Friday Foster: Pam Grier as Comic-Strip Photojournalist

The plot of Friday Foster (1975) is a conspiracy thriller of moderate coherence. The thing that hooks me is the source. This film is adapted from a newspaper comic strip — a real one, syndicated in American papers from 1970, drawn by the Spanish artist Jorge Longarón and written by Jim Lawrence, and the first strip in US syndication to be led by a Black woman. That fact sat in the credits for decades while everybody talked about the poster.

I came to it late in my own Grier education, after the rage pictures, expecting a lesser Coffy. What I got was something closer to a light, fast, absurdly well-populated studio programmer that happens to have the most magnetic actor of the decade at its centre and treats her, for the first time, as a professional with a job.

What AIP was doing

By 1975 American International had a Grier problem of its own devising: three years of avenging-woman pictures had made her a star and boxed her in. The studio tried two exits that year. One was Sheba, Baby, the PG detective picture that removed the violence and discovered the violence had been holding the film up. The other was Friday Foster, which softens her in a completely different direction — towards glamour, comedy, motion and a plot with somewhere to be.

Arthur Marks directs. Marks is a genuinely interesting journeyman: a Perry Mason producer and director for years, then an independent making Black-audience pictures at speed — Detroit 9000 in 1973, Bucktown and J.D.’s Revenge in the same period. What he brings from television is exactly what this film needs. He shoots for clarity, cuts for pace, and understands crowd scenes. When Friday Foster is working — and it works for long stretches — it moves like a good episode of a series that never existed.

The cast list is the film

Read this bench and try to imagine the budget. Yaphet Kotto as Colt Hawkins, a private detective, in the same year he was working for the majors. Godfrey Cambridge as Ford Malotte, a fashion stylist, playing broad and getting away with it because Cambridge could. Thalmus Rasulala as Blake Tarr, the Black billionaire whose attempted assassination starts everything. Eartha Kitt as Madame Rena, the couturier, in about ten minutes of screen time that she detonates completely. Scatman Crothers as a preacher with a sideline. Jim Backus as a rich fool. Carl Weathers, a year before Rocky, as a hired killer. Ted Lange. Julius Harris.

Assembling that bench took intent. It represents most of an industry’s worth of Black character actors, the majority of them getting one decent scene a year elsewhere, gathered into a single production because AIP was one of the few outfits hiring them regularly. The film’s real pleasure is watching them collide, and Marks — a man who spent years managing large guest casts on episodic television — is exactly the director you want holding the traffic.

Grier holds it. This is the performance that ought to have opened the door to the career she deserved and did not get for another twenty years. She is funny here, which the rage pictures never let her be; her timing against Kotto is superb, and their relationship — bickering professionals with an obvious attraction and no time for it — is the film’s spine.

Why the structure works

The plot is a chase, and the mechanics are worth naming because the film is smarter about them than its reputation suggests.

Friday is a photographer. That gives Marks a protagonist whose job is to be somewhere, look at something, and record it — which is a perfect engine for a conspiracy picture, because it explains why she keeps arriving at incidents and why the conspiracy keeps needing to reach her. The camera is her weapon and her liability at once. Every location change is motivated by an assignment. Every escalation is motivated by what is on the film. It is the same logic Antonioni used in Blow-Up nine years earlier, run at drive-in speed and with a lead who can fight.

Marks also uses her profession to justify the film’s most obvious commercial requirement — the fashion-show sequence, the Washington reception, the parade of locations — as work rather than decoration. Friday goes to these places because someone is paying her to. The film gets its glamour and its plot from the same source, which is efficient screenwriting whatever else you think of it.

The structure has a cost, and it is the standard cost of the conspiracy plot: an ending that must explain itself. Friday Foster pays it. The last twenty minutes are a lot of exposition delivered at pace, and the film’s reach — a plot against Black political leadership, a coordinated assassination scheme — is considerably larger than its budget can dramatise. It gestures at a national conspiracy and stages it in a church.

