Boss Nigger

I saw the trailer for this on you tube and I laughed for 10 minutes straight ! I decided then to purchase the DVD . I like Fred Williamson , but I have found his filmography to be hit and miss. This movie is quite enjoyable actually and delivers the goods with the action and comedy. Plus we get an awesome Shaft like theme song, while there are better westerns and black exploitation films . This is a solid b movie with a great supporting cast . D'Urville Martin is great as Boss 's sidekick. Not to mention William Smith and R.G. Armstrong are great villains . In less p.c times this was considered fun for the whole family . So round up the whole family and watch Fred Williamson stick it to the man!

Boss (Fred Williamson) and Amos (D'Urville Martin) are bounty hunters, riding into the city of San Miguel to collect a reward when they find there's no sheriff. Boss nominates himself the new sheriff, and the reluctant mayor (who is working with the local bandits) goes along with it. Now Boss and Amos must clean up crime, defend the poor and win some women's hearts.

What's really amusing about this film is that it received a PG rating. There's some borderline nudity, and they use the N-word something like 200 times. But they never really swear otherwise, the violence is minimal by western standards and there's no sex (though it's hinted). Having seen other blaxploitation films (such as "Sweet Sweetback") I was surprised by the tameness.

They play really heavily on the race issue, not surprisingly. They even institute "black rules" as the new police, which is awesome (including banning the n-word, despite its prevalent use in this film). But the film is not derogatory to whites or blacks, really. It offers an interesting view where white people must be protected by the black man, and things work out fairly well (much to the people's initial chagrin).

Reviewer Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the film as "a pleasant surprise if you stumble upon it without warning." Canby characterized Williamson's acting as "an immensely self-assured parody of the Man With No Name played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's films." I agree with the first part, although I think the second part might be giving this film just a little bit too much credit. But, perhaps not.

Canby finished the review by pointing out what made the film notable among black Westerns: "Most black Westerns either ignore race or make it the fundamental point of the movie. (This movie) somehow manages to do both quite successfully." And on this we agree completely -- race was both the issue and yet completely removed from the real point of the film. Which is why it works; it plays on your insecurities while convincing you they don't exist.

If you can get your hands on this one (I don't know how easy that is), I give it a very high recommendation. My only concern is that someone really needs to get a good transfer with quality picture and sound. The quality I saw was a VHS transfer with grainy footage and mediocre sound. This did nothing to take away from the brilliance of the film, but a smart action film like this one deserves better. Give me digital remastering and a Fred Williamson audio commentary.

Fred Williamson and D'urville Martin are two black bounty hunters that stumble into a town that is sorely in need of a sheriff. So what do they do? Why make themselves the sheriff and deputy of course. Now we know the white folk won't take a liking to that, especially the local bandit (played by William Smith) and his gang a' crackers. Not particularly distinguished from the blaxploitation Western sub-sub genre and not nearly as wild as the name suggests, 'Boss N!gger' is still good fun with a lot of humor (supplied mostly by Martin) and well-directed action scenes.

Made at the height of the Black Power movement, Boss N****r (or The Black Bounty Killer) is a blaxploitation western that was written and co-produced by genre legend Fred Williamson. Boss (Williamson) and his friend Amos (D'Urville Martin) are bounty hunters who are looking for wanted man Jed Clayton (William Smith), in order to claim a big reward. When they arrive at a small town where they suspect he may be, they discover it has no sheriff, and is instead being run by corrupt Mayor Griffin (R.G. Armstrong). Tired of being controlled by those damn 'whities', they instate themselves as sheriff and deputy, and stamp their own brand of law enforcement on the community.

Whether this is a genuinely angry film, made in the midst of racial tension and the rise of Black Power, or a satirical play on a familiar scenario with the roles reversed, I'm not sure. It certainly made me feel uncomfortable every now and then. There is only one white character in the whole town that treats the Boss as an equal, and he is quick to stamp his superiority over her as he seduces her. I know, this is a blaxploitation film and the theme is practically always sticking to the whities, but this is the kind of stereotyping that the black community were experiencing themselves at the time, which leads me to believe that it may in fact be a play on this.

However, racial themes aside, this is actually a pretty enjoyable western. It doesn't break any boundaries, but it's a delightfully old- fashioned new-sheriff-in-town story, that is suitably both amusing and action-packed when it needs to be. As the Boss, Williamson employs his impressive screen presence the same way he did in Larry Cohen's Black Caesar, taking no s**t from the townsfolk, and charming the ladies. It also benefits from the fact that is had a bit of a budget, as opposed to most blaxploitation films which often looked cheap and amateurish. Good, bloodless fun, that drops more 'N' bombs than a BNP rally.

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Boss N#gger is definitely not a prime sample of either western or blaxploitation but it's a genre crossover I'm glad happened because if it didn't happen back in the day it probably wouldn't ever. Perhaps the biggest problem in the movie is Fred Williamson's script, which bears all the marks of an inexperienced writer: too much exposition, flat characterization, scenes that seem to exist only to take the plot from point A to point B. Well, I guess few people are going to see a movie called "Boss N#gger" for its story, but it's details like these that make the difference between Coffy and the multitude of forgettable blaxploits of the early seventies. Williamson's script but be throwaway but when he dons his black cowboy hat and cheroot and transforms into black bounty-hunter Boss, he's as badass as he's ever been. Along with his associate D'Urville Martin ("Sheba Baby", "Dolemite", "Black Caesar") they rescue a black girl from the clutches of bandits before riding into a lawless town terrorized by a gang of cutthroats. He elects himself sheriff and rails against the corrupt mayor of the town and all the bigotry around him. Boss N#gger's seems to exist for no other reason than sticking it to "the man" and in that aspect the balance is heavily tipped towards the blaxploitation end of the equation. This is a blaxploit movie that only happens to take place in the old west. It's still a fairly entertaining diversion with quotable dialogue and all the amusing shenanigans one can expect from having a black sheriff in a town filled with white bigots. A kid is ridden down in slow motion, Williamson says things like "we've got some more whities to catch" and "Mayor, have somebody clean up ma office", D'Urville locks up the bank president for tearing up a note and when the mayor demands he's released he locks him up too for disturbing the peace. What starts as a funky, frolicking action western becomes a lot more violent in the final third and ends on quite a downbeat tone that comes eerily close to Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence. Jack Arnold ("Creature from the Black Lagoon", "The Incredible Shrinking Man") directs.