Sheba, Baby (1975) Blaxploitation, PG style (Review)

On the face of it, we shouldn’t need to watch blaxploitation any more.  As soon as Will Smith and Denzel Washington became viable Hollywood action movie stars, its USP of showing black actors in empowered, heroic roles was co-opted.  This, though, ignores the pleasures of blaxploitation as a movie-making style; its zooming, panning long-lens cinematography, its fusion of noir aesthetics with bright colour and daylight, its obsession with walking and transport, its unforgettable music and fashion.  Sheba, Baby is a fine example of all of the above, a detective movie with the star who – with all due respect to Fred Williamson and Richard Roundtree – embodied the promise of blaxploitation more than anyone else, the great Pam Grier.

As ever, Arrow have supplied a generous selection of extras on this new dual-format release, including a conversation with the film critic Chris Poggiali about Grier’s years at American International Pictures.  It underscores how much of her career was down to chance; she joined AIP not as a star but as a receptionist, and her breakthrough lead Coffy was quickly cobbled together after AIP lost the rights to the script for Cleopatra Jones.  Cleopatra Jones was eventually made by Warner Bros with Tamara Dobson in the lead, and comparing Coffy to Cleopatra Jones is an instructive lesson in how the majors did blaxploitation differently to independent studios like AIP.  Cleopatra Jones is less violent and less sexual than Coffy, and it also has a heroine who, for all her iconic status, is an agent of the US government.  Coffy, though, is an independent hero on her own personal mission of revenge, a trend which continued in Grier’s later vehicles Foxy Brown and Sheba, Baby.

That said, Sheba, Baby is definitely the odd one out in her initial three-picture AIP deal.  Part of this is because it’s directed by William Girdler rather than Jack Hill.  Girdler had broke through with horror movies: Three on a Meathook was one of the many horror films to take inspiration from the true-crime case of Ed Gein, and Abby was a black version of The Exorcist, a transitional form between his horror and blaxploitation work.  Despite this grisly ancestry, Sheba, Baby is a less provocative film than the Jack Hill movies Grier had broken through with.  Part of this is down to its star, who was already tiring of the constant nudity and cat-fights she’d been asked to perform.  In contrast to the Hill movies, Sheba, Baby received a PG certificate, although it has to be remembered that the PG was a much more permissive certificate back in the 1970s, and even then it pushed the limits of the category.

In her quest to bring down the gangsters destroying her father’s business, Sheba Shayne unleashes a ferocious blizzard of violence, interrogating criminals with a brutality that would make Dirty Harry flinch.  Part of the pleasure of Sheba, Baby’s action scenes come from Girdler’s knowledge of his Kentucky locations.  Co-writer David Sheldon notes on one of the commentary tracks that Girdler was the son of a Louisville socialite, and used his family connections to persuade local authorities to let him film at a busy funfair, or get police officers to effectively play themselves.  Sheldon also notes that the third act, which begins with a man being dragged behind a jetski, was written before he’d read a similar scene in Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die – although, ironically, the scene does not appear in the blaxploitation-influenced film adaptation.

Occasionally, you get the feeling Sheba, Baby is pulling its punches.  The violence is plentiful but the sex is neutered, although this does lend its central romance a certain innocent, romantic quality that may have influenced the Grier-Robert Forster relationship in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown.  The only other moment of sensuality is also reflected in a latter-day genre homage: Pilot, the villain played by Dolemite director D’Urville Martin, is introduced in bed with three women in the manner of Black Dynamite.

Overall, Sheba, Baby is an enjoyable action romp with plenty of car chases and funky musical montages.  If Grier is occasionally a little unsteady in the emotional scenes at this stage in her career, she earns her icon status in the action scenes: tough, authoritative, endlessly watchable.  As has already been mentioned, Arrow’s extras turn the package into a celebration of the film, particularly the second commentary by WilliamGirdler.com’s Patty Breen.  I was worried that this track would be overly gushing, but Breen is a fan with a sense of proportion and an endless mental library of trivia and observations.  She is not uncritical of Girdler’s work, but the overall tone of the commentary is affectionate and informative, much like the package as a whole.

Thanks for reading our review of Sheba, Baby

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