Bone (1972)

Out of all the films that can be described as being even vaguely belonging to the Blaxploitation subgenre, Bone (1972) aka Dial Rat for Terror aka Dial Rat aka Beverly Hills Nightmare aka Bone: A Bad Day in Beverly Hills aka Housewife directed by kosher cult filmmaker and perennial screenwriter Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, The Stuff) is probably the most iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, and overtly anti-Anglo. Indeed, as Cohen’s directorial debut, Bone is a sort of satirical Blaxploitation take on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1969) of the more anti-WASP than anti-bourgeois type meets Joe Orton's Off-Broadway play Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) as a post-counter-culture flick that follows a gigantic jolly yet mischievous negro as he robs and terrorizes an ostensibly wealthy used car salesman and his younger blonde trophy wife in a work that acts as a sort of allegory for the decline of white male heterosexual power, as a result of various slave-morality-ridden social movements of the late-1960s, including Civil Rights, feminism, sexual liberation, and various other counter-culture groups/movements. Indeed, Bone is, if nothing else, a sick Semitic fantasy flick where the director seems to vent his rage over the fact that WASPs were once so terribly mean that they would not have allowed his family to enter their banal country club. As a superlatively spiteful hate piece that depicts Nordic males as spineless bullshitters and psychopaths who steal money from their wives and also depicts blonde women as half-braindead gold-digging whores that secretly long to be brutally raped by big black bucks, Cohen’s work reveals the sort of contemptible lows that certain Hebrews are willing to go to undermine Aryan manhood, perfectly exemplifying the sort of subversive Semitic behavior that led to actions like Kristallnacht and Bergen-Belsen. Arguably Cohen’s most intricate, anarchic, and artistically merited effort to date, the film is like the closest thing to a Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) of Blaxploitation cinema, though it would probably be more accurate to describe it as a WASPloitation work directed by a member of the post-WWII Judaic plutocracy.  A work where a rat acts as a catalyst to all the events that transpire, Bone gives the viewer the impression that Cohen may have watched Fritz Hippler's Der ewige Jude (1940) aka The Eternal Jew and took the Nazi propaganda film's decidedly degrading comparison between the Judaic tribe and packs of disease-carrying rodents to heart.

  As noted in a prologue at the beginning of the film: “The year is 1970. The most powerful nation on earth wages war against one of the poorest countries—which it finds impossible to defeat. And in this great and affluent nation exists its smallest richest city…and it is called Beverly Hills.” Opening with a surrealist Arrabal-esque scene of a pseudo-commercial of (anti)protagonist Bill (Andrew Duggan) attempting to advertise totaled cars containing the bloody and mangled corpses of young hippies inside, one gets the impression that the Anglo-Saxon car salesman is a figurative dealer of death and destruction (Cohen's website describes the character as a symbol of, “The Establishment, the oblivious leader of a dying regime that can’t see the protest for the pleas”). Bill lives with his much younger blonde sub-MILF wife Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten) in a fancy house in Beverly Hills that was built in 1929 by the family of William Randolph Hearst and was once owned by Hollywood's first Western megastar, Tom Mix (apparently, the house, which was then owned by director Cohen himself, was indeed built by the Hearst family and lived in by cult director Samuel Fuller around the time he directed 1951 anti-Korean War flick Steel Helmet). Later that day, Bill dives into his swimming pool and has his and wifey’s entire day more or less ruined upon finding a rat floating in the drain. Luckily, a gigantic negro in a jumpsuit named Bone (played by black Israelite Yaphet Kotto of Paul Schrader's Blue Collar (1978) and Ridley Scott's Alien (1979)) randomly appears out of nowhere like a genie in a bottle and fishes the rat out of the pool. While Bill and Bernadette offer the initially seemingly servile negro a tip, Bone really has a bone to pick with the rich white folks and wants to rob them of their wealth and possibly rob the white woman of her pussy. While going through the car salesman’s papers and documents, Bone discovers, to the dismay of Bernadette, that Bill is not only on his third mortgage (which he forged his wife’s signature to get) and has no real physical cash on tap, but also that he has a secret bank account containing $5000 that he has hidden from his discernibly moronic wife. After declaring his intention of raping Bernadette if he fails to do what he tells him to, Bone demands that Bill pick up the five grand from the bank within the next hour while he holds Bernadette hostage at the home. If Bill does not come back in time, Bone claims he will cut Bernadette’s throat with a gold letter opener. Of course, since he really does not give a shit about his trophy wife, Bill decides to take his sweet time on the bank trip, especially after meeting two very generous, if not exceedingly eccentric, women. As is quite apparent, Bill is contemplating whether or not to let his wife die. 

