Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson

From Harlem to Hollywood, and vice versa

Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema was published in 2024. The author is Odie Henderson, film critic for the Boston Globe, who I think is probably right around my age. While I, however, grew up watching Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood movies in a small town in Wisconsin, Henderson grew up watching Pam Grier and Fred Williamson movies in Jersey City and Times Square. Henderson brings to this history a nostalgic enthusiasm for the genre but also an extensive knowledge of the film industry. For each movie he discusses, Henderson provides a wealth of behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the picture and the careers of those involved in its production.

In the first chapter, Henderson provides an overview of Black American cinema, pre-Blaxploitation. The bulk of the book then covers the years 1970 to 1978. Henderson considers Cotton Comes to Harlem to be the birth of the Blaxploitation genre (when Hollywood realized they could make money off of Black films) and The Wiz to be the nail in its coffin. In between, he highlights every major Blaxploitation film, as well as some lesser-known obscurities. Along the way, a number of subgenres are examined, such as horror films, westerns, rom-coms, high school dramas, women in prison, and of course, gangster/crime movies, like those starring the aforementioned Grier and Williamson.

I’ve seen at least half of the films discussed here, and after reading this book, I’d like to see the rest. Henderson provides plot summaries of all the movies he covers in the book. His synopses include spoilers, and they do often give away the endings of the films. By the time you get to the end of this information-rich genre survey, however, it’s unlikely you’re going to remember the difference between the conclusions of Uptown Saturday Night versus Let’s Do It Again or Hammer versus Bucktown. There is so much film criticism, film history, and film trivia crammed into this book. Throughout, Henderson’s prose is a joy to read, delivering a wealth of information in an addictively fun narrative, with just enough period slang to keep things cool while maintaining film-critic dignity and avoiding overly ostentatious cleverness. He intersperses the film-talk with a few stories of his youth, how he grew up watching these movies, but this is definitely not a memoir. It’s closer to an encyclopedia of the genre, although arranged chronologically. Henderson also includes a few brief interviews with a movie producer and a couple of fellow film critics.

My interest in Blaxploitation films springs mainly from their soundtracks, an important aspect of any film in this genre. Artists like Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), and The Impressions (Three the Hard Way) created some of the best soul music of the ‘70s in their scores and soundtracks. Although this is primarily a film book, Henderson does cover the music that accompanies the films he discusses. Perhaps as much as fifteen percent of the text might be concerned with music. There’s an entire chapter on Black concert films, and a sidebar on “The Top Ten Best Blaxploitation Songs.”

As a fan of 1970s cinema, I really enjoyed Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras. The only way to make this book better would be to make it bigger by adding more lesser-known films. Henderson has certainly got the biggest and best movies of the era well-covered. Inspired by this fun and fascinating study of the genre, I’ll be hunting down many of these movies on streaming services and YouTube.