AKA: Machine Gun Blues
Thanks to a tip from a commenter, I added this to Cynda Williams’ nudography.
This is perhaps best described as Roger Corman’s low-budget version of The Cotton Club. If you join me in the club of those previously unaware of this film, you can take comfort in the fact that our club’s membership is a large one. This film came out almost 30 years ago, and in all that time it has attracted only 109 votes on IMDb, and only one review – from TV Guide.
The plot is the usual cliche about Harlem in the 1920s. The local slicks are making a good living running their own speakeasies, featuring good booze and great jazz. The mafia guys from downtown get wind of the high profits in the black clubs, so they decide to make Harlem part of their turf, and set about muscling out the locals. A gang war ensues.
The plot incorporates a Romeo-and-Juliet romance, wherein the #2 mafia guy falls in love with a beautiful black singer (Cynda Williams), although he’s engaged to his boss’s daughter (Maria Ford). As you can probably imagine, bullets fly by the hundreds, blood spills by the gallon, and things don’t really work out well for anyone.
The film takes place mostly in dark clubs where Cynda sings and wise guys threaten each other. Eventually, without ever leaving those claustrophobic and dimly-lit sets, mobsters of all races start blasting each other at close range with pistols and machine guns in shoot-outs that are bloody and sometimes confusing. At one point I thought the white guys were shooting at each other, but I could be wrong since dozens of people were firing weapons in an area of maybe two hundred square feet, and it wasn’t clear who was hiding behind which overturned tables, or exactly where those tables were located within the floor plan. The only time the action ever moves out of dark, confined spaces is when the director pads out the action with stock footage of old-time autos pulling up to clubs, all recycled from an earlier Corman pic, The Lady in Red.
Speaking of padding out the running time, Cynda sings constantly in this film. She has a nice voice, and is easy on the eyes, so the staging of her numbers might have been an excellent way to add atmosphere to the movie if she had sung short snippets of jazz and blues standards as a backdrop to the action. Unfortunately, the director made the decision to make her singing a focused attraction rather than a background element. She sings so many songs, hijacking so much of the film’s running time, that it frequently brings the plot to a complete stop.
Not that it matters, since the plot’s development is predictable and inevitable.
Cynda Williams
Maria Ford
Maria Ford’s nipples were always rather interesting, especially in Angel of Destruction when she was kinda on the muscular side. It’s too bad she later got aftermarket parts installed, but I guess they then matched her nipples. Or her nipples were redone at the same time (if that’s even a thing).