Jamaa Fanaka’s Penitentiary (1979) is about boxing, but its first, longest, and most brutal fight centers on grappling.
In lieu of boxing’s reliance on discrete blows, the combatants—protagonist Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (Leon Isaac Kennedy) and “Half Dead” Johnson (Badja Djola)—spend most of the grueling, eight-minute struggle in a variety of arm locks and chokeholds. With boxing, one punch ends before the next is thrown, which means that, in theory, a nimble fighter could go entire rounds without being struck. By contrast, this scene conveys a sense of unrelenting tension, a constant straining of every bodily fiber to survive for one second longer, to come out just barely on top. There’s no respite, no time-out between bouts, just a state of extreme and prolonged exertion. Enhancing this impression is the low-key lighting, which shades and accentuates the fighters’ muscular contours to suggest bodies wound tight with fear and adrenaline, as well as the guttural groaning, sputtering, and wailing on the soundtrack, which aurally evokes the fight’s crushing physical toll.
In the scene, the framing of shots is often tight, affording close-up views of pain-twisted faces and sweat-slicked skin, but when the camera pulls back, another “frame” comes into view: the claustrophobic walls of the jail cell that physically as well as symbolically “frame” the fight. As the mise-en-scène heightens bodily stress by cramping fighters’ physical mobility, this visual confinement also allegorizes the way in which “Black on Black” violence is conditioned by the American prison industrial complex.
“Facing time? N—, you face time every time you live and breathe! Why you’re doing time right now and don’t even know it!” Thus declares Malik Carter’s “Big Daddy” Johnson from Fanaka’s previous film, Emma Mae (1976), admonishing a group of Black youth for fearing prison when their very lives within a white supremacist society are marked by imprisonment. This notion of prison as both metaphor for and literal participant in the sustained and systematic denial of freedom to Black Americans has been a throughline in Fanaka’s feature-length work, beginning with Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975), which, as Fanaka himself has noted in an interview, concludes by suggesting that death may be sweet relief compared to a life in chains. Penitentiary, which similarly features a scene in which a dying character is told that he’s “won,” foregrounds this theme even more forcefully.
Set in a virtually all-Black prison, the film depicts the ruthless pecking order that develops among inmates who, forced into a position in which violence and assertions of dominance are a means of survival, turn on each other. Meanwhile, the prison’s operations—run by a white warden whose “benevolence” is conditional upon inmates fighting for him in prison boxing tournaments—continue smoothly, profiting off the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans and perpetuating cycles of violence within the Black community.
This idea of prison as both a concrete, historical institution of Black oppression and what film archivist Jan-Christopher Horak calls “a microcosm of Black America” comes into sharp focus in the fight between Too Sweet and Half Dead. The former instigates the fight—working under the aegis of prison gang leader Jesse Amos (Donovan Womack), Half Dead attempts to rape Too Sweet as a way to “bust [the] young buck,” putting him in his place—but, in preceding scenes, Fanaka had hinted that Half Dead himself is merely a manifestation of the system. As such, when the fight happens, we are primed to attribute it not simply or even primarily to these two characters, but to an entire institutional arrangement that breeds such violence. From having him hold a minstrel figurine in hand when we first meet him, to visually framing him from behind bars as he verbally proclaims his dog-eat-dog credo for prison life, to christening him “Half Dead,” Fanaka presents the character as a body deprived of agency, one who has internalized and acts out the racialized violence that the system invites and perpetuates. 
Within this carceral way of life that extends beyond literal prison walls, there is no rest. Hence, the disturbing brilliance of choreographing the fight around grappling maneuvers that viscerally express the idea of relentless stress, of a body racked by the pressures of a society continually trying to box it in and put it down. Watching this scene, I was reminded of the punishing centerpiece of Julien Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), in which a clammy, enervating wrestling match metaphorizes the hustler-protagonist’s reckless attempts at clawing his way to a better societal position. In Penitentiary, however, the sense of desperate drive is framed not as emerging out of an individual character’s compulsive ambitiousness (though one could argue that, especially given the Dassin film’s urban setting and noir iconography, the character is a manifestation of broader postwar capitalist ideology) but, rather, as being caused by external, systemic imposition. The prison’s palpable presence as both physical and symbolic frame registers as the conditioning context for the violence, generating a pressure cooker environment that breaks and exploits Black bodies.
