The Mack: The Oakland Street Epic

The Mack has a scene in it that no other film of its era could have got. Michael Campus took a camera to the Players’ Ball in Oakland — the real event, the real attendees, the real furs and hats and cars — and shot it. What is on the screen is documentary footage of a subculture that had no interest in being documented, and it sits in the middle of a fictional gangster film like a load-bearing wall.

That tension runs through the whole picture. The Mack was made in 1973 with the cooperation of people who actually ran things in Oakland, from a script by Robert J. Poole, who had written it while serving a prison sentence. Max Julien plays John “Goldie” Mickens, out after five years, who decides that the only available route to power in his city runs through pimping. Richard Pryor plays Slim, his friend. Roger E. Mosley plays Olinga, Goldie’s brother, a community organiser who thinks the whole enterprise is a disgrace. Willie Hutch, on loan from Motown, wrote the music.

It is one of the biggest hits the cycle produced, one of the most sampled soundtracks in American music, and one of the most morally confused films I have ever sat through. All three facts are related.

The film wants two things at once

Campus is making a rise-and-fall gangster picture, and the form has rules. The protagonist ascends. The ascent is filmed as pleasure. The fall arrives and retrospectively converts the pleasure into judgment. Little Caesar established the deal in 1931 and every film in the tradition has honoured it since, because it is the mechanism that lets a studio sell a criminal’s life as entertainment while claiming to condemn it.

The Mack honours the first two rules with real conviction. The ascent is filmed lovingly: the clothes, the car, the Ball, the money counted on a table. Willie Hutch’s score is doing what Curtis Mayfield’s did on Super Fly, except with the argument removed — Mayfield spent that film contradicting the images, and Hutch spends this one endorsing them. “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” plays over Goldie’s rise as pure uplift.

Then the film puts Olinga in the room. Mosley’s character is there to say what the picture officially believes: that this is a man building his fortune out of the exploitation of Black women in a Black community, and that the militants trying to fix the neighbourhood regard him as part of the problem. The film gives him the argument, gives him the moral authority, and gives him roughly eleven minutes.

The result is a picture whose stated position and demonstrated position never meet. Every frame of craft is in service of how magnificent Goldie is. Every line of dialogue about what Goldie does is condemnation. Audiences in 1973 were not confused about which one they were buying, and neither is the thirty years of music that sampled the film.

Max Julien’s performance is the fulcrum, and it is better than the film around it. He plays Goldie soft-voiced and watchful, a man who has worked out that volume is for people without leverage. The whole persona is built on withholding: he under-reacts to threats, he lets silences run, and he delivers the film’s most quotable material almost under his breath. That choice is what makes the character legible as a philosopher rather than a thug, and it is why the film’s official condemnation never sticks. You cannot cast a man this calm, light him this well and dress him this beautifully and then expect an audience to take the disapproving brother’s side.

The documentary underneath

The reason to watch it is the texture, and the texture is real.

Campus shot Oakland streets, Oakland bars, Oakland people. The production was, by every account, deeply enmeshed with the Ward brothers, local figures whose cooperation made the film possible and whose world it is depicting. Frank Ward was killed while the film was in production. That is the context in which this thing was made, and it is visible: there is a nervousness to the location work, an absence of the usual movie confidence, that no second-unit team could fake.

The Players’ Ball footage is the clearest case. Watch the way the film cuts between staged material and captured material and you can see the seams — the actors are performing a subculture in the same room as the subculture, and the subculture is better at it. Campus keeps the camera further back than a drama normally would, because he is not directing half the people in the frame.

There is a craft argument in that distance. The film’s most striking images all come from Campus declining to compose. He lets Oakland be Oakland, holds wide, and trusts the clothes and the cars and the faces to fill the frame. It is the same instinct Arthur Marks used on Detroit 9000 the same year: a real city, photographed plainly, does work no set dresser can do.

Willie Hutch deserves his own paragraph. Motown sent him out to Oakland and he came back with a score that has outlived almost everything else about the picture, and the reason is structural: he wrote it as soul music with a job to do. The cues are full songs with verses and choruses, arranged to run under scenes rather than to accompany them, so the film keeps stopping being a film and becoming a music video for four minutes at a time. That is a defect in a drama and an enormous asset in a picture whose best material is people walking around Oakland looking magnificent. Hutch understood the assignment better than Campus did.

The ancestor

The gangster picture is the obvious parent and the specific one is Scarface (1932) by way of every rise-and-fall since: the outsider who takes a city, the friend who cannot keep up, the brother who represents the straight world, the inevitable descent. Poole’s script hits every mark on the list.

The stranger and more important ancestor is the pimp memoir. Iceberg Slim’s Pimp: The Story of My Life had been published in 1967 and had become one of the most widely read books in Black America, and it created the template that The Mack is filming: the pimp as philosopher, the game as a system with rules and a vocabulary, the whole enterprise reframed as an intellectual discipline. Goldie’s monologues about the game are that book’s voice moved to celluloid. The line runs forward from there through Willie Dynamite, which took the same subject the following year and had the nerve to make it a tragedy, and through Dolemite, which took the same subject and turned it into a joke Rudy Ray Moore was in on.

The Mack sits between those two poles and commits to neither. Which is the film’s problem and, honestly, most of the reason it is the one people remember.

The case against

The case against is severe and the film has no defence.

The women in The Mack are property. That is the subject, and a film can depict property relations without endorsing them, and this one does not manage the distinction. The women exist to be recruited, disciplined and displayed. They have no interiority, no arc, and no perspective, and the picture that is officially condemning their exploitation cannot be bothered to give one of them a scene. Carol Speed’s Lulu comes closest and is still furniture.

The pacing sprawls badly across a hundred and ten minutes, and the plot mechanics — the corrupt cops, the rival pimp, the mother — are handled with a clumsiness that the location work throws into relief. Every time Campus has to stage drama rather than capture reality, the film drops a level.

Pryor is wasted, which is the strangest failure of all. He is improvising, he is plainly the funniest and most alive person on screen, and the film has no idea what to do with him. Two years later everybody would.

The verdict: The Mack is essential and it is not good. It is the most valuable document the cycle produced, a genuine record of a place and a moment that no other camera got near, wrapped in a gangster film that lacks the courage of either of its two convictions. Watch it for what Campus caught rather than for what he wrote. The film’s afterlife in hip-hop happened because a generation correctly identified which half was real.

Where to find it: it has stayed in print on disc and turns up across the streaming services. Follow it with Across 110th Street for a film that took comparable material and had the nerve to go all the way down with it, and see the blaxploitation canon for the argument about what the cycle actually left behind.

Spoilers below

Goldie’s fall arrives on schedule and the film sells it cheap.

His mother is murdered. The corrupt cops close in. His brother’s warnings prove correct in every particular. Goldie kills his way out, takes his revenge on the men responsible, and the film’s last movement puts him in a car leaving Oakland with Slim, heading away from the city he spent the whole picture conquering.

The problem is what the ending refuses to cost him. A rise-and-fall picture requires the fall to land on the protagonist. Here the fall lands on his mother, and Goldie’s response is to become the avenging hero of a different genre entirely. He wins the confrontations. He escapes. The film’s official moral — that the game destroys the man who plays it — never actually happens to the man playing it.

The last shot is the two of them driving out, and it plays as liberation. Whatever Olinga said for eleven minutes, the picture’s final image is a man who took a city, got his revenge, and drove away from it in a very good car with his friend.

Audiences understood the ending perfectly. So did every producer who watched the grosses. The cycle spent the next three years making that drive out of town over and over again, and the version of the argument that Olinga was making went back on the shelf where the distributors had found it.