HIT MAN

US, 1972, 90 minutes, Colour.
Bernie Casey, Pam Grier, Roger Mosely.
Directed by George Armitage.

Hit Man is a thriller of the early '70s, the period of what have come to be called `blaxploitation' movies. Bernie Casey was the star of a number of these films. Included in the cast are Pam Greer and Roger Mosely. The writer-director is George Armitage, who made such films as Gas and later, the very effective Miami Blues. This film is a reworking of Mike Hodges' Get Carter.

The film is a mixture of action - with Bernie Casey as a hit man coming back into town to try to investigate the murder of his brother. He encounters a range of characters from prostitutes to actors in pornographic films, owners of bars, studios, companies. The film intermingles a fair amount of violence with some more explicit sex from the period.

There is very little interest in characterisation - the characters are all the expected stereotypes. The interactions are minimal - questions and answers, posings and postures of a violent and sexual kind, the vocabulary of the black American street people.

All this combines to make a basic kind of action feature - but it seems, in retrospect, to be very much of its time and seems now dated.