D2D #54: Black Belt Jones (1974, Robert Clouse)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #1.)
Black Belt Jones should not work — should be a fucking embarrassment, really. It has crass, market-driven commercialism written all on its face: It’s a quickie job, made expressly to capitalize on the huge popularity of Enter the Dragon among the African-American market by grafting a kung-fu flick onto the exploding blaxploitation temple. You can practically hear the cash registers ringing in the producers’ eyes. Despite its ignominious origins, though, Black Belt Jones is completely fucking awesome. The fights are a bit clumsy but earnest and exciting; Kelly maybe not be on the level of Bruce Lee, but he holds his own when it comes to kicking ass. More importantly, he has an undefinable but absolute and irresistible swagger about him. So many stars try to impose their idea of cool or strive for some ideal of cool, but Kelly simply IS cool. You know that “it” that producers sometimes talk about (or used to, at any rate)? Kelly has “it.” He has a natural magnetism that draws attention to him and makes you root for him. It could be the face, lean but open. It could be the easy, winning smile. It could be the ever-unmussable Afro. Whatever it is that sets him apart, Kelly uses major doses of it to set Black Belt Jones apart from the crowd, and damn if it doesn’t work. The film also benefits from not taking itself seriously at all (the opening of the film sets the tone, with two Mafia guys killing an informant in a wine cellar and then talking about marking down the resulting bottles that will be made from this juice). It may, at heart, be a cynical filmed deal, but it wants you to have a good time all the same.
Cultural notes of interest: The final, near-legendary battle royale in a malfunctioning car wash has an interesting racial subtext within it. Kelly fights among the bright whiteness of the suds, but despite the rising tide always manages to keep himself above waist level, thereby keeping his blackness black. Meanwhile, the tide of adversaries get covered in suds and come out looking like white guys no matter their original color. Also, the film’s aggressive swagger goes hand-in-hand with the guy-friendly macho street culture it depicts and is a part of, with an ass-whipping being a way to distinguish oneself as more “male” than (and thus superior to) your opponent, so it’s both unexpected and, in a strange way, totally appropriate that the only one who resorts to homophobic name-calling is Sydney, the ambisexually-monikered female lead whose karate skills are equal to the boys in the film. Her lack of a penis puts her at a presumed disadvantage, so by slinging lines like, “I’m gonna make you look like a sick faggot,” she both brings the male fighters down to her supposed level while disparaging/lessening them all the same. It’s both a move of parity and weakening on her part; simultaneously, it ungenders her, makes her “one of the boys,” so to speak, which leads into the late-film seduction sequence wherein Kelly prods, teases and chases her until she regains her femininity in high fashion.
By the way, did I mention that this film has more than one scene features girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines? ‘Cause it totally does.
