussle, set entirely in the close confines of a two-man cell, is notable not only for its length (it seems to go on forever) but also its banality. There’s no polish or overt stylisation with which to gloss over proceedings. There’s no sense of this kind of thing being celebrated or dished up as entertainment. Admittedly it isn’t quite realism either, but there’s a pleasingly miserable tone to it all that has the desired effect.

In keeping with this matter-of-factness Fanaka never pushes the political subtext. Penitentiary isn’t an angry film in the way that, for example, Sweet Sweetback most definitely was. It is happier just to present the viewer with a series of situations and invite them to do the reading: the plight of this young man wrongfully accused of murder; the inmates being almost uniformly African-American; the lack of triumph to it all in stark contrast to most boxing flicks. There is food for thought here, it’s just a question of how much gets through thanks to its genre and exploitation underpinnings. I confess that it could prove incredibly frustrating as it switched between showing some intelligence and satisfying the lowest common denominator. There is a quality film within Penitentiary, it just doesn’t always make itself known. Still, it’s way better than the two sequels, one of which is included amongst this disc’s extras…

THE DISC

Penitentiary was first released by Arrow back in early 2009. Now it finds itself in their Arrowdrome! range at a budget price but without losing the extras. Thus we find the original 1979 film, with optional commentary from Fanaka, and its first sequel from 1982. In both cases we have a port of the Region 1 discs released by Xenon in 2001, right down to the non-anamorphic NTSC encode. Neither film is in particularly good shape with tramlines and the like making themselves known, whilst the transfers are murky and demonstrate some heavy ghosting, particularly Penitentiary II. Some will perhaps see this as adding to the ‘grindhouse’ charm, though that’s hardly an endorsement. Soundtracks, both in their original mono, are similarly on the murky side with the sequel, once again, finding itself in the worse shape. With that said Penitentiary II is an awful film so its poor presentation quality doesn’t prove too disappointing. Boxing is once again centre-stage and the plot follows on immediately from the first with Kennedy returning to the lead role. However, it also involves a whole series of musical numbers, roller-skating (including a roller-skating musical number), a pre-fame Mr. T, a pre-Ghost Busters Ernie Hudson (as the villain of the piece) and a very poor handle on the pace. This film just seems to drag on and on. Amazingly - though I suspect it was owing more the success of the first Penitentiary rather than the quality of its sequel - a third movie arrived in the late eighties thanks to Cannon Films. Sadly(?!) it isn’t included here. The other major extra, Fanaka’s commentary, provides some interesting anecdotes (the prison yard is actually part of UCLA’s campus; discussing whether the film was based in any way on personal experience, the director notes “George Lucas has never been to outer space”) but overall this is too laid back and prone to long silences. Ultimately it would have been better served up as a 15-minute interview. Rounding off the package we also find trailers for each of the features.

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