''Black Snake'' is a 1973 American film directed by
Russ Meyer
Russell Albion Meyer (March 21, 1922 – September 18, 2004) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. He is known primarily for writing and directing a series of successful sexploitation films that fea ...
and starring
Anouska Hempel,
David Warbeck
David Warbeck (born David Mitchell; 17 November 1941 – 23 July 1997) was a New Zealand actor and model best known for his roles in European exploitation and horror films.
A native of Christchurch, New Zealand, Warbeck became involved in local ...
,
Percy Herbert and
Thomas Baptiste
Thomas Baptiste (17 March 1929 – 6 December 2018) was a Guyanese-born British actor and opera singer.
Biography
Baptiste was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) as the son of a wealthy landowner. He moved to Britain in the late 1940s. His on ...
. It was Meyer's return to self-financed projects, following the end of his brief deal at
20th Century Fox
20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm of Walt Dis ...
. Meyer's only attempt at the
Blaxploitation
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president o ...
genre, it was filmed in
Panavision
Panavision is an American motion picture equipment company founded in 1953 specializing in cameras and lenses, based in Woodland Hills, California. Formed by Robert Gottschalk as a small partnership to create anamorphic projection lenses during ...
and was shot on location in
Barbados
Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, in the Caribbean region of the Americas, and the most easterly of the Caribbean Islands. It occupies an area of and has a population of about 287,000 (2019 estimate). ...
. It was such a box office bomb that a film named ''Foxy'' starring
Edy Williams
Edwina Beth "Edy" Williams is an American television and film actor who is best known for her acting work in the films of Russ Meyer, to whom she was married from 1970 to 1975.
Early years
Williams was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in ...
, which Meyer's wanted to follow this film, was not made.
Meyer's vision was a period piece about colonial slavery in which a cruel
slave
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
-owner and
plantation
A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The ...
mistress dominates both the black and white men of the island. However, just before filming was to begin the original lead actress fell ill, so
Anouska Hempel, a
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
-born actress based in the UK, was cast at the last minute. This decision haunted Meyer for years, complaining that the role was unsuitable for Hempel.
Plot
In 1835, Charles Walker travels to
Saint Kitts
Saint Kitts, officially the Saint Christopher Island, is an island in the West Indies. The west side of the island borders the Caribbean Sea, and the eastern coast faces the Atlantic Ocean. Saint Kitts and the neighbouring island of Nevis cons ...
in the
British West Indies
The British West Indies (BWI) were colonized British territories in the West Indies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grena ...
to look for his missing brother Jonathan. Charles pretends to be a bookkeeper when arrives at Blackmoor Plantation, run by Jonathan's vicious ex-wife, Lady Susan Walker.
Cast
*
Anouska Hempel as Lady Susan
*
David Warbeck
David Warbeck (born David Mitchell; 17 November 1941 – 23 July 1997) was a New Zealand actor and model best known for his roles in European exploitation and horror films.
A native of Christchurch, New Zealand, Warbeck became involved in local ...
as Walker Sopwith
*
Percy Herbert as Overseer
* Milton McCollin as Joshua
*
Thomas Baptiste
Thomas Baptiste (17 March 1929 – 6 December 2018) was a Guyanese-born British actor and opera singer.
Biography
Baptiste was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) as the son of a wealthy landowner. He moved to Britain in the late 1940s. His on ...
as Isiah
* Bernard Boston as Captain Daladier
* Vikki Richards as Slave Girl
*
David Prowse
David Charles Prowse (1 July 1935 – 28 November 2020) was an English actor, bodybuilder and weightlifter. He portrayed Darth Vader (voiced by American actor James Earl Jones) in the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy and a manservant in Stanle ...
as Walker's Brother
Release
''Black Snake'' was originally released theatrically in the UK as ''Slaves'' on 23 March 1973. Internationally it has also been released under the title ''Sweet Suzy''.
Production
Development
After making two films for
20th Century Fox
20th Century Studios, Inc. (previously known as 20th Century Fox) is an American film production company headquartered at the Fox Studio Lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. As of 2019, it serves as a film production arm of Walt Dis ...
Meyer wanted to return to independent filmmaking. He did not want to go back to the sorts of films he had done in the past though as he felt there would no longer be a market for it due to the growth in pornographic movies and increasing permissiveness of studio films.
