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Who hasn’t been there: settled in for the night when your boss, out of the blue, requests you do something after hours? Such a request opens Friday Foster (1975) on a worse evening than usual — New Year’s Eve — but it’s promised it’ll be worth it. Word has it that Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala), the wealthiest Black man in the United States, is secretly landing in town. It would be a huge get if the title character, a photographer played by Pam Grier, were to slink around, get some shots, and sneak away before anyone notices. 

The magazine Friday works for, glossy and expensive and called Glance, will get what they were after — she’s good at her job — though it isn’t quite what they had had in mind: Friday unexpectedly captures an assassination attempt. The three men embroiled in the conspiracy, led by a young Carl Weathers, crouch among the very same row of crates in which Friday too obscures herself. She barely manages to escape, and her life afterward continues to be a series of close calls. The men involved with the near-killing know who she is.

Friday’s editor, played with comically steely flourish by Julius Harris, scolds her often for getting more involved than she needs to in the lives of those she photographs. But because of the scenario posed in the movie, it’s hard not to, not just because she herself suddenly has a target on her back, but also because of the early-film killing of her best friend, a model named Cloris (Rosalind Miles), who apparently had romantic ties to one of the men involved with the assassination attempt. Cloris’ death, paired with her own mounting lack of safety — reaching an early apex with a foot chase between her and the Weathers character through an abandoned building — entices Friday to do some digging of her own. (She’s almost always investigating in envy-inducing fashions while doing so; my favorite is the baggy knit cardigan that looks like a comfy fall embrace transferred to thread.) She gets assistance from a clever P.I. named Colt (Yaphet Kotto), who provides the movie with much of its comic relief. 

In the other movies Grier made with American International Pictures where she played the lead (this was her last with the company), her characters, often also having to sift through secrets and lies and the shady people telling them, regularly resorted to action-heroine stances, savvy with guns and knives and other tools of violence. Based on a groundbreaking comic strip, Friday Foster marks a change of pace from the precedent set by 1973’s Coffy and 1974’s Foxy Brown. The amount of nudity, violence, and general pulpiness is muted for a decidedly more populist affair, the Friday character especially differing from her antecedents with no other tactics than her wits to attain the clarity she’s looking for.

It’s fun to watch Grier and Kotto untangle the narrative web, even if, ultimately, it struggles to find enough clarity to always make its stakes feel vivid. It’s more so to watch Eartha Kitt briefly appear as, typically for Kitt, a regal fashion designer who vamps around like a cat in designer clothing. I didn’t simply need more of her; I needed her to be solving the mystery alongside Grier and Kotto.