1974's Finest Film Feature... TOUGH

Here's the 1974 film “Tough.”  I saw this one rainy afternoon in the early 1990s on television (possibly WAKC-TV in Akron) and was shocked by how awful it was. Being a kid at the time (who rarely ventured beyond mainstream film), I only saw poorly produced, low-budget films in school when teachers wanted to impart a "message." If you’ve seen the whole thing, you know that the ending is not pretty (and also laughably stupid).  It took me decades to track this down because Google kept leading me to “Semi-Tough”; no one seemed to believe me that there was actually a film with the one-word title, “Tough.”  (It's apparently also sometimes credited as "Johnny Tough").  It's apparently an homage to Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," but Gene Siskel gave it ZERO stars.  Lead actor Dion Gossett's only other acting credit is in an episode of "Good Times" (episode "Michael the Warlord," airing October 13, 1976). Sadly, he was killed by police in 2015. Renny Roker (who plays Phil) was a successful BMX promoter in the 1980s.