Good Guys Wear Black (1978)

Good Guys Wear Black (1978)

 

Starring: Chuck Norris, Anne Archer, James Franciscus, Lloyd Haynes, Dana Andrews, Jim Backus, Lawrence P. Casey, Anthony Mannino, Soon-Tek Oh, Joe Bennett
Director: Ted Post
Action Director: Chuck Norris, Aaron Norris, Hubie Kerns Jr.

 

Breaker! Breaker! was Chuck Norris’s first lead role, putting him in the role of a high-kicking hero in a blue-collar job. He was the working man’s hero. The film was successful, making 12 million dollars (51 million dollars today when adjusted for inflation) on a $250,000 budget. His next film boasted a larger budget—one million dollars—and made 18 million dollars (about 77 million dollars in 2021) in its box-office run. However, instead of sticking to the hicksploitation approach of the previous movie, Good Guys Wear Black is a post-Watergate conspiracy thriller with just a smattering of martial arts.

We open in Paris in 1973. The United States is negotiating with Vietnam for the release of its POWs and MIAs in exchange for the withdrawal of its troops. Negotiations are being handled on the US end by a young, ambitious senator, Conrad Morgan (James Franciscus, of Cat O’ Nine Tails and Valley of Gwangi). After the first day of talks, Morgan is approached by Murray Saunders (Lloyd Haynes, of Ice Station Zebra), a higher-up at the CIA. Saunders asks him how many CIA operatives are still being held prisoner in Vietnam, to which Morgan responds about 150, all of whom are likely to be executed after talks are concluded. Morgan gives Saunders 48 hours to get a team into Vietnam and get the operatives out. They agree that they will send in the Black Tiger team.

The Black Tigers are led by Major John T. Booker, played by Norris himself. The rescue mission is a bust: there are no operatives being held there: only Viet Cong soldiers. Several of Booker’s men are killed in the ambush and Booker himself is injured as the survivors escape into the jungle. When they reach the extraction point, they discover to their horror that the helicopter is no longer waiting for them.

 

“Everything went wrong by the numbers. And that takes planning.”

 

Five years later, Booker is back in the United States teaching political science at UCLA. He’s also a test driver in his free time. One day, his class is visited by a young woman named Margaret (Anne Archer of Narrow Margin) who claims to be a reporter. Despite the top-secret nature of Booker’s final mission, Margaret knows quite a lot about that particular SNAFU. At the same time, CIA chief Saunders discovers that two members of Booker’s team—survivors from the failed rescue mission—have died under mysterious circumstances. When he pulls up their files, he discovers that all members of the team have been declared “double agents” for their participation in a non-existent mission in Yemen. In other words, ol’ Uncle Sam has effectively put a hit out on the remaining Black Tigers.

Good Guys Wear Black is a surprisingly cynical political thriller, considering the sort of Right Wing action films that Chuck Norris would make the following decade. The story revolves around the aftermath of the Vietnam War—which would hover over Hollywood for more than a decade—but more telling is the general distrust of the American government that followed in the wake of Watergate. We more or less know who the villain is from the outset, even though the motives are murky until the final reel. There’s also the question of who Margaret is and where her allegiances lie, which are also steeped in the aftermath of Watergate. In essence, Good Guys Wear Black is about how politicians are both willing and able to screw over the most loyal citizens under the pretext of the greater good, but mainly in order to further their own careers.

The movie has four credited action directors. Chuck Norris and his brother, Aaron, handled the fights while seasoned stuntman Hubie Kerns Jr. (The Transformers films) coordinated the other stunts and Don Pike (who later did second unit directing on the Norris film Code of Silence) set up the car stunts. That said, don’t let that fool you into thinking this is an action fest. There is actually not much action in the movie. The movie starts off with a bang with the nighttime raid on the Viet Cong POW camp. Norris throws a few kicks in this scene, but they’re obscured by bad lighting and camerawork. A fight with an assassin at the airport fares a little better, although the choreography is sloppy and the camerawork continues to obscure the action. That scene does end with the classic image of Chuck Norris performing a jump kick through the windshield of the escaping car. The best fight comes at the end, when Norris fights off a quartet of CIA agents, including famous fight choreographer Pat E. Johnson. Norris’s kicks get a better showcase in this sequence: they are crisper and the camerawork captures them better than in the previous sequences.

While the supporting actors are all solid, Chuck Norris is still trying to discover what exactly his acting range is here. He is not bad per se, but he’s not completely convincing as a cynical former CIA operative. There is one good (albeit short) fight and a couple of good stunts. The story is good, although the pacing is let down by a lackluster score that fails to underscore the urgency of the plot. Good Guys Wear Black is an interesting curio: a fascinating time capsule of the sort of cynicism that plagued the country in the second half of the 70s. But it is in no way an essential martial arts film, or an essential Chuck Norris for that matter.