One of the second-string blaxploitation movies, mostly because about half of it plays as a romantic-comedy star vehicle for singer/model/actress Lola Falana. It doesn’t completely lack an edge. There are some good suspense moments, a climactic burst of violence, and Falana says lines that Barbra Streisand would probably never say to her love interest, such as “I’m going to shit, shower and shampoo”, but this is still cutesy-pie stuff. It tries to please too many people, but ends up doing the opposite. And the music score, made up of variations of “Pop Goes the Weasel” (seriously), doesn’t help.
Falana starts out as a bratty prison inmate, behind bars for contempt of court because she refused to testify against her man who happens to be a powerful gangster. After a year-and-a-half of this, she wants out and decides to sing to the judge. That means she’s in danger, with two hired killers out to put her down before she can open her mouth. The law hides her in a hotel room at a Lake Tahoe casino resort, where she starts to fall for her strong, silent-type police escort played by Gene Washington, the real-life wide-receiver for the San Francisco 49ers at the time who also dabbled in a little acting here and there.
On that note, one of the killers is played by Mean Joe Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Yep, we’re talkin’ two football players in major roles. Always a mark of quality.
In fact, most of the principal actors here had careers going in other fields before they became actors. Falana was a singer (famously discovered by Sammy Davis Jr.) and Alex Dreier, as the older, more grizzled cop protecting Falana, was a reporter whose career goes back to the 1930s when he was an American correspondent in Germany.
Not one of the highlights of director Matt Cimber’s work. See the much snappier and more ruthless The Candy Tangerine Man for his blaxploitation peak.