|
The Film: 4/5
Though he was known mainly for his Penitentiary trilogy (one classic original, two very weird sequels), the late Jamaa Fanaka was one of the most important filmmakers in the history of black independent cinema. His first two films, both made while he was a student at UCLA and one of the founders of the L.A. Rebellion filmmaking movement, have been collected on a single Blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Vinegar Syndrome, who have also released Penitentiary and its first sequel this year. Part of their acquisition from Xenon Entertainment Group, who previously released each film on VHS and DVD with exploitative alternate titles and transfers of passable quality, 1975’s Welcome Home Brother Charles and its 1976 follow-up Emma Mae are finally available on home video with their original titles and widescreen framing intact and looking better than ever before.
I was unfamiliar with Emma Mae prior to the announcement of this Blu-ray release, but Brother Charles is a feature I’ve been curious about since I first saw its infamous theatrical trailer on a compilation DVD many years ago. The unlikely titular hero of Fanaka’s feature directorial debut is Charles (Marlo Monte), a small-time Los Angeles drug dealer who gets busted by two cops – one of them an angry, unabashed racist ironically named Freeman (Ben Bigelow) – while his partner Jim (Stan Kamber) flees the scene and avoids arrest. Castrated by Freeman and railroaded by a racially-biased justice system, Charles gets sent up the river for three years. Once released, he sets about rebuilding his old life and starts a relationship with prostitute Carmen (Reatha Grey), all the while cooking up an outrageous plan to get violent revenge on the cops, prosecutor, and judge responsible for his unjust imprisonment.
If you’ve never heard of Brother Charles, prepare yourself for I am about to embark into some spoiler territory regarding the film’s plot. Fanaka ensure his debut feature’s eternal infamy on the strength of his choice for Charles’ weapon of vengeance – his dick. Even though Freeman bloodily hacked off his manhood in the back of an unmarked cop car, our hero got it back during his time in prison. We are never told exactly how that happened, but there are subtle allusions throughout the film to what Charles endured to have his trouser snake revived and mightier than ever. Some guys like to boast that they have a monster in their pants; in Charles’ case, it’s hilariously true.
Deep down in its deranged soul, Brother Charles is about the bigoted, impotent white man’s fear of the black cock, and Fanaka uses this as a vehicle for a full-frontal assault on Hollywood’s hateful suppression of black sexuality since the dawn of cinema and relegation of black characters to positions of subservience to white leads. Charles makes for a satirical embodiment of white America’s racial hysteria; first, he uses the power of his dick to seduce the wives of his white oppressors, then he goes into a terrifying trance, unfurls his prick like a python about to feed on a helpless white mouse, and deploys it to strangle the life out of the men who condemned him on bogus charges.
Fanaka’s ragged, uncompromising debut – made as a student film during his UCLA years – keeps the exploitative elements of its story grounded for a majority of the time, allowing the scrappy, gut-punch verisimilitude of the world he spent the first hour building up to define Brother Charles. The film is more than halfway to its finale before the first death by dick, time Fanaka uses to establish his characters and the daily struggles they encounter. Charles’ budding romance with Carmen never feels tacked-on and unnecessary to the narrative progression. We also get to spend a few fleeting moments with Charles’ family and witness up close how the choices he made in life impacted their own. Fanaka livens up the potentially grim proceedings with silent, documentary-style footage of black life in Los Angeles set to the catchy blues-and-funk soundtrack provided by William Anderson (a future collaborator with the director on his biggest career smash, the original Penitentiary).
Retitled Soul Vengeance by Xenon for its initial video and DVD releases, Brother Charles proved that Jamaa Fanaka from the beginning of his filmmaking career intended to subvert the blaxploitation genre by making hot-blooded B-movies with the anger, sadness, and optimism of the black community at their core. The more outrageous components of his movies would serve as a delivery system for the themes he would continue to explore throughout his filmography, many of which are seeded in his fiery directorial debut. Fanaka also employed a fascinating visual experimentation with his cinematography, editing, and color timing choices to help make Brother Charles stand out from most of the exploitation films designed to appeal to black audiences and keep it closer in spirit to Melvin Van Peebles’ groundbreaking masterpiece Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song than studio-financed releases with wider audience demographic appeal like Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy.