Meyer got the idea for the film after reading "some legend material from the Caribbean". He wanted "to dabble a little bit in a black film. The successful films that I've made have always been in the parody genre, so I figured I would try to come up with something that was kind of irreverent, like ''
All in the Family
''All in the Family'' is an American television sitcom that aired on CBS for nine seasons, from January 12, 1971, to April 8, 1979. Afterwards, it was continued with the spin-off series '' Archie Bunker's Place'', which picked up where ''All in ...
'', maybe."
"The story is very soapy in one way," said Meyer.
"This is not a sex film," he said. "It's mainly sex and violence. It's hellishly entertining."
"This is a very liberal film, extremely so, and it's told in a manner that is forthright, and with my rambunctious style," said Meyer. "I think there are a lot of places in the film where the blacks will get up and start cheering, particularly when they start whipping the white overseer who's been whipping them for a long time."
Meyer described the characters as "a lot bigger than life. They're right out of an
Al Capp
Alfred Gerald Caplin (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip ''Li'l Abner'', which he created in 1934 and continued writing and (wi ...
cartoon. There are only two really sympathetic people in the picture, but for the most part, they're all terribly bad people."
Casting
Meyer said finding the female lead was "a problem, because she's not the typical girl that I've had- the great cantilevered structured girl. First of all, I had to have a very good actress, which was more important than the physical characteristics. Also, I had to have someone who, like the rest of the cast could speak with a British accent, in order to make this thing work."
Meyer cast
Anouska Hempel who he said had "a great ass on her, she's attractive in the same way as Brigitte Bardot. And she's a good actress. She even came up with a cockney accent."
Filming
The film was shot on location in Barbados in 1972. Meyer says he managed to get co-operation from the Barbadian government when he told them "the blacks win". The film was shot over seven weeks with three weeks of pre-production, plus another week of second unit.
Meyer found shooting difficult. "Every day there was a new staggering problem that was presented to us," he said. "It was a very arduous thing, working in the cane fields, the humidity and the heat, the uncomfortableness of it, and I didn't provide all the niceties that an awful lot of these English actors expected, tea and umbrellas and folding chairs and so on." Meyer was unhappy with two performances although he refused to say who they were.
Meyer said he spent "an enormously long period of time cutting" the film even though he wanted "to get away from the editing because it can be a real timeconsuming thing. I've got to spend more time in story development and casting, things of that nature. But I know that if I do not cut it myself, it will not have that same moxie that all the other Russ Meyer films have."
Meyer said the budget was a little over $US200,000, but if he had made it for a studio it would have cost at least a million dollars.
Reception
The film flopped and in 1978 had still yet to cover its money. In 1980 Meyer claimed he had "just" recouped his money.
Meyer later said it "had a lot of things wrong with it. It had a skinny leading lady and she was British. All the actors were British. It was a costume movie. Like everything you could possibly do wrong, I did. It was a weak ''
Mandingo''. It's been called ''Sweet Susie'' and now it's called ''Duchess of Doom'' ... We thought we were making a picture that the blacks would really love. Now if we had made it about four years before it might have been a blockbuster. But we ended up with a film that blacks and whites both hated. The only place it did good business was in
Little Rock
( The "Little Rock")
, government_type = Council-manager
, leader_title = Mayor
, leader_name = Frank Scott Jr.
, leader_party = D
, leader_title2 = Council
, leader_name2 ...
."
"I was totally out of my element," Meyer said.
[Meyer: Up to his old chicks again
Preston, Marilynn. Chicago Tribune 27 Apr 1975: e16.]
See also
*
List of American films of 1973
A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to:
People
* List (surname)
Organizations
* List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
* SC Germania List, German rugby union ...
Notes
External links
*
*
Review of filmat Spinning Image
Review of filmat Film Threat
''Black Snake''at
TCMDB
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is an American movie-oriented pay-TV network owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. Launched in 1994, Turner Classic Movies is headquartered at Turner's Techwood broadcasting campus in the Midtown business district of Atl ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Black Snake (Film)
1973 films
1970s English-language films
Films directed by Russ Meyer
American sexploitation films
Blaxploitation films
Films with screenplays by Russ Meyer
Films set in the Caribbean
Films shot in Barbados
1970s historical films
American historical films
1970s American films