Kick-ass stoicism 

What was Jim Brown thinking when he quit football for acting at the end of the 1965 season? 

He was never going to compete for the black leading man roles that went to Sidney Poitier. Nor was he going to sit still for the types of roles that characterized the career of another former pro football player, Woody Strode, playing African warriors or Pompey the handyman in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And Brown wasn’t about to work at honing his craft doing summer stock performances of The Glass Menagerie on Cape Cod. 

Riding the tailwinds of The Civil Rights Act, he barreled into Hollywood as one of The Dirty Dozen (1967) where he only needed to keep his head down while scenery-chewers like John Cassavetes and Telly Savalas did their thing. In Empire of the Sun (1968), he played a mercenary soldier, mostly Tonto to Rod Taylor’s Lone Ranger. Brown’s first leading role was in The Split (1968), a disappointing mess that failed even with a cast that included Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, Julie Harris and Diahann Carroll. 

It wasn’t until Hollywood got the idea of casting Brown with attractive white actresses, and in doing so tapping into white America’s fears of interracial sex and miscegenation, that Brown’s career really took off. 

There’s a strong undercurrent of sex in The Grasshopper (1970) with Jacqueline Bisset and El Condor (1970) with Marianna Hill. 100 Rifles (1969) received a major publicity push, including lots of hot stills of Brown and Raquel Welch, but the film didn’t stand up to the hype: it’s mostly average. Brown’s twelfth film, Slaughter (1972), a terrific tale of vengeance, fired up the taboo meters and delivered the goods thanks to his on-screen (and reportedly in real life) groping with Stella Stevens. 

As cynical and dark as this trend seems, it reached its inevitably violent peak in Fingers (1978) with Brown playing a scary pimp (whose name is Dreams; it might as well have been Super Spade) who brings a “romantic interlude” with two white women to a brutal end when they refuse to kiss each other. 

Brown’s acting was often described as “wooden,” although he became noticeably better with time. But what he was best at was displaying the same kick-ass stoicism he brandished as the greatest football player of his era: inflicting as much punishment as he received before walking back slowly to the huddle with unemotional indifference.