It's easy to dismiss exploitation films out of hand for their heavy-handedness, often terrible politics, and just sheer trashiness. The thing about exploitation movies, however, is that they must have an audience to exploit, or they don't make any sense. To understand the way people work, and to understand the way the culture is working, it can often be a great idea to head to the exploitation cinema. After all, the filmmakers are only trying to give the audience what it wants.
That does not necessarily mean that the insights gleaned from venturing down to the grindhouse are particularly appetizing. Sometimes what the audience wants is a film that satisfies their very worst instincts and impulses. And so that brings me to urban vigilante movies and, specifically, William Lustig's 1983 film Vigilante, starring Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, Steve James, and Woody Strode.
Vigilante movies go back a ways. Vigilantism is a popular angle in westerns. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the vigilante movie ventured into urban centers of the modern day. It was not just about manly codes of justice or saving helpless damsels in distress. The vigilante movie began to more seriously focus on and reflect other cultural issues, including a legitimately surging crime rate, white flight and angst over the urban areas left behind (where many whites that had fled to segregated suburbs continued to work but allowed to crumble), racist backlash against the civil rights movement and integration, racist angst over miscegenation, and lingering cultural resentment over the Vietnam War.
If you were a white conservative feeling like you were losing the culture war, it might have brought some satisfaction to imagine yourself as a tough guy with a gun, going into the city to blow away some minorities (only the ones that truly deserve it, of course! especially the ones that were raping your women!).
Dirty Harry and Death Wish were making big bucks. There was an audience for this stuff. With all that cash blowing around of course the urban vigilante movie became an exploitation staple.
William Lustig, a legendary exploitation filmmaker who primarily worked in the 1980s and early 1990s, dove head-first into that toxic stew with his film Vigilante, the follow-up to his infamous (and revered in many quarters) horror film Maniac. It came right at the height of the conservative Reagan backlash - euphemistically called the Reagan Revolution. It was a time when conservative whites decided they needed to fight back - or at least wanted to fantasize about fighting back.
Lustig exploits the racist angst and resentments of his audience to the hilt, setting up a scenario where a primarily latino and black gang blow the lead character's small child away (in brilliantly shocking fashion) and rape and brutalize his wife. Lustig caters to the fears and anti-judicial biases of the right-wing by depicting a corrupt and decidedly too liberal justice system that refuses to do anything about the crime. And then Lustig hammers home the belief in the ineffectiveness of government by assuring us that the police either do not care or are too patently incompetent to get anything done. Fucking bureaucrats. Were it not for the blood and nudity, I could see this functioning as a Reagan campaign video.
Given that the overall plot isn't all that coherent, the exploitation is so transparent, there are several truly ludicrous scenes (the courtroom scene is a standout in that regard), and the film swims in a toxic stew of noxious right-wing politics, it would be easy to dismiss this as merely trash that reflects a worse time in America. And it is trash that reflects a worse time in America.
Yet Lustig is too damn good a filmmaker to just leave it at that. He knows how to shoot a movie. The film is really well-shot and properly edited - a level of technical competence far above the normal grindhouse standard. There are some electric scenes, including the opening Fred Williamson monologue, some scenes in a prison, and some of the vigilante confrontations. More than 30 years later the film still has some sharp edges.
The scene in which the gang attacks Forster's wife and kid in particular would be brilliant were it not so informed by racist angst. Lustig knows just where to push and where to draw back. The scene is incredibly brutal but Lustig doesn't play it as violence pornography. It is at times brilliant exploitation filmmaking. Lustig also gets the most out of his cast, including a good, sullen performance by Robert Forster and an intense show from Fred Williamson. The musical score mostly works well and contains a few nice themes.
This honestly is a film that I would recommend even modern-day directors and producers watch as a fine example of what can be done on a technical and visual level in spite of a low budget. For sociologists, this might be a film worth studying to understand how right-wing angst affected the things people believed about urban areas and the justice system. And we can see in the film perhaps an explanation for why police agencies have adopted the reckless vigilante mindset that this film celebrates (to be more effective than the boob police from this movie, of course!).
For everyone else, however, there's just a little too much poison in this toxic stew. In an era where the crime rate is much lower than it was in the 1980s, there isn't as much excuse for buying into the film's unsubtle exploitation. I know some people in the suburbs still want to believe this crap, but there's no reason to indulge - or forgive - their worst impulses. It's an interesting film, but I can't call it a good one.
Screened on TCM.
