Once upon a time, way back in the mid-1970s, some guy in Dallas, Texas, by the name of Bobby Davis, had some dollars in his pocket and a dream. That dream: to write, direct, and produce a blaxploitation flick. He roamed the lounges of Dallas, wading into a sea of nylon and leisure suits in search of the talent he would need to make his vision a reality. Days, nay, weeks, of production pass, and Davis overcomes all of the obstacles which stand in the way of auteurs the world over, and he gets his film in the can. Now, it’s official. Bobby Davis is a filmmaker, forever more. In celebration, and aware that all great artists leave the scene at their peak, he leaves his affairs in order, climbs the Reunion Tower overlooking picturesque Interstate 35E, and hurls himself into the void.
Most of that is bullshit, including Davis’s personal denouement (Reunion Tower wasn’t finished until 1978, three years after this movie’s release). But, sources on this dog of a movie are very thin. It’s known that there was a filmmaker named Bobby Davis, that he shot a film called Bad, Black and Beautiful in Dallas, and that he employed a cast and crew that, for the majority of them, had no experience before or after this film was made. If it wasn’t for the internet, this movie would exist only on crumbling VHS tapes and a handful of 35mm prints lurking in the backs of storage spaces. This is a movie that was well on its way to being lost, and it shows.
Ostensibly, Bad, Black and Beautiful follows Gwynn Barbee as Eva Taylor, an African-American lawyer who is also something of a renaissance woman. Besides holding forth in court, she’s a winning stock car racer, an amateur pilot, a singer, and a homewrecker.
A new case has landed on her desk. Johnny Boyles (Terry Starnes), recently returned from the Vietnam War, hopes to take up his old job. But, his boss (uncredited), has given Johnny’s position to his son, Tony (Mahlon Ball). Tony, in a sequence that didn’t make it to film, kills his father so he can take over the company, and pins the murder on Johnny. Johnny is arrested and charged with the murder, leading to Eva taking the case.
Meanwhile, private detective Rich Jacobs (Levi Balford, in a suit that has to be seen to be believed), is hired by a local madam to find a missing girl. As it turns out, these two cases might be connected. So much so that, by my estimation, Jacobs is the character that handles most of the actual plot in this flick. Eva, rather than kick ass like Foxy Brown, spends most of her screen time fooling around with star reporter Mike Copeland (Sammy Sams, channeling a deep discount Sonny Bono). They race against each other, fly a plane together, make their rounds in the local lounge scene, and generally do not much more than pad the 83-minute running time.
It’s a bizarre way to roll things out to the audience. It’s clear that although Davis was driven enough to get his movie made, he lacked storytelling chops. That will be no surprise when taken with the film as a whole. Everything about this flick is bottom dwelling crap, but in something of an endearing fashion. One of the great aspects of passion projects from untrained amateurs, and those oblivious to their own limitations, is that there’s an earnestness from all involved. Sure, the plot both meanders and jumps around, and no one in the cast could act their way out of a wet paper bag, but so what? No one is watching this flick because they think it has objective quality. This is about pure entertainment, and a whole lot of us find entertainment in rooting for an underdog movie like this. We laugh at, and with, these folks from decades past who were dazzled by the idea of seeing their work on the big screen. We celebrate both their ineptitude, and their success at actually making a movie.
Eva drops in and out of the movie at strange intervals, Jacobs picks up the slack, and it all leads to a big climax in the courtroom. After about thirty seconds of trial, the verdict is read, and…well, I won’t spoil it. But I will say that this one scene is a fine reward to all those who stuck out the entire film. Be forewarned, though, skipping to this climax without seeing what came before robs a viewer of a sublime shitty movie experience. It’s not the most watchable experience, but it is prototypical. Bad, Black and Beautiful enters the Watchability Index at #397, displacing Down ‘n Dirty. This one is for the masochists.