Too Sweet defeats Half Dead in the fight, ends up enrolling in the prison’s boxing program, and becomes a local champion. This victory earns him parole, but with the stipulation that he must continue boxing for the warden’s brother, who is a fight promoter. In other words, the film’s superficially “happy” ending simultaneously evinces ongoing subjugation, a case of winning the battle but not the war. Sporting the suggestive birth name of “Gordone,” Too Sweet feels in many ways like a narrative proxy for Fanaka himself, who was born Walter “Gordon” and spent his whole career on the fringes of Hollywood. Although he enjoyed more commercial success than his anti-Hollywood peers in the L.A. Rebellion movement, his commitment to greater minority representation both on- and off-screen proved to be an ill fit for the historically white supremacist American film industry. Fanaka’s dual insider-outsider status came to a head in a series of lawsuits he launched against the Director’s Guild of America, in which he called out the organization for failing to uphold their contractual agreement to increase employment for women and minorities. These appeals were delayed then dismissed, resulting in his being labeled a “vexatious litigant” and suspended from the guild. Not unlike Too Sweet, who found provisional success but only within a system working against him, Fanaka had auspicious beginnings in Hollywood with Penitentiary—it made a staggering $74 back for every $1 spent on production—but found himself increasingly sidelined in a way that made the initial film’s success feel more like a one-off than a concerted, good-faith opening-up of Hollywood to minority voices.
Top: Richard Roundtree in Shaft (1971). Above: Tamara Dobson Cleopatra Jones (1973).
Too Sweet’s and Fanaka’s shared position of qualified, temporary success within a prejudiced system also evokes the trajectory of the blaxploitation cycle, of which Penitentiary is often considered a tail-end example (even if Fanaka himself rejects the label). Riding the cultural groundswell of the civil rights movement and a financially flagging Hollywood’s thirst for new markets, the blaxploitation era emerged as a felicitous convergence of economic, cultural, and political interests: Black-directed, Black-starring films about Black experience aligned with both racial progressivism and Hollywood’s plan to capitalize upon Black American moviegoers. Despite heated controversy regarding blaxploitation’s tendency to articulate Black experience in the exploitation-cinema terms of sex, drugs, and violence (“blaxploitation” stems from “black exploitation,” a derogatory term popularized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] in reference to this new wave of films), the movement also marked an unprecedented period of African American representation and creative expression in mainstream cinema that saw such figures as Ossie Davis, Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, and Tamara Dobson aggrandized within American pop culture. And yet, this moment of representational flourishing was short-lived. As profit models skewed away from tapping specifically Black markets—in the words of film scholar Novotny Lawrence, “the film industry realized that it did not need an exclusively Black vehicle to draw the large Black audiences”—and, à la genre cycles more generally, as popularity led to decline due to too much of the same or similar, many of the movement’s stars experienced a career nosedive, their Blackness no longer viewed as being profitable.
Penitentiary, in narrating and visualizing a reality in which Black “success” remains circumscribed by a racist system, articulates a connection between Hollywood, the prison industrial complex, and American society in general—a link that, in the fight between Too Sweet and Half Dead, attains a heightened, confrontational immediacy. Working within the mode of action-adjacent exploitation, the scene presents the spectacle of the Black body in crisis, expressing the visceral tension, precarity, and entrapment of being Black in America.
The Action Scene is a column exploring the construction of action set pieces, but it also considers “scene” in the sense of field or area: “action” as a genre and mode that spans different cultures and historical periods. By examining these two levels in tandem—one oriented toward aesthetic expression, the other toward broader contexts and concepts—this series aims to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema.