Hit Man

Hit Man (1972)

He aims to please.

Bernie Casey portrays Tyrone and Pamela Grier plays a sultry skin-flick star in this first Americanized remake of the iconic Michael Caine action film Get Carter. From Watts to the West Side, from porno parlors to a high-rise, from motel dives to a crime kingpin’s sprawling pleasure dome, from corner hangouts to a wildlife preserve, Tyrone covers a lot of real estate, busts a lot of heads.

Date of release
1972-12-20
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Action, Crime
Director
George Armitage

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: Jack's Return Home

Hit Man is a 1972 American crime thriller film written and directed by George Armitage, produced by Gene Corman, and starring Bernie Casey and Pam Grier. It is a blaxploitation-themed adaptation of Ted Lewis' 1970 novel Jack's Return Home, more famously adapted as Get Carter (1971), with the action relocated from England to the United States.

Production

George Armitage says he never saw Get Carter before making the film, claiming that producer Gene Corman gave him a copy of the script with no title and said that MGM owned it. Armitage rewrote it to be set in the African American community, and only then did his agent tell him it was Get Carter. Armitage:

I didn't feel at the time that a white director should be directing it. So I met with Bernie Casey, the film's star, who wanted to direct it, and campaigned for him with Gene, and he said: "I don't want to take a chance on someone who hasn't directed." So he wasn't going to make the picture, and at that point there was a lot of crew and cast involved, and they were friends, so I said: "Okay, I'll do it." There was a great deal of improvisation by…

The film follows details from Lewis' novel more closely than Get Carter, and does not end with the protagonist's death.

Hit Man marked the second time Corman had produced a blaxploitation film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) that was based on a novel which had previously been adapted for one of the company's films, following Cool Breeze, an adaptation of W. R. Burnett's novel The Asphalt Jungle, which had previously inspired the film of the same name.

Future director Andrew Davis (Under Siege, The Fugitive) was the film's cinematographer, one of several low-budget films he shot for Gene and Roger Corman during the 1970s. Davis said of his experience:

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