Why this movie? Pam Grier. Pam Grier. Pam Grier. She plays the eponymous character, a middle-aged flight attendant for Cabo Air who smuggles money into the US for Ordell Robbie, a chatty and violent gunrunner played by Samuel L. Jackson. Grier’s performance sizzles: she’s smart, sexy, watchful, and holds her cards close to her chest. This was one of the first, if not the first, action/crime movie I saw with a middle-aged woman in the lead—and a middle-aged Black woman at that. One of the great things about Jackie is that she isn’t some highly-trained operative or an impossibly skinny superhero squeezed into a catsuit. She’s real (she’s also Pam Grier) but she’s flesh and blood—and that’s what makes her performance so powerful.
Based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, Jackie Brown takes off when agents from the ATF intercept Jackie, who’s carrying wads of cash in her luggage, and give her an ultimatum: either she helps them take down Ordell or she goes to jail. At age forty-four, the agents tell her, this isn’t the time of her life when she has years to throw away. What follows is Jackie’s attempt to escape with half a million dollars of Ordell’s cash with the help of bail bondsman, Max Cherry (Robert Forster). Unfortunately, other people, including Ordell, the ATF agents, ex-con Luis (Robert De Niro), and beach girl Melanie (Bridget Fonda) have their own ideas.
What they said: Grier, who rose to fame playing characters like Foxy Brown in 1970s blaxploitation movies, said of those films: “To me, what really stood out in the genre was women of color acting like heroes…” She describes the characters she played as “street-smart women who were proud of who they were. They were far more aggressive and progressive than the Hollywood stereotypes.” That holds true for Grier’s 70s movies and for Jackie Brown. We need more of those heroines today.
When she received the Jackie Brown script, Grier’s film career had been in the doldrums. After she read the script, she called writer-director Tarantino: “’Which role am I gonna play?’ And you can hear the silence over the phone. Then, ‘Jackie Brown.’ I’m thinking, ‘Naw, really?’ and I can hear him thinking, Oh, she’s dumb. She’s dense. I just could not realize that someone had written such a strong lead role for me… [It] doesn’t happen to you every day. Maybe to Meryl Streep.”
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. With Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro, and Bridget Fonda. 154 minutes.
Streaming on multiple platforms.
