Black Belt Jones (1974)

PLOT: A righteous martial artist comes to the aid of his master when his karate school is being targeted for hostile takeover by a local crime boss beholden to the Italian Mafia. They probably want to turn it into a Whole Foods.

Director: Robert Clouse
Writers: Fred Weintraub, Alexandra Rose, Oscar Williams
Cast: Jim Kelly, Gloria Hendry, Alan Weeks, Malik Carter, Eric Laneuville, Scatman Crothers, Mel Novak, Andre Philippe

PLOT THICKENER

If you ever find yourself at some rich jerk’s house and he takes you into his climate-controlled wine closet and offers up a vintage 1974 merlot from Del Orso Vineyards, you would be wise to pay attention to the following notes. See that brick red color? The viscosity of the liquid as it coats the glass while you swirl it about? Maybe you taste the faint presence of tobacco, iron, or even meat? The reason for this is because this wine was fermented in a vat with a dead body in it. You are drinking dead people. Spit that wine the fuck outta here and welcome to the 1974 Jim Kelly classic, Black Belt Jones.

When Pop Byrd (Crothers) and his karate school come under attack from a neighborhood crime boss named Pinky (Carter), the sparks, fur, and polyester will surely fly. Pinky is under the thumb of Italian mafioso and wine magnate, Don Steffano (Philippe), and he has orders to secure the location of the school for future real estate development. If the combined efforts of the karate school’s teacher, Toppy (Weeks) and his understudy, Quincy (Laneuville), aren’t enough muscle to hold off the goon squad, where else can they turn?

Enter Black Belt Jones (Kelly), a martial arts expert, unabashed trampoline enthusiast, and righteous dude with the unwavering respect of his community. As a one-time student of Byrd and a school loyalist, he’s more than willing to lead the fight against Pinky’s hostile advances. In parallel, the local police force is trying to recruit Jones to infiltrate the Don’s vineyard gang, with everyone apparently unaware of the links between the mafia and Pinky. When Byrd’s long-lost daughter, Sydney (Hendry) unexpectedly arrives in town to defend the honor of her pop and his school, the battle lines are drawn. Can Jones and Sydney get along well enough to fend off the aggressors? Will the alliance of Pinky’s gang and the mafia -- including a handsome menace known only as Blue Eyes (Novak) -- prove too strong a force? And is this the film which shows the very first 360-degree roundhouse kick in cinema history, courtesy of Scatman Crothers?

This follows Jim Kelly's scene-stealing role as Williams in Enter the Dragon, released just a year beforehand, and it's really a showcase for Kelly as a leading man. The action is choreographed to his strengths: kicking ass and looking good while doing it. If there’s a problem with this one-note approach, it’s that the outcomes of the fight scenes become predictable. The stunt guys sell out really well to make Kelly’s character look like a total superhero, but Jones lacks a logical, physical equal in the story (other than his ally, Sydney). The salve for this effect is a lot of visual creativity in the presentation. One scene has Jones working with Toppy during a night-time raid of the dojo by Pinky’s gang to use the indoor lighting strategically as he repeatedly busts heads and disappears in the darkness, only to re-emerge in the light and do it all over again. Another sees him fighting off Pinky’s men inside of an abandoned train car, and in one confrontation after another, the bruised henchmen fly through the train car windows to the outside, to almost comical effect.

In the infamous climax, Jones battles the remnants of the various gangs at a truck wash lot in a sudsy sea of knee-high soap. He makes easy work of his enemies using a variety of moves, though none more flashy than a chain of butterfly kicks that takes out four consecutive unlucky henchmen. In modern terms, a lot of this is going to look silly because there’s plenty of dreaded “stunt guys standing around and waiting to get hit” on the screen. I’m not sure it’s fair to nitpick the fight choreography, though, since American filmmakers were still figuring out how to stage martial arts for film audiences. Regardless, the scenes are creative and humorous on the whole and you’re not watching this for the fight scenes alone.

What I will nitpick, however, is some dated and regrettable language that, while not unique to this particular film, is certainly endemic to exploitation cinema as a whole. Prior to a physical confrontation with some of Pinky’s gang members, Sydney drops a gay slur in the middle of some trash-talking dialogue that will land with an awkward thud with most modern viewers. Why was this level of homophobia ever a thing in this genre? Do we blame Clouse for including it? The screenwriters for hatching the line? I would hate to think that Hendry ad-libbed it. And by the by, I can’t justifiably knock the film for a throwaway line like this without acknowledging the casual misogyny of BBJ telling Sydney to “do those dishes or something” before she shoots all of them with a loaded revolver and quips, “they’re done.” The humor there is in her assertive push-back against his misguided misogyny. That’s the joke!

Despite not being a technical marvel of filmmaking, this is quite possibly the most unadulterated *fun* that an American martial arts film has delivered, and it’s a historically important film to boot. I won’t lecture readers on the cultural significance of Kelly as the first black martial arts superstar -- I wasn’t alive when this was released, and frankly, as just another privileged white dude blogging on the web about cult movies, I don’t wield that authority -- but Black Belt Jones helped to kick off an incredible run of films through the end of the 1970s that melded martial arts and blaxploitation film elements. This Reddit thread does a good job of unpacking the context for how this type of film became so popular, and this tribute written by Michael over at Kiai Kick provides a good perspective for why Jim Kelly was so important to black moviegoers and other people of color who loved martial arts and action film. Jim Kelly really was a trailblazer, and will be remembered as a legend.

