The Action/Adventure Section — A regular column that will exclusively highlight and review action movies. The most likely suspects? Action cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. But no era will be spurned. As the column grows, the intent will be to re-capture the whimsy of perusing the aisles of your local video store with only ragingly kick ass cover art to aide you in your quest for sweaty action glory. Here we will celebrate the beefy. This is a safe place where we still believe that one lone hero can save humanity by sheer force of will and generous steroid usage.
In the indispensible blaxploitation retrospective tome What It Is, What It Was, no less an authority than Samuel L. Jackson sings the praises of the 1975 film The Candy Tangerine Man.
Well, to be more accurate, he describes it as “kind of funny” and points out that it was one of the first blaxploitation movies with really graphic violence.
Samuel L. Jackson is, of course, correct.
The best way to look at The Candy Tangerine Man is as a dark (ahem) comedy in the sheeps’ clothing of a typical “pimps and hoes” narrative. The movie stars John Daniels as The Baron, a laid back Hollywood pimp working out of the back of a massage parlor.
It also stars, and I quote, “The actual hookers and blades of the Sunset Strip — Hollywood”.
I don’t have a joke for that. Frankly, I shouldn’t need one.
Anyhow, yes: The Baron is a pimp. With his own very particular code of honor.
There’s a problem built into my enjoyment of this movie, then, which is that I have at least a moderate sense of morality. And while that sense allows me to enjoy films about assassins, thieves and even Vince Vaughn (sometimes), I tend to have a little bit of cognitive dissonance when a movie asks me to root for a hero whose main source of income is the exploitation of women. But, as with anything, what really matters is how it’s handled, and in that sense it’s pretty hard to get upset about The Candy Tangerine Man because it’s basically a fucking cartoon.
Our story begins with two racist cops trying to trap The Baron by sending an undercover officer in Bugs Bunny-level drag to seduce him.
(I’m not exactly sure why their plan seems to be to bust a pimp for soliciting, but hey, they’re bad cops. Not bad as in corrupt, although yes, they DO turn out to be corrupt; but they’re just kind of generally awful).
This is followed by a scene where The Baron goes to rescue one of his girls from her abusive boyfriend, who wants her to quit hooking. Displeased with The Barons’ interference, the boyfriend calls him a motherfucker, leading to this wonderful little back and forth:
THE BARON: Hold on, that’s some foul language you’re using.
RUDE BOYFRIEND: Is it, motherfucker?
THE BARON: The only mother I ever fucked was yours, and she was a shitty lay!
And then there’s a fight, and The Baron punches a dude so hard he drowns.
So we can cheer our hero’s victory, and because his enemy is an abusive scumbag, hopefully it won’t occur to us that his main infraction in The Barons’ eyes was wanting his girlfriend to stop being a prostitute.
This is a technique that we see over and over again over the course of the movie (and that isn’t exactly uncommon in blaxploitation in general): making a bad man seem better by making everyone around him demonstrably worse (and probably also racist; people tend to drop the n-word like acorns from an extremely bigoted tree). The Baron is a pimp, sure, but he doesn’t sleep with the girls, and he gives them weekends off (there’s a rather specific reason for this, but we’ll get to that…) On the other hand, we have our villains, and with the exception of Compton (who is more comic relief than anything), every baddie here is a subhuman scumbag, which they prove over and over again by spewing vile racist epithets nonstop and terrorizing helpless women. You want to see them get theirs, of course, but the way they linger over some of the misdeeds tends to leave a very bad taste in ones mouth.
At any rate, the story really kicks into gear when The Baron visits Dusty Compton, who is basically the ur-pimp. Flashily dressed, bragging in rhyme, and laughing that prototypical pimp laugh (don’t you DARE pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about…), and plays him at pool to determine who gets to turn out Comptons’ new bottom woman, described as a “little Indian chick” and a “bad little hammer”, which if I’m understanding it right, is a confused sexual metaphor at best.
Interesting thing about me: when I’m watching a movie, I usually say to myself, ‘this movie probably doesn’t have a scene where two black men play nine ball over ownership of an underage Native American girl!’ And usually, I’m right.
But apparently, not always.
When Compton loses (as he must; being the Daffy Duck of the pimp game is his lot in life), he does manage to go on a tirade against his cue ball, calling it a “white, honky motherfucking ball!”
The Baron, about to drive off in his red and yellow Rolls Royce, is confronted by a van full of hitmen. As it turns out, Dusty is in league with the mafia, who send some men to retrieve the girl.
The Baron responds the only way he knows how: by shooting them with machine guns hidden in his headlights.
So… you know, lot of mixed emotions here. The awesomeness of a Rolls Royce with guns sticking out of it, clashing with the whole human trafficking thing.
And yet, this turns out to be a ruse, as he drops the girl off at a bus depot, hands her a stack of bills and tells her to get out of town and “Marry an Indian, or a wetback.”
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen…
But really, we’re just getting started here, people.
