BLACK SAMSON

d. Charles Bail (1974)

I love Blaxploitation films because they generally make absolutely no apologies and they cut straight to the core of popular cinema. These are films filled with sex, action and wish fulfillment and packed with entertainment. The protagonists are not only larger than life but they are big and bold enough to bust out of their societal cage: impervious to pain, irresistible to the opposite sex, ineffably cool, unbelievably tough, they are righteous dudes and bitches, sticking it to The Man, whoever and wherever The Man might be.

Samson is one of these righteous dudes. He is a big mahogany hewn motherfucker who keeps his neighbourhood tight, running it like a benign dictator, although he’s not afraid to hand out a couple of taps with his ceremonial twatting stick if he needs to. He’s down on drugs and crime, and, through his popular bar at the hub of the community, he provides his subjects with beer, topless go-go dancing and the sad novelty of his pet lion, perhaps the biggest victim of Samson’s pre-eminence. The lion looks drugged up and utterly miserable, laid on the bar in a torpor, or a stupor, his eyes dim and dead.

The lion, along with a wardrobe of garish dashikis and a gold topped staff, is clearly part of Samson’s shtick, his chains of office. As a fiend for accuracy this jarred with me, as the original Samson that they are clearly alluding to didn’t even like lions, instead tearing one apart with his bare hands and leaving its corpse to rot. When he passed by again a few days later, a swarm of bees had built a hive in its decaying stomach, prompting the maxim ‘from the strong came forth the sweet’: the phrase, and a rendition of the dead lion and the live bees, still appear on Lyle’s Golden Syrup tins today. Who says that blogs can’t be educational?

Into this relatively balanced and peaceful environment comes the Mafia, in the person of a ambitious, young-ish mobster played by William Smith – a man who has appeared in over three hundred films, none of them much good. His villain is a real master class in scumbaggery, an abuser of women, a bully, a creep and wearer of loud checked trousers. This cracker piece of pockmarked shit wants to take over Samson’s patch and arrogantly thinks it will be easy, an assumption he will live to regret - but not for long.     

The film culminates in a mad battle where the locals gather on roofs to hurl old fridges and air conditioners at the mobsters while being shot in the face and falling to their deaths. It’s carnage. When the battle is won, Samson, curiously absent during the fighting, strides into the fray like a General, surveying the death and destruction with a damp but undamaged eye, nodding sagely at the mayhem he has presided over. To his credit, and most unlike a general, he tears his shirt off, puts his huge dukes up and, after a bruising and protracted scrap, beats the obnoxious and unrepentant Smith to death.

Threat neutralised, villain dispatched, equilibrium is restored in Samsonville, and the topless go go dancing begins again, perhaps with even more abandon. It’s nice to know who’s in charge. For some, anyway, the lion couldn’t give a monkeys.