Some Things To Know About Trick Baby

By Sandra Mitchell


The Blaxploitation films are about the most common subjects or can have unusual themes or plots. Yet all the best films found in this genre nod at the subjects that lie at the core of African American culture. These are very different thematically from movies that are also about exploitation, which are often derogatory in nature.

One film could have gotten to a level that would have been a cut above the best of these epics. This was the 1972 movie Trick Baby, based on an eponymous novel by the author Iceberg Slim, then a leading light in black writing. Whereas the novel is an intense tale of the underworld, the film wasted the potential by being, as one critic put it, watered down.

The movie is about the relationship between two black male con men who are planning their biggest con. These are Blue Howard and White Folks, hustlers working in Philadelphia, the latter being half white and therefore could pass for a white man. This is central to all their cons, and also their ace in the con that they are planning.

The dynamics of race propels this story, but these can be obvious enough because it is based on experiences for Slim, an ex pimp who made it by selling lots of his books about the African underworld. The delineations are made for those the characters, but the actual performance by Folks was very much of a let down for many African males. The intensity was not there, and Folks played white without giving much focus on their being black and why.

White Folks is the product of a black woman who had a baby from a white customer, thus the title. The accident of birth becomes the locus through which both film and book moves, although in the movie the intensity was seen as lacking. Production went ahead to complete a feature that works with subjects easily told through the visual medium.

In this sense, the movie might be forgiven its being unable to really take advantage of the intensely dramatic idea of a biracial conman. However, no conflicts or friction arise from this, especially between Howard and Folks, and their relationship is mostly about the easier time they have of being able to get away with crimes. The cliched theme of black criminality was chosen above everything else.

Hollywood has always had the tendency to dehumanize the focus, to concentrate on visual elements instead of the story ones. It is one defect that no one has deemed to change, and so, no matter supposedly great films there are available from the industry, they do not address this defect. It is mostly about an industry that seems to want to be relevant always ending up producing semi con works.

The plan hatched by the conspirators is complicated by a former crime that involved a Mafia relative. This final nod to the cliche film ending is something that will turn a critics stomach, and this is perhaps the gamble. Perhaps the real point behind this work is the bid to become an impactful sensation.

Thus, director Larry Yust thought it best to soften blows made by the story itself to be more acceptable to the general public. This is one organism that has an oh so sensitive stomach while allowing blasphemy to be its constant companion. And black experience is too much of a punch in the gut that it needs watering down.




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