Michael Hammer is a fictional character created by the American author Mickey Spillane. Hammer debuted in the 1947 book I, the Jury. Hammer is a no-holds-barred private investigator who carries a Colt .45 M1911A1 in a shoulder holster under his left arm. His love for his secretary Velda is outweighed only by his willingness to kill a killer. Hammer's best friend is Pat Chambers, Captain of Homicide NYPD. Hammer was a World War II army veteran who spent two years fighting jungle warfare in the Pacific theatre against Japan.
William Smith was an American actor. In a Hollywood career spanning more than 75 years, he appeared in almost three hundred feature films and television productions in a wide variety of character roles, accumulating over 480 total credits, with his best known role being the menacing Anthony Falconetti in the 1970s television mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man. Smith is also known for films like Any Which Way You Can (1980), Conan The Barbarian (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), and Red Dawn (1984), as well as lead roles in several exploitation films during the 1970s.
Murder by Death is a 1976 American comedy mystery film directed by Robert Moore and written by Neil Simon. The film stars Eileen Brennan, Truman Capote, James Coco, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Elsa Lanchester, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Nancy Walker, and Estelle Winwood.
Frederick Robert Williamson, also known as The Hammer, is an American actor and former professional American football defensive back who played mainly in the American Football League during the 1960s. Williamson is perhaps best known for his film career, starring as Tommy Gibbs in the 1973 crime drama film Black Caesar and its sequel Hell Up in Harlem. Williamson also had other notable roles in other 1970s blaxploitation films such as Hammer (1972), That Man Bolt (1973) and Three the Hard Way (1974).
Thomas Nicol Williamson was a British actor, once described by playwright John Osborne as "the greatest actor since Marlon Brando". He was also described by Samuel Beckett as "touched by genius" and viewed by many critics as "the Hamlet of his generation" during the late 1960s.
The Black Bat was the name of two unrelated pulp heroes featured in different pulp magazine series in the 1930s, most well known because of their similarity to DC Comics hero, Batman.
Burton Hill "Burt" Mustin was an American character actor. Over the course of his career, he appeared in over 150 film and television productions. He also worked in radio and appeared in stage productions.
Robert Lee Minor or Bob Lee Minor is an American stunt performer, television and film actor, best known for doubling many African-American celebrities such as: Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Bernie Mac, Danny Glover, Carl Weathers, Roger E. Mosley and John Amos. Minor was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and made his first television appearance in 1973 on the television program, Search, then appeared in tons of shows such as: Barnaby Jones, McCloud, The Six Million Dollar Man, Eight is Enough, Magnum, P.I. and Starsky and Hutch among other popular television programs.
Eugene Oliver Edgar Stutenroth, best known as Gene Roth, was an American film actor and film manager.
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, then president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP branch. He so named it because he claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypical characters often involved in criminal activity. However, the genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the heroes and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks, villains, or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
Leo Fong was a Chinese-American actor, martial artist, boxer, and Methodist minister who had been making films, acting, and directing since the early 1970s.
Blind Rage is a 1978 blaxploitation martial arts film directed by Efren C. Piñon and starring Fred Williamson, Tony Ferrer, Leo Fong, and D'Urville Martin. Although he receives top billing, Fred Williamson's part in the film is only a cameo appearance, reprising his Jesse Crowder role from the 1976 films Death Journey and No Way Back. The plot is about five blind martial artists pulling off a bank robbery in the Philippines.
Robert Stack Pierce was a Hollywood actor who was previously a boxer and professional baseball player. His acting career began in the early 1970s with television roles in the series Arnie, Room 222, Mannix, Mission Impossible and later as Jake, the alien commander in the 1980s science fiction series V. His film roles include Night Call Nurses, Hammer, Cool Breeze, Low Blow and Weekend at Bernie's II.
No Way Back is a 1976 blaxploitation film written and directed by Fred Williamson, who also stars as Jesse Crowder, a private detective who once used to belong to a police force but that now finds himself taking odd jobs for a little extra money.
You Can't Get Away with Murder is a 1939 crime drama directed by Lewis Seiler, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gale Page, and featuring "Dead End Kid" leader Billy Halop. The film is from Bogart's period of being cast in B pictures by Warner Bros., before his breakthrough as a leading man in High Sierra two years later. The film is based on the play "Chalked Out" by Lewis E. Lawes.
The Last Fight is a 1983 American film directed by Fred Williamson.
Down 'n Dirty is an 2000 American action film directed by and starring Fred Williamson as Dakota Smith. It also stars Bubba Smith, Gary Busey, Tony Lo Bianco, Beverly Johnson, Randy J. Goodwin, David Carradine, and Charles Napier.
Efren C. Piñon is a film director and writer from the Philippines. The main body of his career began in the early 1970s and lasted until the late 1990s. He has worked with actors such as Fred Williamson, Tony Ferrer, Leo Fong and Vic Diaz. His directorial work includes Gangsters daw kami! in 1971, Ninja Assassins in 1976 Blind Rage in 1977, Shoot the Killer in 1981 and Bandido in 1997. A significant amount of his films are of the action-exploitation type.
Darnell Garcia is a former martial arts champion, author, actor and former DEA agent. At one stage in his martial arts career he was rated 7th in the United States. He has had roles in Enter the Dragon, Black Belt Jones, Blind Rage and Enforcer from Death Row. In the 1990s, Garcia became embroiled in a drug and corruption scandal.
The 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in Pennsylvania will be held on November 8, 2022, to elect representatives for the seventeen seats in Pennsylvania.
