The Monkey Hustle is a 1976 blaxploitation

Blaxploitation

Blaxploitation or blacksploitation is a film genre which emerged in the United States circa 1970. It is considered an ethnic sub-genre of the general category of exploitation films. Blaxploitation films were originally made specifically for an urban black audience, although the genre's audience...

 film written by Odie Hawkins and Charles Eric Johnson. It stars Yaphet Kotto

Yaphet Kotto

Yaphet Frederick Kotto is an African-American actor, known for numerous film roles , and his starring role in the NBC television series Homicide: Life on the Street .-Early life:Kotto was born in New York City, the son of Gladys Marie, a...

 as Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

 con-man and "hustler" Big Daddy Foxx and Kirk Calloway as his teenage apprentice. Co-stars include Thomas Carter

Thomas Carter (film director)

Thomas Carter is an American film and television director known for Swing Kids, Save the Last Dance with Julia Stiles, and Coach Carter with Samuel L...

, Donn C. Harper, Rudy Ray Moore

Rudy Ray Moore

Rudy Ray Moore was an American comedian, musician, singer, film actor, and film producer. He was perhaps best known as Dolemite , the uniquely articulate pimp from the 1975 film Dolemite, and its sequel, The Human Tornado...

, and Rosalind Cash

Rosalind Cash

Rosalind Cash was an American singer and actress, whose best known film role was as Charlton Heston's character's love interest Lisa, in the 1971 science fiction cult classic, The Omega Man...

.

Plot synopsis

The film includes a loose plot centered around the ensemble cast of characters in which Foxx mentors "Baby D" (Calloway), "Player" (Carter), and "Tiny" (Harper) in the ways of small-time hustling. An example of a hustle is the boys apparently stealing some televisions from a truck for Foxx in sight of a local shop owner. The boys then steal the televisions from Foxx's truck and stash them in some trash. The shop owner offers the boys $55 cash for the televisions which they accept. However, when the shop owner returns with his dolly, he finds that the boys have run off with the cash as well as the televisions (which were actually empty boxes).

The over-arching plotline is to prevent the construction of an expressway

Controlled-access highway

A controlled-access highway is a highway designed exclusively for high-speed vehicular traffic, with all traffic flow and ingress/egress regulated...

through the neighborhood in which all the characters reside. Using facilities that are not adequately described in the film, Foxx and local numbers man "Glitterin' Goldie" (Moore) use potentially corrupt connections within the city government to prevent the construction.