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The Mack (1973) has been touted in many circles as the best movie to come out of the blaxploitation boom of the 1970s. Best, of course, depends on what you look for in your blaxploitation movies; it’s more measured to say that The Mack is remarkable for featuring an anti-hero it’s more interested in depicting ambivalently than with hints of edgy glamor. It follows Goldie (Max Julien), a small-time hustler who returns to his Oakland roots fixated on becoming the most successful pimp around following a five-year prison sentence. He pays close heed to an early pearl of advice — a pimp is only as good as his pot — and soon tangibly proves to understand that better than his competitors. 

Goldie quickly becomes the man he’d envisioned, powerful and with a surfeit of money always at his disposal. But being powerful and successful in his line of work also means that things like drug kingpins and corrupt cops wanting to cause you trouble will always hamper any kind of enjoyment you could reap from your gains. That, plus Goldie’s nagging conscience. We see it when he puts up a front of ice-cold sternness when the primary sex worker in his stable, Lulu (Carol Speed), comes to him inconsolable after a scary experience with a john and he reluctantly has to be stern with her to maintain his upper hand. We also see it in the moments he has alone with his kind mother (Juanita Moore), for whom he wants nothing more than to buy a nice house, and his brother (Roger E. Mosley), who has emerged in the last five years as a Black nationalist community leader determined to clean Oakland of the drugs and other exploitations — like Goldie’s — harming the Black people who live there. 

None of this is rendered with the heightened, pulpy quality of similarly conceived movies of its decade — 1972’s Superfly and 1975’s Dolemite come to mind — even when some of its dialogue is unintentionally funny. Goldie is never outrightly celebrated or condemned by writer Robert J. Poole and director Michael Campus; The Mack never really turns him into a larger-than-life anti-hero, preferring to more humanely show him sometimes taken with his own power and at other times regretful about where it’s taken him. (One thing he’s consistent about: telling the little boys around the neighborhood who idolize him that they should stay in school, and that they shouldn’t be doing that idolizing.)

Campus further eschews anything like romanticization by being adamant about shooting — at least until he and his cast and crew literally couldn’t anymore — on the turf on which the action took place. (Campus and his team got access by cutting a deal with local pimp Frank Ward — it was to the tune of, Ward offered access and protection as long as he got to himself appear in the movie — who, not long into filming, was killed.) Whereas the filmmakers behind Superfly and Dolemite aimed above all for sordid fun, Campus obviously wants to present this story with as straight a face and with as much dramatic seriousness as he could. That pays off.