Women have been starring in action pictures since the silent era, when names like Pearl White and Helen Gibson promised thrilling adventures with plucky heroines who did their own stunts. Cheng Pei-Pei, heroine of King Hu’s “Come Drink with Me” and Hong Kong’s first real female action star, is another key figure in the evolution of the genre. But the action heroine as we know her today would not exist without the influence of two women who took over the world from opposite ends during the 1970s: Meiko Kaji and Pam Grier.
Both had contemporaries: For Grier, it was her friend and former model Tamara Dobson, star of “Cleopatra Jones” and its Bond-inspired sequel “Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold.” Kaji, meanwhile, was backed by a whole cohort of actresses just a tad more salacious than she, led by “pinky violence” mainstays Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto.
Related Stories
All of them were treading new territory, as women began infiltrating what Danish scholar Rikke Schubart calls the “male” genres of action, adventure, and martial arts films in the early 1970s. But Kaji and Grier were the most visible and mainstream of these performers. And each approached the figure of the gun-toting, knife-wielding badass from her own point of view, creating archetypes that are still in use today.
These ‘70s action goddesses are favorites of Quentin Tarantino, who wrote “Jackie Brown” for Grier and paid tribute to Kaji in his “Kill Bill” saga, both chapters of which end with Kaji singing the theme songs to two of her most famous films. (Grier performed the theme to her 1971 film “The Big Doll House,” one of several things these women have in common.) So credit where it’s due to Tarantino for bringing them back into the forefront of pop culture in the ‘90s and ‘00s. But they would have gotten there anyway — their famous superfan just gave them a boost.
Grier and Kaji are products of a decade when women’s liberation, increased permissiveness around sexuality, and reactionary fears about these aggressive “new women” combined on American movie screens, with combustive results. (The rape-revenge subgenre is the most overt manifestation of this uneasy mix, although it’s evident in many films of the era.) Japan, which experienced a ‘60s counterculture boom similar to that in the West, incorporated these tensions into its cinema as well, with an added element of cultural stagnation that led to a major movie studio, Nikkatsu, switching to an all-softcore format in 1971.
Grier in particular could be a literal ball-buster, although her characters’ hatred of bad men was often matched by their desire for a good one. (In real life, Grier was never fully comfortable with being a sex symbol, which she’s attributed to a traumatic assault at the age of six.) Kaji’s star persona was less sexual, at least overtly; although her characters were sometimes allowed to fall in love, she projected an otherworldly untouchability that contrasted with Grier’s more down-to-earth sensuality. Both were — and still are — stunning, sporty types who had to be informed of their own statuesque beauty early in their careers. Both have an upright posture and a magnetic charisma, exuding a dignity that would be ripped away and then reclaimed over and over again in their films.
The politics of the era required that beautiful, self-possessed women like Grier and Kaji must be degraded for the pleasure — and the comfort — of their presumed male audience, who worshiped them and wanted to destroy them at the same time. They maintained their dignity both on and off screen, however, obtaining levels of influence within their respective industries that were unheard of for women up to that point. Their perseverance is key to both women’s personas, and their greatest gift to the female action stars that came after them.
Kaji began her career under her birth name of Masako Ota, climbing through the ranks of the Japanese studio system until she received a new name and a starring role in a period gangster film, “Blind Woman’s Curse,” as a reward. For that film, she learned traditional Japanese dance, mastering sword forms she would later use in the “Lady Snowblood” movies.
At that time, actors were considered interchangeable in the Japanese studio system, and were expected to do what they were told: “I would have to take whatever role I was offered, fit into whatever mold they put me in,” Kaji said in a rare English-language interview in 1997. In that same interview, she expresses her ambivalence about becoming an icon of onscreen vengeance, saying that “I was tending to get cast as strong women, and the company steered me to continue with that kind of role.”
Although she’s appeared in over a hundred films and TV shows, the majority of Kaji’s action-heroine filmography was produced between 1970 and 1974, in which time she starred in three iconic series. In the “Stray Cat Rock” series of youth films, she’s the tall, soft-spoken cool girl, slow to anger but quick with a switchblade when pressed. (The best of these, “Sex Hunter,” builds to a knife fight by flashlight after Kaji and her girl gang firebomb a party full of sexual predators.) In “Lady Snowblood” and its sequel, “Love Song of Vengeance,” Kaji is both more and less than human, a supernaturally talented assassion born to avenge the rape of her mother and the murder of her father and brother. Her restraint and the subtlety of her movements — she can cut a jugular with the flick of her wrist — contrast with the hot red blood and pulpy storytelling, living up to the film’s name.
