Written and directed by Jack Hill
A Black woman is ogled, denigrated, beat, shot at, forcefully injected with heroin (twice), whipped, and subjected to what’s worse, yet Foxy Brown, the story of a woman’s rampage of revenge against the people that killed her man, is a story of Black triumph over the established white order and its nefarious undermining of Black communities.
The drug trade and its devastating effects are at the center of Jack Hill’s blaxploitation movie classic and beneath the motown swagger, jive talk, and nudity is something astute and subversive. Funky until it’s cruel, down-and-out until it’s on top, the B-movie trappings belie something timeless.
Pam Grier is an icon as Foxy Brown, all but ready to live happily ever after with her boyfriend who has been working undercover in the drug trade for the past few years. With a facelift, he’s supposedly unrecognizable, but not to Foxy’s brother, a good-for-nothing small-time dealer in deep with the drug lords, who tips them to the cop’s whereabouts. A good woman robbed of the future she imagined, right on her bloodied doorstep, as he’s gunned down.
To get revenge, Foxy infiltrates the high-end prostitution network that acts as a public affairs wing for the crime syndicate responsible for her partner’s death, taking on presentable white-collar crooks, allying herself with a local militia. Every frame contains either bullets, breasts, or balled-up fists.
As quintessential blaxploitation, it does feature plenty of things we’d lambast if released today, especially how Jack Hill turns his lens into a butcher shop window, parading every one of Grier’s body parts. It’s also not a game of subtleties, but as Foxy Brown maneuvers through its revenge fantasy, something becomes clear: the joke’s on us whities.
Everyone who’s rich and/or in a position of power in Foxy Brown is white. They’re also dumb buffoons, easily manipulated, or skittish, loveless losers whose only contribution to society is cruelty and exploitation of those less fortunate and each other.
Foxy’s quest is righteous, but Foxy Brown isn’t some holier-than-thou screed. It carries itself with a raised enticing eyebrow, clearly meant to entertain, and will do so with car chases, stunts, large-scale fisticuffs in a lesbian bar, some great one-liners, a world covered in polyester and wide lapels, with Grier at the center of it as a tough-as-nails woman who’s beyond giving a fuck.
It can therefore be really jarring when Foxy Brown depicts gruesome bloody violence and depraved sexual violence in the same breath, but it adds to this sense that Hill’s movie isn’t as straightforward as it might appear at first sight, a complex social critique that is more than its simplified parts.
Foxy Brown will meet you where you are. If you want a funky romp full of sex and violence where bad guys get what they deserve, have at it, and if you want something layered and textured to chew on, it’ll serve that up too.
Mikkel Frederiksen 