Bernie Casey strides purposefully through Hit Man, his flamboyant hat tilted at a rakish angle over a graying Afro, his ex-professional-football player frame squeezed into a series of tight trousers. If he emerges as Hit Man’s hero, it’s only because his brutally efficient enforcer qualifies as marginally less evil than the human parasites around him. Miami Blues and Grosse Pointe Blank director George Armitage directed this 1972 blaxploitation adaptation of Jack’s Return Home, the Ted Lewis novel that previously inspired the seminal British gangster film Get Carter. He strands Casey’s grittily charismatic protagonist in some of the seamiest corners of a Los Angeles rotting from the inside out, then watches in admiration as Casey leaves behind a trail of bullet-riddled corpses and sexually satisfied women. In one particularly impressive display of virility, Casey simultaneously seduces women in different area codes—one in person, the other over the phone.
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