BOSS (1975) Blu-ray/DVD Combo
Director: Jack Arnold
The Sprocket Vault

"They call him Boss--" um, that's what The Sprocket Vault calls him too for their Blu-ray/DVD combo edition of the Fred Williamson Blaxploitation western with the volatile title.

Tired of being hunted by whitey, Boss (Fred Williamson, DEATH JOURNEY) and Amos (D'Urville Martin, DOLEMITE) try their hand at bounty hunting. Gunning down a quartet of bank robbers, they discover on one of the corpses a letter of introduction signed by the mayor of San Miguel for the position of sheriff for one of their bounty kills as recommended by notorious outlaw Jed Clayton (William Smith, GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE). After rescuing black Clara Mae (Carmen Hayward, CHEERLEADERS WILD WEEKEND), whose father has just been murdered by bandits, and situating her with the Mexican owners of the local cantina, Boss and Amos ride into town and make themselves known to the consternation of the white locals. When Mayor Griffin (R.G. Armstrong, MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS) refuses to give up the location of Clayton, seemingly out of fear of his mob who ride into town occasionally to steal supplies and women, Boss uses the letter as leverage and takes over the town as sheriff to draw Clayton out. While Amos takes out lucrative fines on the snooty locals who use a certain epithet, Boss has his attention divided between Griffin's attempts to undermine him with the town council and the moral concerns of man-hungry schoolmarm Miss Pruitt (Barbara Leigh, TERMINAL ISLAND). When Clayton's men ride into town, Boss kills two of them and jails another, knowing that double-crossing Griffin will tell Clayton since an outlaw draining the town dry is seemingly preferable to a black man in charge.

Directly preceding Williamson's stepping behind the camera to helm his own star vehicles starting with MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS and his own western ADIÓS AMIGO, BOSS – or BOSS NIGGER as the title appears onscreen, posters, and in the theme song by Terrible Tom – was helmed by the great Jack Arnold during the final twenty-odd years of his career which veered to episodic television early in the 1960s with feature films fewer and far between. Based on a script by Williamson, the film does indeed anticipate his forthcoming lower budget works by foregrounding Williamson's Hammer image – and the demands he made of his roles that he cannot be killed, he wins every fight, and he gets the girl (if he wants her) – in a genre plot stocked with character actors like Don 'Red' Barry (JESSE JAMES' WOMEN) as the town doctor, Carmen Zapata (ubiquitous on seventies television as motherly Mexican and Italian characters) as the mother of a child killed by Clayton's bandits, and Bruce Gordon (PIRANHA) as a shopkeep, while trying to ape the slightly loftier 1970s American Clint Eastwood westerns on a minimal budget. While Williamson had enough experience by this time as a leading man, he is upstaged here as much by co-star Martin (who directed DOLEMITE the same year) and TV and low budget film regular villain Smith as by some shoddy fight choreography and some edited gunfights; as such, his decision to form his own production company and direct himself may have been a reaction to how he felt about his handling by other directors. Williamson would try his hand at the black bounty hunter scenario again the following year in penning and starring in Larry G. Spangler's underwhelming JOSHUA.

Released theatrically by Dimension Pictures, BOSS was not released on VHS until 1985 through Magnum Entertainment and not on DVD until 2008 with VCI's anamorphic edition. The Sprocket Vault's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray is a VCI release in everything but name, having licensed the film and extras from Kit Parker Films. Press materials touted a 2K scan from the original camera negative. The cover makes no such claims and one would assume that the source were a somewhat faded print with some vibrant primary colors but diluted shadows both in sunny daylight shots and underlit night shots. Detail fares better in close-ups and medium shots while long shots have an overall softness that may be a fault of the Todd-AO 35 anamorphics which are presumably the older models rented for low budget productions and the encode more so than digital noise reduction. The LPCM 2.0 mono sound is okay with intelligible dialogue and some umph in the funky score while optional English SDH subtitles are also included.

"The Boss Memory" (7:54) is an interview with associate producer Myrl Schriebman (HUNTER'S BLOOD) who went to work for Arnold fresh out of UCLA. Arnold had previously worked with Williamson on BLACK EYE when the actor gave him a twenty-eight page script to develop. Schriebman interested accounting brothers Don and Dwight Call in raising funds as producers but it became apparent that shooting on location in Arizona would be too expensive; however, Schriebman found a cheaper alternative in the standing sets in Santa Fe left over from the Gene Kelly vehicle THE CHEYENNE SOCIAL CLUB. Schriebman also appears in the "Jack Arnold Tribute" (3:50) featurette discussing Arnold's beginnings as an actor and understudy and his career behind the camera. "A Conversation with Fred Williamson" (27:11) rehashes the specifics of the Hammer's career with which his fans are already familiar: his switch from a track scholarship to football, earning his nickname, graduating with a degree in architecture and designing buildings in Dubai in the off-season, his decision to get onto television and the movies after ending his sports career and realizing a nine to five job was not for him, getting a regular role on the Diahann Carroll show JULIA, being hired by Robert Altman to stage and direct the football sequence in M*A*S*H, and so on. The theatrical trailer (2:30) is also included, and the inside of the reversible cover features the original title and poster artwork. (Eric Cotenas)

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