The Monkey Hustle

Blaxploitation films commonly fell to one side or the other of that catchy but contentious B-movie categorization. While programmers such as Slaughter (1972), Black Caesar (1973) and Coffy (1973) doled out lashings of ultra-violence and scatological humor to satisfy their requirements as lower common dominator exploitation fare, the gentler, more thoughtful likes of Five on the Black Hand Side (1973), Aaron Loves Angela (1975) and Cooley High (1975) endeavored to show a truer, more balanced side of the life of Afro-Americans in the inner city. Yet blaxploitation proved to be deep enough of a storytelling well to accommodate a wealth of films that fell in between these tent pole classifications, acknowledging as they did criminality as an unfortunate component of the black experience but keeping their eyes on the prize of legitimacy, self-sovereignty and a better tomorrow. Based on novels by Chester Himes (who had done hard time in Ohio for armed robbery before turning his life around in prison), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and its sequel Come Back, Charleston Blue (1972) are both tales of dirty deals and shady doings poisoning poor but vital urban neighborhoods. Confidence men of all stripes, from the penny ante chiselers and curbside grifters straight on up to the big wheels of the long con, figured into such films as Larry Yust's Trick Baby (1973), Jamaa Fanaka's Emma Mae (1976) and Arthur Marks' The Monkey Hustle (1976). The latter of these is an uptown take on Oliver! (1968) by way of The Sting (1973), in which a Chicago hustler drafts an army of orphans to do his dirty work but winds up doing good for the community he had set out to bilk. American International Pictures had wanted in on the blaxploitation game early on. Roger Corman allegedly told Martin Scorsese he would back Mean Streets (1973) if all the characters were rewritten from Italian-American to African-American. By 1976, the Sunset Strip-based independent company had a string of black-themed successes, among them William Crain's Blacula (1972), Michael Campus' The Mack (1973), Jonathan Kaplan's Truck Turner (1974) with Isaac Hayes, and several films directed in quick succession by Arthur Marks. AIP had been sufficiently impressed with the diversity shown by Marks' gritty policier Detroit 9000 (1973), his Fred Williamson vehicle Bucktown (1975) and the ghost possession film J.D.'s Revenge (1976) – to offer him the helm of The Monkey Hustle. Born in Los Angeles in 1927, Marks was third generation Hollywood. His grandfather and mother were silent film actors and his father had kept busy at Metro Goldwyn Mayer as a script supervisor and assistant director. Arthur Marks got his start in the industry as juvenile bit player before his college years at USC and an early job in the production department at MGM. As had his father, Marks later freelanced at other studios, assisting Orson Welles on The Lady from Shanghai (1947) before turning his hand to television. After directing several episodes of the Perry Mason series, Marks made his feature film directing debut in 1970. Though Togetherness was developed for MGM, a regime change at the studio resulted in Marks distributing the picture via General Film Group, an independent company he helped found. Through the 1970s, Arthur Marks (not to be confused with Arthur Marx, son of Groucho Marx) made a name for himself as a fast and resourceful director-for-hire. When Marks acquired the rights to the comic strip Friday Foster (the first mainstream comic strip with a black protagonist) as a vehicle for blaxploitation queen Pam Grier, AIP stepped in with the budget and a short-lived partnership was born. Marks' films for AIP are distinguished by a lightness of tone not often apparent in his work for GFG (typified by the sleazy, downbeat Bonnie's Kids [1973]), with the lightest (and some would say slightest) of them all being The Monkey Hustle. Amiable and loose-knit to the point of unraveling, the film is a broadly-played community comedy in the Chester Himes mold, with colorfully named flimflam man Big Daddy Foxx (Yaphet Kotto, on a career roll after playing a Bond villain in Live and Let Die [1973]) sharing cutting up the screen in the company of such larger-than-life personalities as Rosalind Cash's Mama and Rudy Ray Moore's Glittering Goldie. The film was not a success and the critics were largely unimpressed, although Roger Ebert, writing in The Chicago Sun Times, admitted The Monkey Hustle was at least a charming mess of a movie. Recalling the film in his 1995 book That's Blaxploitation, author Darius James was far less kind, fobbing the film off as "some lame nonsense." Whatever one's opinion of The Monkey Hustle as either a blaxploitation footnote or on its own merits as a marginalized piece of cinematic storytelling, the production certainly benefits from a better-than-average cast. With his soulful eyes and Cheshire Cat grin, Yaphet Kotto proves himself a worthwhile leading man; a descendant of Cameroon royalty, Kotto excelled in character parts through the next decade, with vivid appearances as a blue collar astronaut in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and a prison trustee in Stuart Rosenberg's Brubaker (1980), a role Kotto chose over the plum part of Lando Calrissian in the 1980 Star Wars (1977) sequel The Empire Strikes Back. Rosalind Cash was a seasoned stage and film actress who shared a taboo-shattering interracial kiss with Charlton Heston in The Omega Man (1971) but her screen time shrunk in the 1980s, prior to her death from cancer in 1995. Rudy Ray Moore, who appears as Glitterin' Goldie in The Monkey Hustle, had come to California from Ohio in 1959 after failing an early bid as an R&B crooner. Switching his focus to comedy, Moore established his own brand of "ghetto expression" by self-producing his own comedy albums. The raunchy performer's reputation as a foul-mouthed comedian in the Redd Foxx mold won him a small but devoted following and his 1970 album Eat Out More Often actually made the Billboard charts. In 1975, Moore put down his own money to finance his feature film debut. Inspired by a Stagger Lee-like character from Afro-American folklore, Dolemite (1975) was sufficiently successful to beget a sequel, The Human Tornado (1976). Moore's rising stock among black audiences led to his casting in The Monkey Hustle and his particular cult of personality thrived until he succumbed to the complications of diabetes in October of 2008 at the age of 81. Producers: Arthur Marks, Robert E. Schultz Director: Arthur Marks Screenplay: Charles Johnson; Odie Hawkins (story) Cinematography: Jack L. Richards Art Direction: Laurence Kensey Music: Jack Conrad Film Editing: Art Seid Cast: Yaphet Kotto (Big Daddy Foxx), Kirk Calloway (Baby D), Thomas Carter (Player), Donn C. Harper (Tiny), Lynn Caridine (Jan-Jan), Patricia McCaskill (Shirl), Lynn Harris (Sweet Potato), Rudy Ray Moore (Glitterin' Goldie), Rosalind Cash (Mama) C-90m. by Richard Harland Smith Sources: Arthur Marx interview by Brian Albright, Shock Cinema No. 33, 2007 Rudy Ray Moore interview, Shocking Images, 1993 That's Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadassssss 'Tude by Darius James Yaphet Kotto interview by Steve Head, IGN.com, 2003