This week on TCM:U, a double feature of blaxploitation… well, we really can’t call them classics, can we? But wait…

The tale of a street corner activist (Tobar Mayo) transformed by science into a being of God-like vision and power, SUPERBLACK was meant to be a grass roots rejoinder to the tenets of blaxploitation, which so often exaggerated aspects of ghetto and inner city life that degraded when they should have uplifted. On paper, the independent film meant to offer people of color a fantasy hero on par with that iconic Man of Steel created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who would be able to deliver his target audience the promise of truth, justice, and the African-American way. Inspiration and seed money came from one James Smalley, remembered by those threw in with him as a pimp. Partnering with a white screenwriter Frank Packard, Smalley began casting for SUPERBLACK in 1973 but his funds ran out a third of the way into shooting and rights were surrendered to Pacific Film Labs proprietor Burt Steiger to settle unpaid bills. Though American International Pictures had expressed an interest in distributing ABAR (as the film was retitled upon completion, a reference to its protagonist, John Abar), and there was discussion of a sequel, negotiations broke down and the film was shelved until it was acquired by the LA-based exploitation film clearing house Mirror Releasing. A limited release came in 1977, mostly in the Southern drive-in (or “Chitlin’) circuit, under the alternate titles ABAR, BLACK SUPERMAN and ABAR, THE FIRST BLACK SUPERMAN. On video, the title was changed yet again, to IN YOUR FACE. 

Critical and popular response to ABAR, BLACK SUPERMAN rarely rises above the level of amused contempt at the film’s technical shortcomings (among them, a recurring musical motif that teeters on the cusp of plagiarizing the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE theme) and amateur performances. Yet when assessed on its own terms, ABAR is admirably ambitious in its bid to give voice to differing opinions within the black community: to the inclination towards restraint (as embodied by the presciently Ben Carson-like J. Walter Smith, playing a stoic though possibly deranged research scientist) and to the flipside of militant proaction personified by the eponymous Abar. The film also makes use of atypical Los Angeles locations, in particularly the “Black Beverly Hills” of Baldwin Hills and post-riot Watts. Packard stages the film’s penultimate setpiece under the Watts Towers, a potent symbol of the 1965 riots; unlike William Crain’s DR. BLACK AND MR. HYDE (1976) – which also ended with a Watts Towers standoff between its martyr-monster and the LAPD - ABAR, THE FIRST BLACK SUPERMAN forfeits the comfort of a genre cop-out to press for a climactic reckoning of Biblical proportions.

SHAFT IN AFRICA (1973) was the third and final cinematic go for the character created by Ernest Tidyman and brought to life in Gordon Parks’ seminal SHAFT (1971) two years earlier. Helmed by journeyman director John Guillerman (between the for hire jobs of  SKYJACKED and THE TOWERING INFERNO), and transplanting John Shaft from the mean streets of New York to Ethiopia to help put a kink in the hose of the Africa-to-Paris slave trade, SHAFT IN AFRICA will strike you as either a crude, big studio cash-out or as an inspired out-of-the-box curve ball. Making concessions to the then-popular James Bond films (even as Roger Moore’s 1972 debut as 007 in LIVE AND LET DIE made its own to the blaxploitation market), Shaft is pressed into service by being kidnapped (shades of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE) and sent undercover with a spy camera concealed in a walking stick. Marketed as “the biggest Shaft of all,” SHAFT IN AFRICA was less successful than the previous two Shaft films and marked the end of the line for the character on the big screen. A a short-lived, limited run TV series followed, with Roundtree suffering a restrictive venue change to Southern California; he should have stayed in Africa. The strength of the film now is an above-par international cast (Vonetta McGee, Frank Finlay, Marne Maitland, future Walter Hill rep player Frank McRae in his third film, SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER‘s Nadim Sawalha and Serbian actress Neda Arneric, who later went on to a career in politics), and gorgeous location shooting above the 8th Parallel by Marcel Grignon, a veteran of Andre Hunebelle’s “Fantomas” franchise, who later shot Walerian Borowczyk’s THE BEAST (1975).