We all know what prison movies are all about. A bunch of sweaty men packed into together, ready for shanking, power playing, and raping. In Jamaa Fanaka’s Penitentiary, you won’t be disappointed with these incarceration clichés, but I still highly recommend this flawed film. For all its goofiness, Penitentiary is a tightly shot and surprisingly well-acted film, and the actors often go beyond the outlandish screenplay to add a touch of emotional urgency to what are otherwise exploitation stereotypes. Even better, the screenplay takes the Jive Turkey Theater boilerplate dialog and occasionally elevates it to a poetic, sarcastic, and even optimistic eloquence. It’s as if Huggy Bear were running the show, and then Barack Obama suddenly shows up to give some stirring oratory.
The opening of Penitentiary is absurd enough. Our African American hero Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (a smooth and level-headed Leon Isaac Kennedy) is minding his own business, snoozing underneath his makeshift tent on the side of the highway. A bunch of long haired punks on dirt bikes start tearing up the pea patch around his one-man slum tenement, so it’s time for Martel to move on. He is hitchhiking on the highway, and naturally some red-hot hooker named Linda (the red-hot Hazel Spears) stops to pick him up in her luxury conversion van. ‘Cause you know, those sorts of things happened in the 70s. She offers him a freebie in the back of the van, but her amorous advances are interrupted by a business prospect making itself known over her CB radio. It’s business before pleasure, so the couple stops at a roadside diner so Linda can meet her date and make a living.
From this innocuous opening, things go south quickly. Linda thinks these two honky rednecks are her dates, but they instead they impugn her honor, as roadside diner rednecks do. Martel jumps in and prevents her rape, and he gets knocked unconscious for his trouble. Next thing you know, Martel is now serving hard time in the penitentiary, taking the fall for the murder of one of the rednecks. From here, Penitentiary turns into a strictly prison survival film, with Martel having to protect his sweet, sweet ass from a twisted gang of rapists who want to make him their “property.”
For all its rough living conditions, the penitentiary of Penitentiary has some pretty liberal policies. In the first prison yard scene, there is full funk band (with electric instruments) jamming away as other prisoners are making coordinated dance moves straight out of some bad episode of Soul Train. Then the warden organizes a full-on boxing tournament, inviting the women prisoners to watch the proceedings. The grand prize of the tournament is a “connubial visit” with a woman in a trailer. During the boxing tournament, several of the prisoners actually get to have some consensual heterosexual sex in the restroom.
But Penitentiary somehow manages to transcend its ridiculous trappings. The key scenes involve a wizened old man Hezzikia “Seldom Seen” Jackson (a wonderfully grumpy Floyd Chatman) who Martel eventually shares a cell with. I really liked Seldom Seen in his soaring, well-earned bitterness, and Chatman gets to fire off some of the sharpest and darkest dialog in the film. And Martel is a strong and appealing character as well. He not only protects his own dignity, but also inspires another prison bitch to finally stand up for himself. How this rape victim finally changes his mentality is a lesson we could all learn from, believe it or not. There are some superb exchanges here that make you realize that though the Fanaka is mostly goofing off, he can turn deadly serious when need be. The grueling fight scenes are fantastic in their street-hard authenticity, in both the boxing ring and the cells.
Penitentiary is an entertaining, very well-edited, and oddly poignant film. The film strikes a hopeful and honest note that I found myself in accord with; you have to continuously struggle for your freedom, for despair will only lead to slavery of the body and mind. And that’s what Jive Turkey Theater is all about.
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