However limited Kaji felt by these roles, she owned them, using whatever small amount of power she had to shape the trajectory of her career. Kaji famously hated doing nude scenes, which created an issue for her as a Nikkatsu contract player when the studio launched its “roman porno” series the year after “Blind Woman’s Curse.” So she took a bold — one might even say scandalous — step, leaving the studio that nurtured her for a rival, Toei. There, she took on the title role in the third and most iconic of her film series, with a condition that would forever shape her image.
The eponymous “Sasori” (Japanese for “scorpion”) of Toru Shinohara’s comics was a foul-mouthed, hot-tempered woman, but Kaji — after reading a collection lent to her by the film’s director, Shunya Ito — balked at all the cursing. So she suggested that her Scorpion should speak as little as possible, a sort of female Man With No Name who expressed herself through actions rather than words.
It was an ideal role for Kaji, a gifted physical actor who can infuse meaning into the smallest movements — not to mention her big, intense eyes. Kaji can express a whole range of emotions through her eyes, although in the “Female Prisoner Scorpion” movies she most frequently conveys the trio of hatred, contempt, and blind animal panic.
Ito’s trilogy of “Female Prisoner Scorpion” films — particularly the second in the series, “Jailhouse 41” — transcend the exploitation label, full of artistic compositions and daring directorial gambits that tell the story while Sasori stays mute. She’s beaten, tortured, and betrayed by men, both before her incarceration and as punishment for her defiance once she does end up behind bars. But her suffering does not break her; instead, it makes her tougher and scarier and harder to kill. In the process, her revenge becomes the revenge of all women against patriarchal violence, which Ito makes explicit in the image of a group of women passing a knife from hand to hand as they run towards the camera at the end of “Jailhouse 41.”
Sadly, however, that was just in the movies. In reality, the process of filming the “Female Prisoner Scorpion” series was extremely taxing on its star. Although Kaji envisioned Scorpion as a character whose strength came from her compassion for the weak as much as her talent for violence, filming “became more a test of physical endurance rather than acting skill,” as she told Chris D. in 1997. “I had to be more concerned about not getting sick, not getting hurt on the set. It was, in some ways, very limiting physically and mentally.”
Kaji’s frustration led her to leave Japan for a stint in New York in the late ‘70s. Since then, she’s worked primarily in television and rarely gives interviews. When given the chance, she’s got range, as she proved in 1978’s “Double Suicide of Sonezaki,” for which she won multiple acting awards. But, forever chained to her action heroines and their unending cycles of karmic suffering, she’s become as elusive and unknowable off screen as she was on.
Grier, on the other hand, is very accessible, posting regularly on social media and giving interviews for each new project. Many of these are B-movies influenced by Grier’s ‘70s output, and she approaches her roles as authority figures in these films with a sense of good humor. She’s proud of her place in Black film history — she was the first Black female action star, and the undisputed “queen of Blaxploitation.” She writes in her autobiography “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts” that “we were redefining heroes as schoolteachers, nurses, mothers, and street-smart women who were proud of who they were.”
An important, if subtle, difference between Meiko Kaji and Pam Grier as action stars is that, where Kaji is an avenger, Grier is a protector. Her characters are ordinary women with jobs — the title character in “Coffy” is a surgical nurse — and families that they love. It’s that love, rather than hatred, that allows Grier’s characters to rise to extraordinary circumstances when the people close to them get hurt. As with Kaji, these personal grudges rise to a societal level; characters in Grier’s films frequently bemoan the corrosive influence of hard drugs on Black communities, for example. But she’s not above the people. She’s one of them.
Grier’s practicality and grit came from her background, growing up as the daughter of an Air Force sergeant who moved the family around the world before landing in Denver, Colorado when Grier was a teenager. (She still lives in Colorado when she’s not working, on a small ranch that she bought back in the ‘80s.) She came to Los Angeles with the intention of saving money for medical school, and got into the film business through one of her many part-time jobs, which she kept working between gigs for several years after making her screen debut in Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
Women-in-prison films were also important to Grier’s career as an action star. As she writes in “Foxy,” she took an offer to travel to the Philippines to film back-to-back roles in the sleazy, sweaty 1971 B-movies “The Big Doll House” and “Women in Cages” almost on a whim. (She definitely did it for the money, noting that the $500 a week she got as an actor was more than all of her other jobs combined.) Grier plays variations on the same sadistic-lesbian stereotype in both films. And although she took the assignments seriously, going back to her hotel room and reading Stanislavski at night, there wasn’t much nuance for her to play with.