 After going to the bank and meeting a hippie broad played by Jeannie Berlin who he will later bone, Bill goes to a bar and is approached by an eccentric old broad named ‘X-Ray Lady’ (Brett Somers), who compliments him on the sleazy TV commercials he makes for his used car business. When the X-Ray Lady remarks her love of the mascot German Shepherd featured in the commercials, Bill demonstrates his deep-seated hatred of heebs by coldheartedly stating, “Every time I looked at that mutt all I could think of was his grandfather chasing across the yard of some concentration camp biting some Jewish ass. Ad agency nightmare.” After going on a bizarre rant regarding a conspiracy involving dentists taking x-rays of her late beloved’s teeth that may or may not have resulted in his premature death, the X-Ray Lady saves Bill from shame by paying for his bar tab after he dubiously claims he left his wallet in the car. After Bill’s rendezvous with X-Ray Lady, Bill hangs out with a lecherous flower child/hustling hoe named ‘The Girl’ (played by archetypical ‘Jewish American Princess’ Jeannie Berlin of the Heartbreak Kid and Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York), who has used the concept of ‘free love’ as a way to swindle men out of their money so she can support her lazy hippie loser lifestyle. Despite fantasizing that Bill is the same smelly old man that molested her as a little girl, ‘The Girl’ has sex with the malodorous used car salesman, though he fantasizes about making love to a used car while humping the young and rather sexually aggressive hippie.  Aside from doing the seemingly unthinkable by humping a hippie, Bill, who hates peaceniks and bohemians, also has a flower child son who pulled a Midnight Express and is now serving a six year sentence in prison in Spain for smuggling dope out of Tangiers.  Of course, Bill and Bernadette lie and tell Bone that their prodigal son is a hero who is overseas killing gooks in the Vietnam War.

 Since Bill is late with the money due to the fact he decided to waste so much time banging the beatnik broad, Bone decides to rape Bernadette and while ripping her clothes off, he states, “I’m just a big black buck that is doing what is expected of him.” Ironically, the big boisterous black buck Bone cannot ‘rise to the occasion’ while attempting to sexually pillage the hysterical cracker cunt, which largely has to do with the fact that the ‘The Nigga Mystique’ has died in America due to Civil Rights and the rise of the black bourgeoisie and release of horrendous Hollywood movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Indeed, Bone is a walking and talking anachronism who is nothing more than an outmoded sexual fantasy for Bernadette, who is quite upset when the nefarious chuckling negro fails to force himself upon her. Indeed, despite his lack of negro sexual prowess, Bernadette, who has now developed a sort of fucked feminist mentality, decides to be Bone’s whore and plots to kill her hubby. As Bernadette explains to Bill after hunting him down with the help of Bone, she plans to kill him and use the insurance money to fund her miscegenation-based future with the black buck. While Bill agrees to be a cuckold who will fund Bernadette and Bone’s raunchy relationship, they prefer to have the insurance money. Unfortunately, after Bernadette joyously murders Bill by burying his head in the sand, black brotha Bone, who like most homeboys who get what they are after from a cracker chick, disappears, thus destroying the bourgeois housewife turned mariticidal feminist’s fantasy illusions. 

 A film where a dumb blonde bourgeois slut housewife longs for being raped by a savage negro, a sleazy used car salesman with ‘anti-Semitic tendencies’ dreams of defiling a car while being defiled by a jaded Jewish American hippie princess, and an impotent buck negro cons a dumb white rich bitch into killing her hubby and running away with the insurance money, Bone is a work where virtually every character is some other character’s fantasy figure, but ultimately it is really auteur Larry Cohen’s fucked fantasy and big kosher wet dream of a post-white-gentile-male-ruled America where even the negro untermensch can kill whitey, rape his wife, and not feel afraid to do so. Of course, as the rape statistics for the United States and Europe demonstrates, black-on-white rape has only become all the more vogue since the film's release, but I digress. Hebraic anti-Aryan sentiment aside, Bone is unquestionably Cohen’s most ambitious, experimental, and artsy fartsy work to date, which is certainly something the director himself agrees with. Indeed, in the Blue Underground DVD release of the film, Cohen confesses in the audio commentary regarding the film: “This was truly the kind of movie I wanted to make and if this picture had gotten the acceptance that I dreamed of it getting, it would have changed my whole career around. I mean, this is the kind of pictures I would have done…these very eccentric, individualistic stories.” Of course, the film was not a success and Cohen had to whore himself to the generic Blaxploitation genre with the much more conventional effort Black Caesar (1972), which proved to be a big enough success that it spawned the predictably inferior sequel Hell Up in Harlem (1973) and the rest was history, with the director churning out a couple more worthwhile efforts, though he has spent most of his career penning screenplays. Unquestionably, next to similarly themed works like Fight for Your Life (1977) and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979), Bone is certainly the best of the hate-fueled and Hebrew-concocted ‘hate whitey’ exploitation pieces. 

-Ty E