Hit Man (1972) [Warner Archive Blu-ray review]

George Armitage’s Hit Man occupies a strange, fascinating crossroads in 1970s American cinema. On paper it’s a blaxploitation outing—Bernie Casey as a stone-cold enforcer carving a path through Oakland and Los Angeles vice. Under the hood, though, it’s an Americanized riff on Ted Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home (best known as Get Carter) filtered through noir fatalism, West Coast social decay, and a cool-jazz score. For fifty years the film has lurked in battered TV masters and bootleg DVDs that flattened Andrew Davis’s gritty camerawork into muddy smears.

The Warner Archive Collection has now pulled the original camera negative, scanned it in 2K, and pressed a Blu-ray that finally lets Hit Man breathe. If you like your crime pictures raw, talky, and morally crooked—this disc is the ticket.

Bernie Casey is Hit Man

Tyrone Tackett (Bernie Casey) is an L.A. heavy who returns to Oakland after his brother’s “accidental” death. The more he digs, the uglier it gets: porn kingpins, bent businessmen, and a high-end prostitution ring funneling money to powerful men. Tackett moves methodically—asking questions, breaking jaws, peeling layer after layer until the rot is exposed.

Casey plays against the flamboyant heroics of Shaft or Super Fly. Tackett is educated, measured, and dangerous only when logic demands. Casey’s physical presence—he was an NFL wide receiver—is undeniable, but it’s his quiet intellect that dominates scenes. A single raised eyebrow tells you he’s added two and two and decided somebody’s got to die.

Yeah, it really is a Blaxploitation version of Get Carter

Ted Lewis’s 1970 novel Jack’s Return Home told the story of a London mob enforcer who travels to his grim Northern hometown to investigate his brother’s death and dismantle the pornography racket behind it. Mike Hodges and Michael Caine turned that novel into Get Carter (1971), a cult classic of British cinema.

MGM executives, sniffing an exploitation opportunity, tapped 29-year-old George Armitage—fresh off Roger Corman’s factory line—to transplant the tale to an American Black milieu. Armitage took Lewis’s skeleton plot and injected West Coast malaise, writing a script steeped in Vietnam fatigue, COINTELPRO paranoia, and the economic apartheid dividing Black residents from white powerbrokers.

I love Hit Man, but that Car Wash attack stuck with me

At the 51-minute mark, Tackett confronts two enforcers inside an automated car wash. High-pressure sprayers hiss; red and blue lights strobe through soapy drips. Davis used handheld 16 mm cameras mounted in waterproof housings, later blown up to 35 mm. The restoration now makes visible micro-scratches on the car’s paint and individual soap bubbles—immersive sensory detail that heightens the violence when Tackett uses a water wand like a truncheon.

Audio cleanup uncovers layered Foley work: machinery drones, sloshing puddles, shattering glass—all too subtle to register on monaural TV broadcasts. The DTS-HD track spreads these elements with surgical precision; rear channels fill with claustrophobic echoes while Barnum’s horn riff spikes the adrenaline.

How about that Blu-ray A/V Quality?

Since we’re getting more feedback from Home Theater Enthusiasts demanding certain metrics, we’ll present them here. Not sure how long it will last, but we’re trying. The movie’s theatrical trailer is the sole special feature. So, there’s that.

Video Metrics

• Scan: 2K, supervised by Warner’s in-house archivists
• Bitrate: Averages 34 Mbps, peaks at 38 Mbps during grain-heavy night exteriors
• Compression: No macroblocking; grain resolves without clumping

Audio Metrics

• Primary: DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono @ 1.6 Mbps
• Range: 28 Hz low-frequency roar on gunshots; crisp highs on cymbal taps
• Alternates: None. English SDH subtitles included.

Some final thoughts

Warner Archive’s Hit Man Blu-ray isn’t just a format upgrade; it’s an act of cinematic rescue. The disc restores visual nuance, clarifies thematic subtlety, and contextualizes a film that slipped through the cracks of both mainstream and cult appreciation.

In Tyrone Tackett’s world, justice costs blood and soul. Watching him navigate corrupt corridors now, in high-definition clarity, underscores why certain 1970s thrillers feel eerily present: the systems he confronts still grind on, and the questions he faces—How much violence is righteous? When does revenge curdle into complicity?—remain unresolved.

If you collect physical media, this release earns precious shelf real estate. If you teach film studies, it provides a case study in adaptation, genre hybridization, and race-aware storytelling. And if you simply love a cool customer who can quote Shakespeare before pistol-whipping a pimp—well, Tyrone Tackett is waiting.

Hit Man is now available on Warner Archive Blu-ray from MovieZyng