Penitentiary (1979)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) If I’ve got my notes right, the rather short filmography of writer-director Jamaa Fanaka is sometimes seen (along with the L.A. Rebellion movement) as a transition from blaxploitation to the social issues black cinema of the late 1980s. Penitentiary certainly plays into that transition, being concerned about racial injustice (as in: a young black man unjustly arrested, blamed for the death of a white man and sent to prison) but very much using the tools of exploitation cinema in order to keep audiences invested in the film. In this case, imprisonment drama turns into an underdog boxing match, with the winner of the bout being assured of parole. Decidedly as raw as low-budget filmmaking was at the time, Penitentiary has roughly a napkin’s worth of plot stretched over 99 minutes, sometimes in the most obvious of ways – how else can you explain the sequences of inmates sharing a few intimate moments with girls in the prison’s bathroom? I’m not objecting on aesthetic grounds – the girls are attractive – but it does highlight that the film often slows to a halt in-between its weightier thematic material (the prison being a metaphor for, well, yes) and plot progression. The boxing sequences are raw (the worst being the sweaty and bloody bare-knuckles fight that marks the end of the first act) and so is the rest of the film, but Penitentiary is watchable enough – even though I like Fanaka’s Emma Mae quite a bit better.