The local CW affiliate around here has a bizarre asortment of movies it plays at 2 AM. This morning they showed Foxy Brown, the 1974 Pam Grier vehicle, and despite Grier's awesome presence and a great bit by Sid Haig, the best thing about this movie is the effortlesly dynamic performance of Antonio Fargas.
Fargas was a stage-trained pro, which explained why his work in early seventies exploitation movies tended to stand out: he was a real actor. Unfortunately, due to his wiry physique and perpetually hangdog face, he tended to get cast in secondary parts, usually as pimps or drug dealers. His best-known part was as comic relef snitch Hugy Bear on Starsky And Hutch, not exactly the most dignified part a black actor could get.
Occasionally a good filmmaker would cast Fargas in a nonstereotyped part--Paul Mazursky gave him a great role in Next Stop, Greenwich Village, and Louis Malle put him in Pretty Baby. Maybe his best part came in the sloppy but entertaining Car Wash, in which he's hilarious and touching as the transvestite Lindy.
By the eighties, sadly, it was back to bit parts on TV, and occasional larger roles in projects that knowingly referenced Fargas' past roles, such as the pimp Flyguy in Keenen Ivory Wayans' I'm Gonna Get You Sucka. He still gets work--he's a regular on Everybody Hates Chris--but it's safe to say he's never going to get the great part he deserves.
It would be easy to blame Hollywood's institutional racism as an explanation for Fargas' stunted career, and that's no doubt part of it, but it may be simply that Fargas was a victim of his own talent: Never a leading man type, it was risky to cast him in a secondary role for fear that he'd steal the movie away from the hero.
