The Blaxploitation era of the 1970s gave the world an array of explosive films that include seminal features Shaft, Super Fly, Coffy and The Mack. However, there are many films made during that period that, for various reasons, are barely remembered even by fans of the genre. One of the more interesting in the kicked-to-the-curb canon is the little-known juvenile delinquent/family film Tough aka Johnny Tough. With its poster declaring, "He's bad...he's Black...he's beautiful...and Tough! And that's no jive,” the film was originally released in the summer of 1974. A favorite of director Quentin Tarantino, he screened his personal print at the Grindhouse Film Festival in 2007.
Tough was a departure from the usual Blaxploitation bad brothers and mad mamas. Director/writer Horace Jackson’s independent debut told the tale of a wild kid named Johnny coming of age on the not-so-mean streets of Los Angeles and the strife he dealt with on a regular. Three years prior, Jackson produced and scripted the low-budget film The Bus is Coming, but Tough was his first directed project.
Jackson was a handsome young man with a long face and a beard, who was determined to make it in Hollywood by any means necessary. With the film world rapidly changing in the ‘70s and Black directors crossing the threshold ever so slightly, Jackson, like Melvin Van Peebles before and Spike Lee after, did it himself. Filmed in a neo-realist style and shot in the Fairfax District, the director wasn’t as visually savvy as contemporaries Ossie Davis (Cotton Comes to Harlem) or Gordon Parks (Shaft), but being forced to work on a shoestring budget couldn't have helped much either.
While Tough was rated G during a period when most Black films were restricted (R) because of sex and violence, in the first fifteen minutes the adorable Afro-wearing kid played by Dion Gossett steals a FOR SALE sign, which he later sticks in the lawn in front of his school, shoplifts cookies, and slowly drives his teacher crazy. Back home, after he’s caught telling yet another fib, Johnny’s mother (Sandra Reed) blurts, “Every time he opens his mouth, he’s telling a lie.” Of course, the prepubescent Johnny needed discipline badly, but Jackson’s script showed that the kid’s rebellion was caused by his constantly arguing middle-class parents and short-tempered teacher.
“All the adults in Johnny’s life were all screwed-up,” Renny Roker the actor who played Johnny’s stepfather Phil, says. A New York City native currently living in Palm Coast, Florida with his wife Linda, he is the author of Positivity Your Key to Success. In the 1970s, Roker was a character actor who appeared on Mission: Impossible and Mod Squadbefore tackling the daddy role in Tough. “Johnny was an intelligent young man, but he was also lonely and troubled because of his circumstances.”
In addition to being the only professional thespian in the film, Roker worked with Horace Jackson’s company, Jina Productions, as a (uncredited) co-producer on the feature. “The budget for Tough was between $250,000 and $300,000,” Roker says, “but during the middle of shooting, Jackson ran out of money and I was able to find some. I got some pretty strong people involved with us and eventually we had a movie.”
Whether deliberately biting or as a subconscious homage, Jackson sampled the plot and various scenes from the famed French film The 400 Blows with Johnny as a sepia-skinned version of Antoine Doinel and the action transported from bleak Paris to sunny Cali. “About a quarter of a way through the movie, I realized that I was watching a remake of my favorite François Truffaut’s film,” says Moon in Gutter movie blogger and Art Decades publisher Jeremy Richey. A fan of Tough, he first saw it in 2008 while searching a torrent site for obscure Blaxploitation films. “I sat down and watched it thinking it was going to be a typical early ‘70s Blaxplotation film, but it’s really not.”
Although Roker denies that Jackson used the 1959 masterwork as the springboard for Tough, in 2011 the Los Angeles theater Cinefamily screened the two films as a double feature; the program description read, “…Johnny Tough emerges not as a copycat film, but as a true genre gem.”
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