Movie Reviews: Hit!

Hit!
directed by Sidney Furie

I think that some people might unfairly dismiss this early seventies film as a low quality blaxploitation film. It wasn't that at all. 

It's an action drama that was directed by the same fellow who had just recently directed Diana Ross in the Billie Holiday bio Lady Sings The Blues. 

Hit! was not originally conceived as a "Black" movie. It was supposed to be a Steve McQueen vehicle. 

It was a sign of the times that the director and producer did not change the demographics of the cast or the race of the female love interest when Black actor and then male sex symbol Billy Dee Williams became attached to the film as the lead actor.  

This film, like many seventies movies, takes its own sweet time setting up events. It lets things play out naturally. 

Usually I like this seventies cinematic characteristic of naturalism and deliberateness as it is a nice departure from today's frantic camera style in which something new or different is happening every two seconds. 

However this film feels a little long, clocking in at over two hours. 

There's not really enough story here to justify that running time, which is why at times I did wish that the director would have sped things up a tad. 

This film questions if one person makes a difference. In some ways Hit! also takes from The Godfather and The French Connnection. Decisions that people in one nation make have impact on people whom they will never meet in other nations. 

This is true if the underlying business is legal, like selling chocolate or gasoline, or illegal, like selling heroin. In either case the customer or producer may not know or care about the negative externalities of their market transactions.

In a number of intercuts the movie shows us how opium arrives in Marseilles, France and is processed into heroin before being smuggled into the United States and distributed to various drug dealers. 

One dealer sells some to a young man and his girlfriend (Tina Andrews). 

Either the heroin is too strong or the boyfriend gave her too much because the young woman tragically dies from the drugs. 

But this woman is the daughter of Federal agent (could be FBI/CIA/DEA) Nick Allen (Williams). 

Allen finds the drug dealer and puts a beating on him but decides not to kill him when the dealer correctly points out that he's the low man on a very big totem pole. Removing him from the planet won't stop anything. Most people wouldn't even notice.

Allen asks his boss (Norman Burton) to redirect resources towards the French bigwigs who are at the top of the syndicate. 

The director declines and strongly suggests that Allen take some time off or lose his job and maybe more.

But Allen isn't a man to take "no" for an answer. Allen recruits a number of people who have scores to settle with drug dealers. 

This group includes Mike Wilmer (Richard Pryor), a sailor whose wife was murdered by junkies, Dutch Schiller (Warren Kemmerling), an agent who wants to take off the metaphorical gloves in the drug war, Barry Hampton (Paul Hampton), a sniper with a tax issue, Ida (Janet Brandt) and Herman (Sid Melton), an elderly loving solicitous Jewish couple who may have worked for both Mossad and Murder Inc., and Sherry Nelson (Gwen Welles) a beautiful escort with a drug problem. 

Allen trains and hones this group (and tries to avoid falling in love with Sherry) until he thinks they're all ready for the Big Payback. The director knows Allen is up to something. The director is not a man to take lightly. But then again neither is Allen. 

Although Pryor definitely has some comedic moments, they are properly few and far between. It was a shame that Pryor didn't have more opportunities to show off his serious acting chops as he did here. The film's final third ratchets up the tension among the team members and the suspense around their mission. I just wish the film didn't take so long to get there. Still, this was better than expected.