Get ready to have your minds blown…
Having done a decent days work, The Baron gets in his car and drives out of the city. At a certain point, he steps out of the Rolls and changes from his pimp wear to a more conservative every-man business suit. And then he resumes his drive. But not in his Rolls, no; in a blue Ford Cortina.
(at least, I think it’s blue. The picture quality is so bad on the copy I watched that it’s hard to tell…)
Whatever. The actual color, make and model couldn’t matter less in the scheme of things; no matter the conveyance, the destination is the same: a bucolic neighborhood in Ventura (which is described in the song playing over all of this as “Out in the country…”, which doesn’t seem to match the visual as such, but what do I know about California? I’m an east coast intellectual…)
The point is, The Baron is off the clock. He’s only a Hollywood pimp from Monday to Friday.
When the weekend comes, he becomes Ron, faithful husband and mower of overgrown lawns in the California suburbs.
His theme song by little known 70s soul group Smoke puts it best: “No one knows his double life/two small children and a wife…”
As far as his wife and children know, he’s a travelling insurance salesman. But in reality, he’s walking the gritty streets of La-La Land, running all of the Tricks and presumably using a Gripmaster, as to keep his pimp hand strong.
I’ve just described the first half hour of the film, and it took me damn near a thousand words. So I kind of have to burn though the rest here.
To be sure, Candy Tangerine Man is an odd duck. Tonality is a problem. On one level, it’s impossible to take seriously, and there’s ample evidence that we’re not meant to. But on the other hand, there are moments of sexual violence (and violence violence) that cast an ugly pall over everything. I mean, there’s a moment towards the end where the dirty cops set up The Baron, but are late to their own ambush because they’re too busy gang raping someone.
And the fact that I can’t tell whether or not that was an intentional joke or just a serendipitous piece of misanthropic grotesquerie is exactly the sort of thing that makes it hard to fully recommend the movie, even though it’s got more than a few truly fun moments and interesting ideas.
As The Baron, John Daniels at least improves on his performance in Black Shampoo (which, yup, is exactly what you think it is). In that film, also released in 1975, Daniels played a hairdresser/walking, talking piece of driftwood. But he’s better here, or at least his lack of affect lends him an air of coolness, which is contrasted by pretty much everyone else in the movie, who go so over-the-top that when Nicolas Cage watched it (probably projected onto the surface of a fossilized raptor egg), he was heard to remark “Dial it down, everyone… you’re embarrassing yourselves…”
No bullshit: the mafia boss’ (essentially the main bad guy of the film) Italian accent is so bad that after his first scene he’s not allowed to speak for the entire rest of the film.
But it keeps coming back to the same point. Are these amusements enough to cancel out some of the violence and misogyny? I will say by way of middling defense that the misogyny isn’t nearly as bad here as it is in other films of this type; there are at least attempts to flesh out some of the sex workers and making more than sexy walking targets. But the ugliness is still there, and even though it’s relegated to the antics of the bad guys, they’re still asking us to root for a pimp. In the end, the only way to be sure where we stand on the issue of what the movie thinks of our hero is to see how this all winds up: Does he get away with it, or do we want him to be held responsible for his crimes?
And how that question gets dealt with is what brings me over to making a full recommendation.
What seems like it should be the final showdown takes place twenty minutes before the end of the film, where The Baron faces off with the mafia in an awesomely anticlimactic manner. And I know that sounds like a complaint, but the scene where he handles his business is nothing short of genius in the way it makes it clear that, for all their bluster, these guys were never even in the game to begin with. It’s a genuinely awesome moment, and almost redeems whatever nastiness we endured to get to this point.
But with another eighteen minutes of film, what’s left? Well, the goofiest car chase outside of an episode of ‘Wacky Races’, sure. But also Bella. And Bella is where things really get interesting. Bella is the owner of the massage parlor The Baron works out of, who betrays him in a subplot I don’t even have time to get into. He tracks her down, and we’re expecting more of that cold-blooded vengeful catharsis shit that we watch these movies for.
What we get instead, is a slapstick fight with Bella’s mother and a showdown that doesn’t at all go the way I expected.
The reason for Bella’s betrayal, and The Barons’ reaction, are what elevate this movie to that next level. The Baron is taken to task for his past misdeeds, and his ambiguous reaction cements that we haven’t exactly been watching the story of a cut-rate Superfly after all, but the story of a man who tried to be the best possible version of a bad thing and still managed to ruin almost everything he touched. Despite some rather… unfortunate… assumptions about gender and sexuality, this climactic encounter transcends its pulpy roots and invests the proceedings with a wounded, righteous anger that renders the actual ending a palpably bitter punchline.
So, yeah: Candy Tangerine Man is a strange movie. It’s not perfect, but it’s one well worth seeking out, if you can stomach it.
FUN FACT: One of the movie’s assistant editors is Erich Von Stroheim III, which is one of those pieces of knowledge that is so amazing that I simply can’t think of anything to say other than to acknowledge that it is an actual fact of our actual reality.
