Street Sisters

Blaxsploitation cinema of the 70's is littered with the same old tiresome genres: Martials Arts, Gangster movies and Drug Smuggling. So it's refreshing to come across a movie that tries to shake the boundaries and try something new. Granted Arthur Robinson's 'Sister, Sister' aka Black Hooker and Don't Leave Go My Hand, suffers somewhat dramatically from amateur directing, but overall the movie delivers its story well enough for the audience to appreciate the intentions it sets out to achieve.

The story follows the early years of a young white boy, abandoned by his mother; A high class African-American hooker from the city, to be brought up by her grandparents in the poor black regions in the countryside. The denial of her son, is illustrated through her disgust at his white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, a child born a bastard to a drunken white man and a prostitute. The child however, alien to a world of racial bigotry, wants only the love of his estranged mother. After losing his childhood sweetheart and first love to his preacher grandfather at the age of 16, he decides to leave home for the city in search of his mother, only to finally find her and be greeted with stone cold denial, and contempt. A lifetime of rejection and hardship is too much to bare for the son... How will he cope?

A fairly thought provoking story which undeniably sets out to challenge the social and ethnic class structures that were so divided in working class America in the 70's. Which I feel the current IMDb rating does not give it credit for. There's no pretending that this movie is anything particularly special, but it does manage to string together a plausible narrative, which offers somewhat more than the usual pimp/blow/fist fighter we're so used to with blaxploitation.

The strength of this movie comes from the performance of the leading actress Sandra Alexandra who plays the working girl mother. Besides Alexandra's performance, the rest of the cast is nothing out of the ordinary, but the ideals this movie is trying to flagstone, speak louder than the actions actually portrayed on the screen.

With the title of this movie at times being "Street Sisters" and other times "Black Hooker", one might be lead to believe this is a sleazy blaxploitation movie. Actually, while the movie does have a couple of sex scenes with nudity, the majority of the movie aims to be a serious drama. Nothing wrong with that aim, but the end results are disappointing. I will say that the acting by the no-name cast is competent, and while the movie is based on a stage play, it manages to hide its stage origins fairly well. But the storytelling is a mess. It's confusing with its abrupt jumps in time, though most of the time the movie is really slow, padded out with scenes that serve little to no purpose. And we never really get into the head of the Caucasian central character. I suspect that this worked a lot better on the stage than this cinematic translation.

This is really a successor to the one-man, low-budget productions of Oscar Micheaux in the 1920's and 1930's, rather than one of the blaxploitation movies of the 1960's and 1970's.

Blaxploitation movies were urban. They were action movies with karate, knife, and gun fights; they pitted black heroes (sometimes good guys but often criminals themselves) against bad white guys (usually politicians and cops). They had pounding rhythm and blues scores and pimp style, and most of them were produced by major film studios, though on relatively small budgets.

The black-audience shoestring independent productions of Micheaux and his colleagues, on the other hand, most frequently had rural or small-town settings. Their characters were rarely involved in crime, and there was minimal violence. There was also little conflict between blacks and whites; the conflict was intraracial, and the movies usually had a religious, moral, or social message.

Under either title, "Black Hooker" or "Street Sisters," this movie markets itself as a blaxploitation movie, but its main elements are all from the earlier genre. It's the drama of a conflicted family, with a grandfather who is a crazed preacher; a grandmother who is the earthy family peacemaker; their daughter, the title character, who is more like the fallen woman in the earlier films than like the flashy, assertive whores of the later ones; and the daughter's son who is light enough to pass for white (and passing is a common theme of the earlier movies).

It's also, unfortunately, just as clumsily plotted and directed as the Micheaux movies.

A very white, blond, blue-eyed, hippie-haired boy who looks kinda like 70s Joseph Bottoms is improbably born a trick baby to a hateful African-American prostitute/flapper (the initial period seems to be the 1920s) who leaves him to be raised by his loving grandma and hostile preacher grandpa on the farm while she carries on her evil ways in the Big City. As an adult, the Boy (none of these characters get names, emphasizing their archetypal melodrama nature) falls in love with a local black girl, whom out of the blue his pious grandpa decides to seduce. So our hero runs away. Further tragedies lead to a violent finale.

Based on the director's stage play--which must have seen even cornier onstage--this isn't at all the 70s blaxploitation piece it was rather desperately marketed as, but a crude inspirational drama like those of Oscar Micheaux (as a prior poster noted). If not for the infrequent, rather gratuitous, very badly shot sexploitative scene, it would be something you'd expect to see in a church basement of the era.

The low-budget film-making is really erratic, ditto the acting, both running a gamut from the nearly professional to the completely hapless. Unsurprisingly, this was the first/last film endeavor for its writer-director and much of the cast. It's got that very 70s thing of soundtracked soul songs that clumsily comment on the action. By no stretch of the imagination is this a good movie, nor is it a camp classic despite some dialogue howlers. Still, it's worth a look for people (like me) who find any one-off oddity from the era interesting.

When I worked with L.A. County, I knew Art Roberson fairly well, tho I have no idea of his current status or whereabouts. We were both social workers in the ghetto (really) in the 1970s. My impression was that being a social worker was his day job, that being a movie maker was his primary ambition...so what else is new?

The movie, some interiors of which were shot at the legendary Joe Jost's in Long Beach, premiered for friends and associates at Warner Bros. screening room in Burbank. At the end of the showing, it was greeted by dead silence, replacing excitement or applause.

I think the viewers realized that the director had blown a pretty good chance to do something worthwhile after all his work, investment and attention to this film.

Originally entitled something like "Don't Leave Go My Hand" (or maybe

"Don't Let Go My Hand"), it was supposed to sensitively portray the horrible life of a neglected (or abused, I don't recall which) black child, the son of a...you guessed it...black hooker!

But that original intent didn't play, so the title was changed to "Black Hooker," presumably to piggyback on the blaxploitation movement at the time.

As sort of a metaphor for that all-too-sensitive evening's experience, after the showing, as the cars were wending out of the Warner Bros. lot, I clearly recall the car of a black viewer rear-ending the car of a white viewer who had stopped short at a traffic light...an embarrassing wreck.