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Riffing on the conceit of The Defiant Ones (1958) — the Tony Curtis- and Sidney Poitier-starring thriller in which the pair played chained-together fugitives on the run — Black Mama, White Mama (1972) sticks together a poor little rich girl turned revolutionary named Karen (Margaret Markov) and a woman in deep trouble in the drug trade named Lee (Pam Grier). At the start of the movie, the pair arrive, separately, at a women’s prison somewhere unspecified that’s very clearly the Philippines. They don’t have to suffer through its indignities very long, though, before being put in a similar position as Curtis and Poitier. They’re being transferred somewhere else for reasons never made that clear when the bus’s trip is interrupted by a hail of bullets. They’re left with no other choice but to get away, handcuffs keeping them together whether they’d like it or not.

Both women, it turns out, weren’t making their keenness to escape so obvious back at the prison just because it simply would be nice to. Both have unfinished business on the island, their respective parties waiting on inconveniently opposite ends for them to help continue their work. The film doesn’t leave Lee and Karen’s handcuffed-together sides until it’s suddenly oscillating uncompellingly among the various dramas of the people looking for the pair: the revolutionaries and the on-Lee’s-side drug runners, of course, and also the Jabba the Hutt-esque figure who gets foot massages while torturing people who will stop at nothing to get the $40,000 Lee is said to owe him. There is also much with a drug-world cult of personality played with vulgar commitment by the always-game Sid Haig; I had to look up after watching the movie who exactly he was with because I was on a plane and the lack of sleep the night before was catching up with me. I didn’t strain myself very hard to get to a place of understanding.  

Some of that exhaustion I’m sure was not innocent in making me feel nothing for Black Mama, White Mama. But I’m not sure it’s that great, either — something probably best encapsulated by the lack of any convincing rapport, whether hostile or friendly, between the women for whom the movie is crassly named. Aside from the charming stretch where they steal the garb of some nuns and half-heartedly feign holiness, and their generally impressive knack for violently incapacitating people elsewhere despite the thick handcuffs you always worry will result in a broken wrist with the wrong move, there’s nothing much there. 

There was at least something interpersonal to be worked through in The Defiant Ones. It’s harder to root for what mostly strikes us as transactionality, not helped by the obviousness that Grier, just a year away from her mainstream breakthrough in Coffy (1973), is a star much better than this perfunctory material. Most memorable about Markov is her long and healthy hair, which manages to keep looking that way despite the hell it’s put through.