Her star persona didn’t fully emerge until 1973’s “Coffy,” which reunited Grier with “The Big Doll House” director Jack Hill for a pair of movies in which a tough-but-glamorous Grier stands up to the dope pushers that have ruined her family and community. The plots are similar, but the tones of each film are distinct; of the two, “Coffy” is the better and more grounded movie, as much as one can call a film that opens with Grier airing out a predatory dope pusher’s skull with a shotgun “grounded.”
In “Coffy,” she’s on a mission to wipe out the entire supply chain of dope dealers who got her 11-year-old sister hooked on smack. In “Foxy Brown,” her fed boyfriend improbably returns from hiding with a new face, only to get gunned down on Foxy’s doorstep a few scenes later. Both films include sex-work subplots, as Coffy/Foxy goes undercover at brothels with ties to organized crime. At times, “Foxy Brown” plays like a parody of “Coffy,” more colorful and cartoonish with quippy exchanges like the one where Foxy jokes that vigilante justice is “as American as apple pie.”
Grier did her own stunts in both of these films, as well as in “Sheba, Baby,” the third in AIP’s unofficial trilogy that forms the core of Grier’s Blaxploitation filmography. This was a decision motivated by necessity — there were no Black stuntwomen who could double for Grier at the time, a reflection both of her singular look and her pioneering status. So she hid razor blades in her hair and smashed barstools in extras’ faces, which ended up being an advantage in terms of her image as well. Viewers believed her as a tough woman who could fight, because they actually saw her fighting.
Catfights and topless scenes notwithstanding, Pam Grier the action star was warmly received by feminists: Gloria Steinem put her on the cover of Ms. magazine in 1975. In the accompanying interview, Grier preaches the virtue of self-reliance, saying, “use your own strength and no one will ever be able to take advantage of you.” Grier represents a specific ideal of Black femininity, one that values female independence and posits women as the defenders of the family and the community. She based the character of Coffy on her mother, who worked long hours as a nurse.
There’s an admitted camp quality to Grier’s AIP work. But these are hard-bitten, cynical films, criticized by contemporary reviewers for their shocking violence. The audience cheers for Grier as she smashes her way through the criminal underworld, while knowing that a new crop of corrupt politicians and cops on the make will replace the ones she kills. The final shot of “Coffy” underlines the tragic futility of its heroine’s mission: After an emotional scene where Coffy confronts her callous city-councilman boyfriend, she stumbles out onto the beach at dawn, bruised and defeated but still alive.
A similar sequence unfolds at the end of “Lady Snowblood,” where Kaji’s doomed assassin Yuki collapses, her red blood soaking the white snow, as she releases her rage in a final scream of fury. Revenge is satisfying, but ultimately empty, and when their trials are over, these heroines will continue to endure.
Their influence can be felt in the stars that came after them: Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Ripley in the “Alien” series has a maternal fierceness that calls back to Grier’s action persona, as does Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.” (The 2018 film “Proud Mary,” starring Taraji P. Henson, is essentially a 21st-century Pam Grier movie.) And had they been made a few decades earlier, Grier would have slayed the role of the fiercely loyal Letty Ortiz in the “Fast & Furious” movies.
Meanwhile, Kaji’s cool inscrutability shows up in Charlize Theron’s action roles, particularly her turn as an enigmatic assassin in “Atomic Blonde.” Ana De Armas’ character in “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” has a bloody origin story reminiscent of Yuki’s in “Lady Snowblood,” as does the Marvel superhero Black Widow.
Most importantly, however, Grier and Kaji proved that a woman could not only headline a single action film, but a whole series of them, and that those movies could make money at the box office. Without that, none of these bad bitches and super-assassins would exist at all.
IndieWire’s ‘70s Week is presented by Bleecker Street’s “RELAY.” Riz Ahmed plays a world class “fixer” who specializes in brokering lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the individuals who threaten their ruin. IndieWire calls “RELAY” “sharp, fun, and smartly entertaining from its first scene to its final twist, ‘RELAY’ is a modern paranoid thriller that harkens back to the genre’s ’70s heyday.” From director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”) and also starring Lily James, in theaters August 22.