The film’s pacing is smooth and luxuriates in the laidback atmosphere of sun-soaked 1970’s L.A., and only falters when the plot’s lurid elements are not introduced until late in the game and only then made use of whenever the street-level drama begins to run out of steam. Fanaka ends his offbeat flick on a note of ambiguity that values emotional anguish over splatter and seediness, the only ending for Brother Charles that truly makes sense.
Emma Mae is named for its lead character, a naïve country girl (Jerri Hayes) from Mississippi who has come out to L.A. to live with her uncle Huari (Eddy Dyer), aunt Daisy (Gammy Burdett), and cousins Dara (Teri Taylor), Ulika (Synthia James), and Melik (Laetitia Burdett) in an apartment in the Watts district. Initially feeling alienated from her relatives and their friends with whom she tries to connect, Emma Mae soon finds companionship with drug pusher and addict Jesse (Ernest Williams II). When Jesse is arrested, she decides to raise the money for his bail by robbing a bank – a crime that Emma Mae may have possibly committed for the wrong reasons and could destroy her young life just as she seems to finally find happiness so far from the only home she has ever known.
Fanaka’s second film was rarely seen during its initial release, outside of some festival screenings, until Xenon purchased it and gave it a home video release under the more lurid and enticing title Black Sister’s Revenge (“Mess with her man and she’ll bust your face.”). Such attempts to rebrand Emma Mae as another slick piece of disposable blaxploitation probably kept it off the radars of adventurous film buffs unaware that they were missing out on a surprisingly honest and heartfelt tale that was far better than its exploitative marketing would imply. There is little violence in this film, no one dies, and the climatic fight between our heroine and an advantageous scumbag criminal is fueled the sadness of youthful heartbreak and the volcanic rage women like Emma Mae when miserable bastards such as Jesse are allowed to be idolized and held up as an example of the best the black community can contribute to society.
Fanaka’s characters here aren’t stereotypical vessels to address his potent themes of poverty, black-on-black crime, and police brutality, but fleshed-out human beings many of us can relate to on some level, even if we have never had to struggle as they did. Like any person who falls madly in love, Emma Mae refuses to acknowledge Jesse’s glaring character flaws and the fact that he is just a dangerous man who will use the younger woman for whatever purpose he requires, be it a last-minute date or a convenient hostage to keep the police at bay. She is even willing to enter a life of crime in order to get him released from a place he very likely belonged in the first place. Fresh off the bus from the deep South, Emma Mae is a sweet, well-meaning kid with broken heels and a suitcase held shut by a length of rope. By the end of the film, she is a powerful and defiant woman ready to take on the world. Fanaka, directing from his own screenplay, makes this the story of Emma Mae’s coming of age in a land previously foreign to her, and every action she takes over the course of her arc is organic and true to her continuing maturity.
Once again, Fanaka relied on a cast comprised of unknown actors and brimming with raw, untapped talent that the director managed to successfully bring out on celluloid. The key performance is delivered by Jerri Hayes and it is a genuine heartbreaker but also one filled with quiet strength that emerges naturally and is a joy to watch happen. Aided by Fanaka’s soulful writing and direction, Hayes makes Emma Mae a three-dimensional woman who originally comes across as another country hick amazed by life in the big city but makes a convincing transformation into a real hero who just wants to love and be loved in return. This is her film, no doubt, and Hayes dominates her every scene without hardly breaking a sweat despite being a relative unknown actress, but the rest of the cast bring to their characters happiness, pain, and anger that feels all too palpable.
