Since impressing writer/director Jack Hill in his two previous films (The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972)), the buxom and beautiful Pam Grier takes centre stage in this violent anti-drug vigilante drama. Grier plays a no-holds-barred nurse, known by many as Coffy, whose younger sister has been brought into the world of drugs, and is in hospital after being sold some "bad stuff". She subsequently takes control of the situation, infiltrating the criminal world of pimps and drug pushers, using her sexuality to dupe the seemingly stupid and ridiculous criminal gangs. In the opening, she poses as a woman hooked on drugs, looking for her next fix, portraying herself as one of the many women that will do "anything" for drugs. This leads to a quite graphic scene in which Coffy blows the head off a dealer with a shotgun.
Within an exploitation industry that played very much within the confines of misogyny, this particular blaxploitation film offers a more feminist approach to the subject. At the time black films were largely masculine in their output, with lead actors such as Rudy Ray Moore, who would treat female characters with seeming disdain, and they were fundamentally in the films as sexual objects. In Coffy, Grier obliterates the ideal of the passive woman, and gleefully attacks both men and women in her mission to destroy the illegal drugs industry. This inevitably leads her to areas of society formally thought to be justified; including a local politician who Coffy has been in a relationship with.
Coffy is an interesting twist on the male dominated blaxploitation genre, and Grier is sensational in the lead - it is easy to see why she has endured where many other actresses of the decade have disappeared into obscurity. It does still have sequences of gratuitous female nudity (but that is simple symptomatic of the period), such as the party scene where Coffy attacks the harem of prostitutes under the control of the over-the-top, garishly dressed pimp, King George (Robert DoQui), whose collection of "onesy" outfits are spectacularly '70's. I find most of the charm of these low budget '70's films to be held in their outrageous iconography - the fashions and outlandish decorations are a special joy to behold. Unusually for the time, Coffy does not glorify drugs and the activities of the criminals, but does show the ubiquitous theme that authorities were implicit in pushing drugs into the black ghettos of America.
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