You play games with me and you'll be a dead Pasha.
While I've got poultry on my mind, I figured I'd jump back into the "Drive-In Movie Classics" box set with 1974's Jive Turkey, a low-budget blaxploitation period piece that originally went out under the title Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes -- and that's not all baby could have used. Director Bill Brame didn't have a whole lot of bread to work with, so a few vintage cars aside, this is the kind of film that tries to establish its time period by having its characters repeatedly say things like, "Remember, this is 1956," which may be cheaper but it's far less convincing. Another thing that needs to be taken with a grain of salt is the pre-title card that declares, "THIS IS A TRUE STORY." Now, I'm not saying the Italian mafia didn't try to muscle in on a black numbers kingpin's action in 1956, but there's probably a good reason why the next card says, "Only the Names, Places, and Events have been changed to Protect the Innocent."
At any rate, the film stars Paul Harris as the Big Man in the Hood who knows how to take care of his own and who to hire to take care of the competition, with "special guest star" Frank DeKova (who logged a fair bit of time playing Chief Wild Eagle on F Troop) as the mafioso putting the squeeze on him, Frances Williams as the madam of the local opium den/whorehouse, Reginald Farmer as Sweetman, one of Harris's top numbers runners (because you can't have a blaxploitation picture without a character named something like Sweetman), and Larry Greene (who went on to play Hood #2 in three separate episodes of Good Times) as his right-hand man. The film also tries to be coy about Harris's secret weapon, a sassy assassin named Serene, but anybody with a pair of eyes can figure out what's up long before the closing credits reveal that "Tawny Tan" is actually Don Edmondson (who didn't work again under either name, so I guess the filmmakers didn't need to go to that much trouble "introducing" him/her).
There's a smattering of gun play through the film (including a scene where DeKova goads Harris into playing a game of Russian roulette), but most of the bloodletting is achieved through people slicing and beating each other to a pulp. And there's also copious nudity (mostly female, of course), but the language is mostly confined to variations on the n-word (one of the songs is even called "Nigger Rich"). My favorite extraneous detail, though, has to be the kid who's crazy about potato chips, mostly because people can't stop talking about them when he's around. It's like the filmmakers were in thrall to the Potato Chip Lobby or something.