Street Sisters

Make no mistake, "Street Sisters" (which I saw as "The Black Hooker") is a bad film. However, it does have enough bad elements to keep you curious enough (maybe) to sit through the whole thing.

One interesting thing is that the film is set in the 30's and 40's, with most of the actors still looking like they are from the 70's of course, especially hair-wise. The plot - a very attractive black hooker has a white son in "a bad way" (meaning from a john), wants nothing to do with her son, so she keeps the son on her parent's farm where grandma and grandpa raise him. Grandpa is a preacher but a pervert and a mean dude, grandma is very nice but she has an undisclosed bad past. The kid makes friends with a young black girl (why he shockingly pushes her from behind as she is running in a small brook who knows) and then all of a sudden it's the 40's, and the kid and his girlfriend are teens.

His girlfriend has a certain encounter with grandpa, prompting the son to leave home, and go find his hooker mom. He wants a relationship with her, but she still wants nothing to do with him. He goes off on his own and has a few "adventures." The last 15 minutes of this film gets real strange. The color tone of the film change for a little while and things get a little psychedelic. Some weird things happen and it all ends very suddenly and strangely.

The film is bad. There are plenty of odd close-ups and poor camera angles. Despite being set in the 30s and 40s, the music is still 70's porno funky. Makes you think maybe the film is indeed set in the 70's after all, but the few vehicles you actually see are all 30's cars. yeah right! There are some sequences where nothing happens at all, except to fill in the time with some utterly meaningless conversation between characters.

There is even one long and brutal beat down of one of mom's johns by a couple of guys (her pimp and his muscle?) that makes you wonder, what does this have to do with anything? There are early indications that the film will be about the white boy struggling to live in the "black world" due to his family and upbringing, but that's never touched upon after all. Mom though, as attractive and sexy as she is, is very much an unlikable selfish bitch to such a degree, the viewer can never feel anything for her at all.

This is definitely an interesting viewing experience but it isn't something you will want to watch again more than once most likely.

With the title of this movie at times being "Street Sisters" and other times "Black Hooker", one might be lead to believe this is a sleazy blaxploitation movie. Actually, while the movie does have a couple of sex scenes with nudity, the majority of the movie aims to be a serious drama. Nothing wrong with that aim, but the end results are disappointing. I will say that the acting by the no-name cast is competent, and while the movie is based on a stage play, it manages to hide its stage origins fairly well. But the storytelling is a mess. It's confusing with its abrupt jumps in time, though most of the time the movie is really slow, padded out with scenes that serve little to no purpose. And we never really get into the head of the Caucasian central character. I suspect that this worked a lot better on the stage than this cinematic translation.

Blaxsploitation cinema of the 70's is littered with the same old tiresome genres: Martials Arts, Gangster movies and Drug Smuggling. So it's refreshing to come across a movie that tries to shake the boundaries and try something new. Granted Arthur Robinson's 'Sister, Sister' aka Black Hooker and Don't Leave Go My Hand, suffers somewhat dramatically from amateur directing, but overall the movie delivers its story well enough for the audience to appreciate the intentions it sets out to achieve.

The story follows the early years of a young white boy, abandoned by his mother; A high class African-American hooker from the city, to be brought up by her grandparents in the poor black regions in the countryside. The denial of her son, is illustrated through her disgust at his white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, a child born a bastard to a drunken white man and a prostitute. The child however, alien to a world of racial bigotry, wants only the love of his estranged mother. After losing his childhood sweetheart and first love to his preacher grandfather at the age of 16, he decides to leave home for the city in search of his mother, only to finally find her and be greeted with stone cold denial, and contempt. A lifetime of rejection and hardship is too much to bare for the son... How will he cope?

A fairly thought provoking story which undeniably sets out to challenge the social and ethnic class structures that were so divided in working class America in the 70's. Which I feel the current IMDb rating does not give it credit for. There's no pretending that this movie is anything particularly special, but it does manage to string together a plausible narrative, which offers somewhat more than the usual pimp/blow/fist fighter we're so used to with blaxploitation.

The strength of this movie comes from the performance of the leading actress Sandra Alexandra who plays the working girl mother. Besides Alexandra's performance, the rest of the cast is nothing out of the ordinary, but the ideals this movie is trying to flagstone, speak louder than the actions actually portrayed on the screen.

Just when I think I've seen every unnoticed example of the 'blaxploitation' genre...along comes this quirky, sincere little film from 1972. It more rightly fits, perhaps, into the sub-genre of African-American themed films set in the Great Depression, like "Book of Numbers" and "Thomasine and Bushrod". The actress who plays the main character's mother bears a rather striking resemblance to Josephine Baker. The film's stage origins often stick out and the fact that all the dialogue was post-synched doesn't help to alleviate a general sense of technical stiffness. Still, it's an interesting story about the son of a light-skinned prostitute (improbably played by an actor who's far too fair-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed) caught between the clash of white and black cultures. The video version I watched (on Edde) was actually a pretty good looking print (apart from a few bad stretches on the soundtrack), moderately letterboxed even. If you can find this and are a fan of the genre, check it out.

This is really a successor to the one-man, low-budget productions of Oscar Micheaux in the 1920's and 1930's, rather than one of the blaxploitation movies of the 1960's and 1970's.

Blaxploitation movies were urban. They were action movies with karate, knife, and gun fights; they pitted black heroes (sometimes good guys but often criminals themselves) against bad white guys (usually politicians and cops). They had pounding rhythm and blues scores and pimp style, and most of them were produced by major film studios, though on relatively small budgets.

The black-audience shoestring independent productions of Micheaux and his colleagues, on the other hand, most frequently had rural or small-town settings. Their characters were rarely involved in crime, and there was minimal violence. There was also little conflict between blacks and whites; the conflict was intraracial, and the movies usually had a religious, moral, or social message.

Under either title, "Black Hooker" or "Street Sisters," this movie markets itself as a blaxploitation movie, but its main elements are all from the earlier genre. It's the drama of a conflicted family, with a grandfather who is a crazed preacher; a grandmother who is the earthy family peacemaker; their daughter, the title character, who is more like the fallen woman in the earlier films than like the flashy, assertive whores of the later ones; and the daughter's son who is light enough to pass for white (and passing is a common theme of the earlier movies).

It's also, unfortunately, just as clumsily plotted and directed as the Micheaux movies.