There is a nice piece of craft in how Marks handles Friday’s photographs. The film keeps showing us what she has shot, and it keeps being slightly wrong — a figure half out of frame, a face turned away, a detail she did not know she had captured. The pictures accumulate information faster than Friday can interpret it, so the plot advances through the gap between what the camera saw and what she understood. That is a real screenwriting device, and it does the work that a dozen scenes of exposition would otherwise be doing.

The ancestor

The obvious cross-reference is the newspaper strip itself. Longarón drew Friday in a full-figure, high-fashion register borrowed from European commercial illustration, and the film’s visual approach — bright, poster-flat, keeping Grier centre-frame in strong colour — is closer to that than to the smoky look of the rest of the cycle.

The real ancestor, though, is the 1940s newspaper picture: the Torchy Blane series, the wisecracking reporter programmers where the hero’s press credentials open the door to the crime and the romance runs on professional insult. Swap the reporter for a photographer, 1939 for 1975, and the machinery is identical, down to the sceptical detective who keeps telling her to go home. Cross it with the paranoid political thriller the American cinema was making at exactly that moment — the year Three Days of the Condor opened — and you have this film’s genuine, unglamorous pedigree.

Set against the cycle’s harder work — Across 110th Street, The Spook Who Sat by the Door — Friday Foster is a lightweight. It is also the only one that imagines its heroine surviving to a normal Tuesday.

The case against

The conspiracy makes limited sense on inspection, and the film’s paranoid politics — genuinely charged material, drawing on a decade of real assassinations — get handled with the tonal seriousness of a caper. That mismatch bothers me more on each rewatch. There is a version of this script that is furious and it would have been a better film.

Marks’s television instincts flatten the images. Almost everything here is covered rather than composed. The picture has no visual memory to speak of, which is why nobody quotes shots from it.

And the film cannot decide whether Friday is a professional or a pin-up, so it makes her both in alternating scenes, and the seams show. The nude scene is contractual rather than dramatic, and Grier — who spent her career being extremely clear-eyed about what AIP was selling — deserved a script with the courage of its own premise.

The verdict

The last significant Grier vehicle of the classic run, and the one that points at what she could have been given. Take it for the cast, for the pace, for the sight of an American film in 1975 building a whole ensemble of Black character actors and letting them play. Take Kitt’s ten minutes. Take Kotto and Grier arguing.

The plot will not survive scrutiny and the film knows it, which is why it keeps moving. It has circulated on the boutique labels alongside the rest of the AIP run; it looks better than it has any right to when the colour is properly restored, because the colour is the point. If you want to see the whole shape of the cycle, the blaxploitation canon sets out the route, and the studio that followed the money explains why films like this existed at all.

Spoilers below

The conspiracy is called Black Widow, and it is a plot to assassinate the leading Black political figures of the United States at a single gathering — a mass killing at a summit of Black leaders, coordinated by wealthy white interests with a Black front man inside the operation.

That is an extraordinary premise for an AIP picture in 1975, a decade on from Malcolm X and seven years on from Memphis. It is real, unhealed material, and the film reaches for it with complete sincerity and then executes it as a foot chase.

Blake Tarr, the billionaire, survives the opening attempt and turns out to be the intended centrepiece rather than an aberration. Colt Hawkins is inside the plot’s orbit throughout. The reveal is delivered in a rush and the confrontation lands in a church, where Friday — camera in hand, having spent the film photographing her way towards the answer — is the one who stops it.

What the film does correctly at the very end is refuse to make her a martyr. She lives, she keeps the job, the ambiguity with Colt stays unresolved, and the credits arrive on a note of ordinary Friday-night pleasure. The genre killed most of its protagonists or drove them out of the frame. This one gets to go back to work on Monday, which for a 1975 picture built on a comic strip that a syndicate once thought was a risk, is a quietly radical place to leave her.