Ernest Williams II is charming and sleazy as the duplicitous Jesse. You can see how a man like him could easily win over Emma Mae, but you still never entirely trust him. Eddy Dyer and Gammy Burdett make their love and concern for their niece convincing. As “Big Daddy”, the unlikely father figure to Jesse and his friends, Malik Carter (who would reunite with Fanaka for Penitentiary II) has a soul-stirring monologue in support of Emma Mae’s bank robbery plot in which he emphatically makes clear that black men in America need to stop killing each other in pointless gang feuds and start helping each other if they ever intend to survive. White characters in this film are minimal, and the expected run-in with the law ratchets up the intensity as two black police officers viciously fight it out with Jesse’s group and it is uncomfortable to watch.
The cinematography by Stephen L. Posey (who also shot Penitentiary II for Fanaka as well as 80’s horror films like Slumber Party Massacre, Bloody Birthday, and Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning) beautifully soaks in the actual Watts filming locations with an eye for the working-class legitimacy Fanaka preferred to evoke. H.B. Barnum, a pianist, arranger, producer, and songwriter who has previously worked with Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, and the Supremes, contributed a bluesy original score perfectly ideal for the setting and story. Barnum keeps his soundtrack lo-fi until the final scenes, then he gets overly dramatic and it really works.
Audio/Video: 4/5
Both films have been scanned and restored in 2K resolution from their original 35mm camera negatives and are presented on this Blu-ray in their original 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratios. Each transfer is backed up by an English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono soundtrack, and English subtitles are also provided.
In the case of Brother Charles, the camera negative wasn’t exactly found in pristine condition. The transfer sports its share of minor print damage and grain content is heavy, with the darker scenes nearly overcome by grain. Occasional traces of dirt and grit, inherent to the source elements, lightly pepper the picture. Image stability is strong, while the warm and balanced color timing effectively favors reds and browns that never become too bright or garish in appearance. Audio quality is another mixed bag; the track is mostly a crisp and audible presentation of the original mono sound mix, but split-second drop-outs can easily be detected in certain dialogue scenes. Distortion is minimal though.
Emma Mae fares better on both fronts in a near-flawless presentation. Picture quality benefits from a stabilized image, balanced and natural grain, and authentic color timing. Apart from a few shuddering opticals in the opening credits, the transfer is fantastic. Same goes for the audio, an excellent recreation of the original mono that is rich in clarity and central activity. Volume levels are maintained well.
Extras: 3.5/5
“The History of the L.A. Rebellion & Jamaa Fanaka” (31 minutes) is a highly informative interview with film historian Jan-Christopher Horak, who also serves as the director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and co-edited the book “The L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema”. Horak provides an in-depth overview of the history of black independent filmmaking, how it grew to prominence in the wake of the old Hollywood studio system’s financial collapse, the popularity of “Blaxploitation”, the suppression of black sexuality and the glorification of pimps and drug dealers in mainstream cinema, and more. He also talks extensively about the life and career of Fanaka and the importance of the filmmaking movement he helped to create.
Emma Mae star Jerri Hayes was interviewed by Jesse Trussell of the Brooklyn-based BAMcinematek following a September 24, 2017 screening of the film. Questions from the audience were also taken and the resulting chat was filmed for the Reelblack Podcast and included here in full (20 minutes). Hayes discusses how she earned the title role, her personal and professional relationships with Fanaka, and more. Her recollections are warm, funny, and all worth absorbing.
That crazy theatrical trailer for Brother Charles (4 minutes) along with 30 and 60-second teasers close out the extras. A reversible cover art sleeve and DVD copy featuring standard-definition transfers of the two films and their accompanying supplements have also been provided.
Overall: 4/5
Vinegar Syndrome continues to do right by the cinematic legacy of the important and underrated filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka with a terrific high-definition showcase for his first two films. The transfers and extras are terrific. Fans of B-movies and vital black cinema that have never received their due until now will find lots to love about the Welcome Home Brother Charles/Emma Mae Blu-ray/DVD combo set. Highly recommended.
|
