What I forgot about Coffy (1973), a movie I haven’t seen in about a decade, is how all-dominating its sense of sadness is. Once the memories fade, it’s hard not to misremember the pretty frequently reshared images of its peak-of-her-powers star, Pam Grier, at her most unfuckwithable in the film — with a gun cocked and aimed at a drug dealer, her mouth frozen in whichever part of a one-liner she has reached in that moment — as its primary tonal mode. But after rewatching Coffy in full, a gloomy line that appears a little later, while she’s sitting at a dining-room table with one of few men in the film she knows she can trust — “When was the last time I laughed?” — is what now will persist to me as an encapsulation of how this movie largely feels.
If Grier does laugh in Coffy, I don’t remember there being an instance of it deployed nonmethodically — without the unmistakable sizzle of manipulation. Her character, an emergency-room nurse, is occupied with revenge. She only laughs when she needs to get on the good side of someone she would like to kill soon. She’s bloodthirsty because her 11-year-old sister died recently of a drug overdose. Grier’s character, from whom the movie gets its namesake (it’s a moniker referencing her last name, Coffin), starts her quest by mowing down the men who are the most directly responsible.
Then she expands her purview, to the point that, when the movie ends with her actually walking into the sunset — here the path is created by a sandy beach rather than the Old West’s dusty expanse — the suggestion seems to be that wherever she lands will still not bring her the satisfaction she seeks. The only thing that could satisfy her would probably be the resurrection of the sibling cruelly gone too soon. The revenge business, she understands quickly, is not so much soothing (she’s haunted, throughout the movie, of the memories of the bloody, guilt-inducing messes she’s made) as it is the only real way to bring her sister the justice she knows will unlikely be brought by anything state-sanctioned — not when she’s Black, certainly not when drugs are what led to her death.
Pam Grier in Coffy.
Coffy would not have its poignance were it not Grier — a once-in-a-lifetime actress most associated with low-budget B movies where you’re almost taken aback by how much she acts circles around nearly everybody around her — in the lead role. I say as much because you can tell, in white writer-director Jack Hill’s work, that he primarily sees this all a little more pulpily than Grier’s performance proposes. When not inside scenes where she’s talking tough and resolutely with the upper hand, she’s persuasive as a real woman conflicted about what she’s doing but willing to move forward because of her anger, her love for her sister. Hill, in contrast, seems to think of her mostly as an action hero and, by how much he requires her to rend her clothes (Coffy is, not shockingly, a movie that does not believe in such things as equal-opportunity nudity), a sex object.
You’re always aware of his gaze, feeling how much it abrades the performance of an actress who more vividly sees Coffy’s humanity. Hill directs the movie’s more emotional scenes like they were an obligation; he prefers to linger on the moments defined by their sex, their violence. Scenes taken up with the former, usually involving Coffy seducing someone she’s moments away from turning on, always leer a little more than they need to.
Pam Grier and Robert DoQui in Coffy.
Scenes taken up with the latter can be entertaining. My favorite is the one where Coffy, having ingratiated herself into the world of a powerful pimp, starts a food fight among a stable of toxically jealous sex workers, planting razor blades in her hair just in case anybody tries tugging. They also can be nauseating. There’s one, in very poor taste, involving a vehicularly driven lynching.
Coffy is a bifurcated movie. It’s sleazy and cheap in its approach to sex and violence as overseen by Hill; it’s also genuinely emotional and thrilling as it relates to Grier’s performance. The second-best part of it is Roy Ayers’ punchy soundtrack, all chugging-along guitars, whirling marimbas, zingy horns. The movie was, famously, Grier’s breakthrough, because of course it was. I can’t imagine living in 1973, never having seen her in anything before (or at least not in anything worth remembering) and not immediately wanting to see her in everything else. She starred in a handful more movies in the 1970s taking after the Coffy mold: 1974’s Foxy Brown, 1975’s Sheba, Baby, 1975’s Friday Foster. I like Foxy Brown better — it’s more evenly pulpy — and Friday Foster, where Grier more modestly plays a magazine photographer in over her head with a conspiracy plot she uncovers, best.
Grier has always worked prolifically, disserviced too often by being the finest thing in a movie not as good as she is. It feels like something of a fairy tale story now that Quentin Tarantino, who had for long seen what Grier was capable of, gave her a vehicle in 1997’s Jackie Brown that at last gave her material that really let her chew — give what is, hands down, her best performance. Like so many of her other projects, Coffy is worth watching by virtue of her being in it — for providing an opportunity to bear witness to her magnificence.
Peterson Reviews 