Black Snake (1973)

80%

Here, Blacks help Whites enslave Blacks by a process of political divide 'n' conquer; Whites fight among themselves for Most Self Righteous Christian Award; &, Russ MEYER handles more serious subject matter than usual with his customary humorously melodramatic aesthetic. Unusually, his anti Christian bias has somewhat mellowed into recognition of the crucial role played by Christianity in paradoxically wanting to abolish the very institution – slavery – it originally supported. The christianized slaves here are more Christian than the white Christians who initially enslaved them: A subtle point well made.

Despite expository dialogue and a gallery of cost saving and/or deliberate anachronisms – modern rifles in 1835 and modern slang – the latter stresses the contemporary relevance of White racism; making the whole an emotionally plausible race relations' drama. The moral corruption both implied and shown is as endemic as it is mutual since the British Empire was based on racist exploitation with the necessity of Black collaboration.

Appropriately, the white actors are deliriously over the top; visually expressing the emotional hysteria, physical brutality, alcoholism & sexual impotence usually associated with parasitism. Whites are shown as sexually twisted because they have repressed their emotions to enable them to treat other human beings as slaves. Conversely, the Black actors are required to get across the political and moral subtleties involved.

Percy HERBERT is especially excellent; projecting alternately physical fear and emotional sadism. His performance effectively displays the hysteria designed to induce fear of violence in slaves while not actually meting it out on a large scale since, to do so, could create unproductive slaves; that is, dead ones. While Bernard BOSTON as Captain Raymond Daladier perfectly encapsulates the opportunist Black who blows with the White political wind. David WARBECK – not without good reason – acts as if he is in a broad farce which, to some extent, he is.

It is unusual for a White to write, produce and direct something so politically astute and psychologically perspicacious on a subject so shaming and guilt inducing to Whites as this. Nevertheless, he does it rather well by using archetypal characterizations and solid thematic content.

The movie only lets itself down by an absurdly naïve coda referring to the 'firestorm of a new moral [eg, egalitarian] conception'. This clearly implies that the old conception was moral when the film has spent all its running time saying just the opposite!

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