SOLOMON KING

“Don’t you suckers know the days of Uncle Remus and Old Black Joe are gone?,” barks ex-CIA operative/ex-Green Beret/nightclub owner Solomon King to a group of Black gang members at the Sugar Hill Club, in actor/director/writer Sal Watts’s long-lost Black urban crime/action film. SOLOMON KING was shot independently in Oakland, CA in 1973 with a cast of mostly non-professional Black actors, a killer soul-funk soundtrack and incredible clothes from Watts’s own Mr. Sal’s Fashion stores. In the vein of SHAFT, the film stars Watts as an African American version of James Bond/Matt Helm, seducing beautiful nightclub singers and beating the crap out of the henchmen of an oil-obsessed Middle Eastern ruler. Produced on a shoestring budget and shot on location in many of the businesses Watts owned, the film is a priceless document of early Seventies Black culture, music and fashion in Oakland – and a powerful metaphor for Black empowerment, with Solomon turning the tables on every duplicitous Establishment character he encounters.