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Hammer Time with Fred Williamson

July 30, 2008

“Once you get past the given, you have to distinguish yourself from the other players—I was the first player to wear white shoes, and I was the first to speak my mind,” said Fred “The Hammer” Williamson in a recent interview concerning his professional football reputation as one of the toughest defensive players to ever play the game. (His karate-styled blows to the offense helped him coin his own nickname - “The Hammer”).

 

Williamson’s film career over the past four decades can be described in a similar fashion, as the Hammer appeared in a variety of projects, all of which helped him to distinguish himself from other jocks-turned-actors. After retiring from pro-football in 1967 following eight crushing seasons with both the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs, Williamson made the move into acting, appearing in such late-Sixties TV staples as Star Trek and Ironside. Not soon thereafter, he made the leap to feature films, popping up in such movies as

1970’s M*A*S*H and a series of Seventies exploitation flicks featuring black leading players—including 1972’s Hammer and 1973’s Black Caesar--which are now commonly referred to as “blaxploitation movies.”

 

“I never understood that word—blaxploitation. Who was it who was being exploited,” Williamson questioned. “The actors werent’ being exploited, the filmmakers weren’t being exploited and I wasn’t being exploited.:

 

“And I killed everybody in my movies—I didn’t just kill the white guy,” he added. “Whites, blacks, Chinese—everybody. I was an equal opportunity ass-kicker.”

 

And Williamson kicks (and shoots!) some serious ass in The Inglorious Bastards (Severin Films, available now), Italian genre journeyman Enzo Castellari’s 1978 shoot-em-up throwback to the great World War II “deadly mission” movies of the Sixties. The action-filled war film finds escaped convict Williamson taking part in a good number of battle and chase sequences, a requirement of the role that he met head-on.

 

“I’m an actor and when you’re an actor, there’s nothing impossible to do when you have to do it,” he said. I shot machine guns, and I threw grenades, and so on in a jungle setting. But I’m from the concrete jungle—Chicago—so it wasn’t a problem.”

 

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on July 30, 2008 | Comments (2)