In our weekly series Anatomy of a Nude Scene, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sex scenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This Black History Month, we're honoring four of our favorite nude scenes featuring some of the hottest black actresses of all time, starting with the queen of Blaxploitation herself, Pam Grier in 1973's Coffy!
While certainly not as well known as his Oscar-winning UCLA classmate Francis Ford Coppola, director Jack Hill is no less influential in his corner of the filmmaking world. Like his more famous contemporary, Hill left UCLA to work for mega-producer Roger Corman, working with Coppola on some of his own films before moving into the world of directing himself with 1966's Mondo Keyhole. Hill spent the remaining years of the 60s working on low budget horror films, all of which are fairly interchangeable, with such vague titles as Blood Bath, House of Evil, Fear Chamber, and Pit Stop. In fact, the only reason anyone might remember that last one is because it featured the film debut of another Oscar winner, Ellen Burstyn!
When the calendar ticked over to the 70s, horror began to take a back seat to other exploitation genres cropping up all over the world. Hill soon became a pioneer of the women-in-prison genre thanks to his back-to-back hits The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. Shortly before shooting began on 1971's The Big Doll House, Hill met 21-year old Pam Grier, a North Carolina native with big dreams of making it in the pictures while she worked the switchboard at American International Pictures, the studio Corman called home for decades. Taken by her stunning beauty and no-nonsense attitude, Hill cast Grier in supporting roles in both of those pink-in-the-clink classics, though she wouldn't be supporting anyone for long.
Spurned on by the increasingly successful independent genre movement known as Blaxploitation, AIP soon began to branch out into that realm, delivering low budget films for a black audience full of sex, violence, language, and all around bad assery! Grier landed her first co-lead alongside Margaret Markov in Eddie Romero's 1972 flick Black Mama, White Mama, a gender-swapped exploitation take on the film The Defiant Ones starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. Now firmly on the map, Grier was ready to headline her first film for Jack Hill, playing a nurse who takes vengeance on the heroin dealers who got her young sister hooked on smack in 1973's Coffy.
Sporting the tagline, "They call her Coffy and she'll cream you," the film was born out of AIP losing the rights to make the script that would become Cleopatra Jones. When AIP's head of production Larry Gordon lost the rights to Warner Brothers, he turned to Hill to crank out a competing Blaxploitation film with a female lead, one that might even beat Cleopatra Jones into theaters. Hill knew immediately that Grier had to play the lead in the film and went to work, getting Coffy into theaters two months to the day before Cleopatra Jones.
While Tamara Dobson's Cleopatra Jones was a CIA operative posing as a fashion model in order to take down an international crime syndicate, Pam Grier's Flower Child Coffin, or Coffy, was just a streetwise gal out to right some wrongs in her neighborhood. The lower stakes—and obviously substantially lower budget—allowed Hill and Grier to bring a heroine to the screen who was relatable to everyday people, an aspirational hero in the guise of an every woman. This also allowed the film to turn a substantial profit, earning back eight times its production budget by the end of its run in theaters.
Coffy's plan is simple. She lures unsuspecting pimps, dealers, and gangsters in by pretending to be a junkie in need of a fix. Then, once they're behind closed doors, Coffy blows them away, quite literally. Because it's an exploitation flick, however, there's also a healthy dose of exploitative content in the flick, like when Coffy battles a room full of prostitutes for the honor of sleeping with a mob boss named Vitrioni. Even still, the plot of a seemingly weak, helpless, and poor woman turning the tables on those in power gives the film at least an air of feminist allegory.
Roger Ebert gave the film a mostly favorable review—at least compared with the pan doled out by his partner Gene Siskel—praising Grier's performance and at least insinuating that the film had a bit more going on than your average exploitation film. It's borderline impossible not to be taken in by Grier, who didn't make her nude debut in the flick, but treated each nude scene like it was her very first, sensually undressing in the most famous of those nude scenes...
The film launched Grier into the stratosphere, making her one of the marquee names of the Blaxploitation movement and arguably the biggest female name in the genre. A scrapped sequel to Coffy was morphed into the following year's Foxy Brown, and lead roles in films like Friday Foster, Sheba Baby, and Drum followed in short order. Obviously the Blaxploitation movement didn't last forever and Grier eventually faded into relative obscurity before Tarantino brought her back to the spotlight with 1997's Jackie Brown.
While it's hard to call any one scene in her career the "A Star is Born" moment, it's hard to deny that the scene from Coffy above doesn't at least bear most of the hallmarks of one. Whenever it was that her star was born, we sure are glad that Pam Grier got those moments in the spotlight!
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Further Reading for Black History Month
—How Halle Berry's Nude Debut Led Her to Monster's Ball
—Rosario Dawson Laid Bare for Danny Boyle's Trance
—List Bonet's Bloody Nude Debut in Angel Heart
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Catch up with our most recent editions of Anatomy of a Nude Scene
—Christina Ricci Goes Nude for the First Time in the Opening Minutes of Prozac Nation
—A Salute to Tanya Roberts' PG Nudity in Sheena and The Beastmaster
—Sarah Silverman is Seriously Sexy (and Topless) in I Smile Back
—Jessica Chastain's Nude Debut in Salomé Takes Director Al Pacino Over a Decade to Finish
—Salma Hayek Knocks Our Pants Off with Her Performance in Frida
—Kirsten Dunst Goes Topless for the First Time in All Good Things
—Kristen Stewart Pops Her Top Off in On the Road
—Uma Thurman Steals Dangerous Liaisons Out From Under Her More Famous Co-Stars
—Did They Really Kill a Chicken During That Infamous Pink Flamingos Sex Scene?
—A Naked Julie Michaels Kicks Keanu's Ass in Point Break
—Alexis Dziena Gives Aging Lothario Bill Murray an Eyeful in Broken Flowers
—P.J. Soles Establishes a Key Horror Movie Trope in John Carpenter's Halloween
—Can We Talk About Linnea Quigley's Barbie Doll Crotch in Return of the Living Dead?
—Innocent Blood Finds John Landis Trying to Get His American Werewolf Mojo Back
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Click Here to Read All Past Editions of Anatomy of a Nude Scene/Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy
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