“In this world there’s only two kinds of
dudes and that’s hustlers and suckers.”
Despite
his hubristic assertion to a group of fellow hustlers in a seedy, red-hued bar,
the line dividing Blue from his marks risks being erased as this ghetto-based
character study progresses. Seizing plot points from Iceberg Slim’s perceptive novel,
Yurst’s soulful tragedy focuses on the enduring loyalty between two Philadelphia
street hustlers, who may have cast a dice too many – Blue, an ageing black
conman, and White Folks, his mixed-race friend, whose moniker is earned because
of his light skin and ability to take on the ‘white con’.[i]
Often dismissed as a blaxploitation curio, Trick
Baby is a fatalistic example of the sub-genre with a hardboiled milieu –
see also the comparatively toned Detroit
9000 and Across 110th
Street – which eschews the campy aspects often associated with these films.
When
Blue and Folks bilk a middle-aged man by selling him fake jewellery, he suffers
a heart attack and his Mob-linked nephew Pirelli (Tony Mazzadra) vows to find them.
Dot Murray, a crooked cop, has rumbled this and expects a payoff, but Blue pads
the bribe with toilet paper, thus triggering the policeman’s wrath. The same
night, Folks convinces a group of conservative businessman that he can involve
them in a lucrative deal buying run-down tenement blocks. Unable to touch the
$100,000 real-estate money, their ticket out of the ghetto, until the following
morning, and caught in the crossfire of Italian mobsters and a rabid cop, they try
to stay alive.
He adapts well to ‘character’ while running a con. When grifting Pirelli’s uncle, he adopts the threatening persona of a white hoodlum, even racially subjugating his friend. As a man navigating a societal no-man’s land, Kiel Martin gives a poignant performance. Martin had worked mainly in television but, on the merits of this portrayal, would have been a perfect fit for any Seventies urban crime film.[ii]
An
ersatz father figure, Blue’s affection for White Folks is boundless but his
ultimate rapacity may be the harbinger of their fate. Folks implores him to abandon
Philly (“The flow has turned against us”), but Blue wants the $100,000 so
badly, he is willing to risk his life. Though eclipsed by Martin, Mel Stewart’s
performance as fast-talking Blue is weighted with regret and pathos. When
Murray storms into Blue’s apartment during his manic search, we even see that
Blue’s well-kept wife, Cleo, cuckolds her older husband.
The
film fails in its lacklustre depiction of the Mob and its hitmen, and the
script doesn’t offer enough to understand (or even care) why Susan becomes so
quickly obsessed with White Folks. Dot Murray’s fiery performance as a
shoot-to-kill cop, however, counters much of these script weaknesses; poised to
kill the conmen who humiliated him, he also takes umbrage with Pirelli’s crowd
if they dare to refer to him or their quarry with racist insults.
The film’s rather televisual aesthetic is enlivened by some brilliant on-location shooting, with bar scenes filmed in Philadelphia watering holes energised by regular patrons. In a lengthy, sinewy sequence, Murray shoots Folks, injuring his hand, and chases him through the streets. Yurst and Mankofsky inject documentary immediacy to the action; the camera races through a busy market, Folks rolling in front of a metro train that offers him a safeguard. In less frantic moments, Mankofsky captures Philly’s lower-rent neighbourhoods in all their ragged glory; the last tracking shot is laden with lost dreams and a sense of impotency in the face of negative racial perceptions.
Clark Hodgkiss
[i] In
Slim’s novel, White Folks’ parents were married; his father, a white musician,
abandoned the family when White Folks was a child and his mother slipped into
alcoholism. The film doesn’t dwell on any of this bruising back story, instead
implying his mother was a prostitute.
[ii]
Even though Martin’s big-screen career never took off, he found his calling in
the gritty crime series Hill Street Blues
as roguish officer JD LaRue. Like that character, Martin also battled
alcoholism. A heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer in 1990 at the age of 46. 
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