Willie Dynamite: The Pimp-Redemption Melodrama

There is a moment about two-thirds of the way through Willie Dynamite (1974) when the film’s title character stands in a New York street stripped of every prop that made him — the car impounded, the wardrobe gone, the stable scattered — and the picture simply lets him stand there. No music swell. No cutaway to a gloating rival. Just a man in a suit that suddenly looks like a costume, in a city that has stopped finding him interesting.

I came to this one late, on a battered transfer, having spent a decade assuming from the title and the poster art that I knew exactly what it was: another cape-and-Cadillac strut, another wardrobe parade with a soul soundtrack. The title is a lie, or at least a marketing department’s idea of a joke. Universal sold a swagger picture. Gilbert Moses directed an indictment.

The film Universal thought it was buying

By 1974 the studio maths were obvious to everyone. Super Fly had turned a fortune on a shoestring in 1972 and made the pimp a viable protagonist; the whole apparatus of the majors had swung round to follow the money, in the pattern I traced in the blaxploitation cycle and the studio that followed it. Universal wanted its own. What it commissioned, from a script by Ron Cutler, was a picture in which the protagonist’s entire worldview is systematically demolished by the plot, and in which the most sympathetic figure on screen is the social worker trying to get his employees to quit.

Roscoe Orman plays Willie. That casting is one of the great accidental jokes of the era — Orman would join Sesame Street as Gordon that same year and stay for four decades, which means a generation of American children grew up with the reassuring voice of a man whose feature-film calling card was a Manhattan pimp in a gold Eldorado. Orman is very good, and specifically good in a way the material demands: he plays Willie’s arrogance as brittle from the very first scene. Watch his eyes when anyone contradicts him. There is no serenity in this man. He is running a business he does not understand, in a market that has consolidated without telling him.

Opposite him is Diana Sands as Cora, the ex-prostitute turned social worker who keeps appearing at the edges of Willie’s operation and detaching his women from it one at a time. Sands was one of the finest American stage actors of her generation — she had originated Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway — and this was her last completed film; she died of cancer in 1973, before release. She plays Cora with a flat, unsentimental exhaustion that the picture badly needs. Every scene between Sands and Orman is a scene between an actor who has thought about the character’s whole life and an actor who has thought about the character’s whole life, and the friction is the best thing in the movie.

Why the moralising works

Message pictures usually die of their own message. This one survives, and the reason is structural.

Cutler and Moses argue that pimping is a bad job rather than a sin — badly paid at the bottom, precarious in the middle, and controlled at the top by people who look nothing like Willie. The film’s antagonist is a cartel: an organised association of pimps who want Willie to fall in line, share territory, stop drawing heat. The film’s other antagonist is a prosecutor’s office that has worked out that you do not need to convict a man to destroy him. You simply need to take the car. Then take the coat. Then take the woman who does his accounts.

That is a devastatingly practical thesis for a genre normally content with iconography, and Moses shoots it practically. He was a theatre director by training, a co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, and his instincts are all about blocking and duration. He lets scenes run past the point where a studio picture would cut. When Willie loses an argument, we stay in the room for the silence afterwards. When the women in the stable talk among themselves, the camera holds still and lets us notice how much of their conversation is about money, rent and risk — the mundane arithmetic of a job.

The visual scheme reinforces it. The Eldorado is absurd, purple and gold and encrusted, and the film photographs it lovingly for the first act and then, once the pressure starts, keeps framing it as an enormous liability: too visible, too slow in traffic, impossible to park, a beacon that tells every cop in the borough exactly where you are. J.J. Johnson’s score — Johnson being one of the great bebop trombonists, slumming gloriously in film work — does something similar. The swagger cues arrive early and get progressively more sardonic. By the last reel the music sounds like it is watching Willie from across the street.

The ancestor the poster hides

The real ancestor of Willie Dynamite sits well outside the 1970s. This is a Warner Bros. gangster melodrama of the early thirties wearing a 1974 wardrobe: the rise, the strut, the overreach, the machine closing, the fall — the exact architecture Howard Hawks laid down in Scarface (1932), down to the moral epilogue that pre-Code censors demanded and that this film delivers without anyone demanding it. Willie is Tony Camonte with a fur coat. The cartel is the syndicate. Cora is the reformer who was always in the screenplay, played here by an actor good enough to make the role hurt.

Set it against its contemporaries and the difference is stark. Super Fly gives its dealer a clean exit and a Curtis Mayfield soundtrack that half-adores him even while the lyrics indict. Shaft hands its hero the whole city. The Spook Who Sat by the Door burns the city down on principle. Willie Dynamite takes the genre’s most glamorised figure and spends ninety-odd minutes explaining, patiently, that he is a small businessman about to be liquidated. Of the whole cycle, the picture it most resembles in temperament is Across 110th Street, which likewise refuses anyone a win.

The case against

The film is uneven, and pretending otherwise does it no favours. Moses’s theatrical patience produces some magnificent scenes and some inert ones; the middle act sags where the cartel plotting gets procedural. The prosecutor’s office is thin — a functional plot engine rather than a set of characters. And the picture has a real tonal problem it never solves: it wants to condemn the lifestyle while photographing the wardrobe with genuine lust. Willie’s clothes are astonishing. The camera knows it. You cannot fully renounce a thing you shoot that beautifully, and the film’s final position wobbles because of it.

There is also the question the whole cycle raises and this film raises more sharply than most, because it puts a real actor of Sands’s calibre inside it: the women in Willie’s stable are written as economic units in a thesis about Willie. Cora exists to redeem him. The film is honest about the exploitation and still slightly complicit in it, which is the permanent contradiction of the genre, and I would rather name it than pretend a moral last reel resolves it.

The verdict

It is the strangest film in the cycle and one of the two or three best. The moralising, which should sink it, is what keeps it upright, because the subject of the sermon is precarity. That argument has aged in a way the strut pictures have not. Orman gives a performance that deserved a career it never got. Sands gives a last performance that deserves to be better known than it is. Moses shoots the whole thing with a stage director’s faith that a held silence beats a cut.

The right way to see it is on a decent restoration — the colours are the point, and a muddy transfer flattens the Eldorado into a beige lump — and the right way to programme it is on a double bill with Super Fly, in that order, so the second film systematically dismantles the first. Come for the coat. Stay for the moment the coat comes off. If it sends you onward, the blaxploitation canon has the map.

Spoilers below

The ending is the reason people either love this film or dismiss it, so it needs stating plainly.

Willie loses everything. The state takes the car and the money, the cartel takes the territory, the women leave — several of them via Cora, one of them via a violent assault that the film stages without any of the leering the genre usually brings to such scenes. Cora herself pays for her interference. And the last movement of the picture finds Willie stripped, humiliated in a courtroom, and finally walking away from the trade entirely, on foot, in the company of one of the women he used to own a percentage of.

No shootout. No last-reel massacre. No triumphant reversal in which he outsmarts the cartel and drives off with the money. The genre’s entire grammar promises you one of those, and Willie Dynamite withholds all three and hands you an anticlimax on purpose. That is why it flopped, and that is why it lasts. The film’s argument is that there was never a version of this story with a good ending in it, and the only honest thing a movie can do with a man like Willie is take his things away and let him find out what is left. What is left, it turns out, is a person. That is not nothing, and it is the last thing anyone in 1974 expected this poster to be selling.