VERDICT

For many, Black Belt Jones is one of the great American martial arts films of all time, and I count myself among those ranks. The action scenes are ton of fun, it features an incredibly charismatic lead coming into his own as an action star, and the relationship between the two main characters is enjoyable and engaging. Such cool, very recommend!

AVAILABILITY

Streaming on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, iTunes. DVD is widely available on Netflix or the 4 Film Favorites: Urban Action collection from Warner Bros.

5.5 / 7

The Dynamite Brothers (1974)

PLOT: For the first ten minutes, it's like that movie Fled where two dudes on the run are chained together. For the next seventy minutes, it's like that blaxploitation movie where all the white cops are racist and the heroes just can't catch a break. For the final ten minutes, it's like that martial arts movie where EVERYBODY FUCKING DIES.

Director: Al Adamson
Writers: John D'Amato, Marvin Lagunoff, Jim Rein
Cast: Alan Tang, Timothy Brown, Aldo Ray, James Hong, Don Oliver, Al Richardson, Carol Speed, Richard Lee-Sung



PLOT THICKENER:
This week, we have the distinct pleasure of being included in Lost Video Archive’s Week of Hong, a cooperative effort between several exceptional blogs to cover over a dozen films from the distinguished filmography of Hollywood veteran James Hong. We’re no stranger to the Hong around these parts, having previously covered his contributions to martial arts movies such as Talons of the Eagle and Operation Golden Phoenix. We can argue about the quality of those and other low-budget films in which Hong has made appearances, but one thing is undeniable: Hong’s efforts are a consistent and steadying presence in every film he makes.

Around the same time Hong was cutting his teeth as a supporting player in Roman Polanski’s sprawling 1974 noir Chinatown, he was also putting in a few honest hours’ work as a ruthless crime boss in Al Adamson’s chopsocky-tinged blaxploitation film The Dynamite Brothers. This type of juxtaposition is Exhibit D for why the 1970s was and continues to be the best decade in American film history.

Let's get this out of the way: this film basically sucks. The opening five minutes and the climax are the best stretches of the runtime and by no small coincidence, that's where James Hong gets the most play as the villainous crime boss, Tuen. Alan Tang plays the Hogan to his Andre as Larry Chin, a heroic transplant from Hong Kong searching for his brother. Chin is picked up by the police for illegally entrering into the country and gets lumped into a squad car with Stud Brown (Brown), a laid-back dude picked up for what we can only assume was a charge of breaking hearts. Or maybe public lewdness, because he can't seem to keep his shirt buttoned up. Jaywalking? Loitering? How the fuck should I know? Don't sweat the details (the writers didn't).

As heroes are want to do, the pair makes a quick getaway and flees to Los Angeles to chase a tip on the whereabouts of Larry's brother. Along the way, they encounter helpful motorists while hitch-hiking, a kindly crime boss named Smiling Man, and a lot of foxy women concealing unkempt pubic hair, in keeping with the "big" hair style of the era. Unfortunately, few of these interactions are of any consequence. You know where the story is going within the first ten minutes of the movie and it's really just a matter of how much fighting, fucking, and continuity errors Adamson can jam in between points A and B.

The director was going for an interesting cross-cultural dynamic between Chin and Brown, but there's no tension or disagreement whatsoever between them. Instead, they're utilized as a punching bag for a bunch of racist one-liners courtesy of drunken whiteboy thugs and a corrupt detective played by Aldo Ray. Some of this can be forgiven as an artifact of the genre, but if that's not offensive enough for you, the film also features a romantic subplot between Stud Brown and a mute girl who lacks the ability to express her thoughts or feelings. Ironically, she's basically the only female character who keeps her top on. Positive feminist icon?

It's not all bad though. The title sequence included an interesting visual mix of action shot silhouettes and psychedelic colors over an incredibly funky opening track by soul jazz organist Charles Earland. Tang and Brown are decent as the heroes, though neither has the acting chops to carry the film on their own for any considerable length of time. In a case like that, one might assume the director would lean on his best actor to buoy the story, but Hong is barely on-screen and probably not as devious as he should have been. When he's present, however, he's consistently solid, and gets some appropriately incredible outfits for his troubles. Plaid jackets, polyester suits, and incredible white turtlenecks are all on the table. This film might also have the best Hong-stache he's ever sported.

Adamson is quoted on his IMDb profile as having said that he was "a better action director than anything," which is rather curious since the majority of fight scenes here are tawdry, neutered affairs. The one shoot-out in the movie is very poorly lit, has no squibs, and consists of intercutting between close-ups of guys squinting defensively as their guns go off. However, the film earns a bit of goodwill back with a zany finale that sees insane stunt falls, a car driving off a cliff, and a grisly scalp mauling. That there are no visible crash pads whatsoever will either warm your cinematic heart or really piss you off to end.

VERDICT:
This was my first experience with an Al Adamson film, and though it pains me to say this, it probably won’t be my last. While the majority of this movie is forgettable and hackneyed by most critical measures, it’s not nearly as sloppy as expected and works fine as junk food cinema. (Admittedly, it helps that he directed two Jim Kelly films, an actor I've yet to cover). As is something of a welcomed pattern, James Hong acts circles around the rest of the cast and if only for short bursts, he elevates the film well above its source material. For Hong completists and Adamson acolytes only.

AVAILABILITY:
Netflix, Amazon, YouTube.

2.5 / 7

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