Jamaa Fanaka’s sympathetic look at a young woman who moves to Los Angeles from Mississippi in the wake of her mother’s death was released at the height of the Blaxploitation era as Black Sister’s Revenge. Mindful of his audience, Fanaka endows his heroine with formidable fighting skills. Nevertheless, with her plain looks and shy demeanor, Emma Mae is much more down to earth than the genre’s supervixens; similarly, the film’s clear-eyed sense of class and of sexual politics also sets it apart from others in the cycle. Although Fanaka draws on the Cinderella story, he is too much of a straight shooter to provide a fairy tale ending.