Blaxploitation Education: Black Belt Jones

Blaxploitation gets its first real martial arts superstar.

Black Belt Jones
Written by Oscar Williams
Directed by Robert Clouse
1974

With the rising popularity of martial arts in the 1970s, it was only a matter of time before Blaxploitation movies started to highlight this type of hand-to-hand fighting. That Man Bolt was an enjoyable first attempt at that sort of thing, but while Fred Williamson was a fine action star and athlete, he didn’t have the skills or training to really sell the martial arts action. Fortunately, another charismatic star was waiting in the wings: Jim Kelly, a real-life karate champion who had a supporting role in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon.

Black Belt Jones, which was directed by Enter the Dragon’s Robert Clouse, is Kelly’s first starring role, and he makes the most of it, taking every possible chance to beat up thugs in a pretty convincing manner while occasionally uttering Bruce Lee-style yips and “hoo-ee!” screams. He comes up with plenty of exciting moves, and the movie helps him out by adding sound effects that make every single punch, kick, elbow, or knee sound like it’s hitting with the force of a gunshot. It’s all pretty over the top and often silly, but Kelly does a great job of selling it through his athleticism and physique, which features what had to be the most chiseled abs of the 1970s.

Kelly’s character is actually named Black Belt Jones, with most other characters referring to him as “Black Belt” or, if they’re especially familiar, simply “Belt.” He seems to be some sort of police consultant, with an early scene seeing him serve as a bodyguard who beats up some assassins who are gunning for a group of Latin American ambassadors who had appeared in Los Angeles for a TV interview (amusingly, after leaving the assassins in a heap on the ground, he just gets in his car and drives away, since his work is done). His main law enforcement contact then offers him payment of $100,000 if he will sneak into a winery that serves as a mafia stronghold and retrieve some incriminating photos, but he declines, since he knows that it would almost certainly be a suicide mission. (In one of the movie’s only attempts at social commentary, he suggests that the cops should pretend that the winery is the ghetto and go in guns blazing, but the officer declines, since the mafia is connected to some local politicians, so I guess they need some plausible deniability.)

However, he’ll soon get pulled into mafia-related matters when they decide to target the school where he received his training. In an early example of the “save the community center” plot, the area where the school is located is being targeted for redevelopment by the city, so the mafia is trying to buy up all the land in order to sell it to the city at a huge profit. Thus, they decide to get a local pool hall owner and drug dealer named Pinky (Malik Carter) to lean on the owner of the school and get him to sell.

Hilariously, Pop, the guy who owns and runs the school, is played by Scatman Crothers, who is the absolute last person who could convincingly play a karate master. He barely even tries to seem like a martial artist, although he does throw a couple of unconvincing punches in one fight scene. Instead, he seems to be a source of embarrassment to the second-in-command at the school, since he focuses more on drinking, gambling, and messing around with women than on training students. Also, he spends the few scenes in which he appears in the movie wearing a ridiculous toupee.

While Pinky and his men fail in their first attempt to lean on Pop, with the school’s students beating up him and his thugs and sending them packing, he decides to take things directly to Pop, confronting him at a card game. While Pinky has an IOU showing that Pop owes him money, he has altered it from $1,000 to $10,000, but he’ll be happy to forgive the debt if Pop just turns ownership of the school over to him. When Pop refuses, one of Pinky’s thugs tries to convince him by punching him a few times, but apparently this martial artist is so frail that the slightest amount of physical violence is enough to kill him.

Black Belt Jones and the rest of the students mourn Pop at his funeral by doing some martial arts moves in time with a church choir’s singing, and then another player shows up to try to sort things out: Pop’s daughter Sydney (Gloria Hendry, from Hell Up in Harlem, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!, and more), who has inherited the school. She agrees to work with Black Belt to investigate the situation, and he has one of his students drive her to her hotel. But on the way, she convinces him to stop by Pinky’s pool hall so she can look for some answers about why her father was killed. The henchmen hanging out there try to intimidate her, but she reveals that her father trained her as well, and after using a slur for homosexuals that was unfortunately common in the 70s, she beats them all up.

This prompts Pinky, now accompanied by some “treacherous n****s” from out of town, to visit the school again. He’s altered the IOU from Pops again, now claiming that the debt owed is $41,000, and along with $124,000 in damages and $84,000 in medical bills caused by Sydney, the total owed is now $250,000 (which happens to be the amount he owes to the mafia). And his new henchmen are tougher than the previous ones, so they defeat the students pretty easily. So now it’s up to Jones and Sydney to figure out what to do.

Their answer is to carry out the mission that his law enforcement buddy had been trying to get him to do, figuring that they can steal the mafia’s money and give it to Pinky, getting him on the mafia’s bad side when they realize that it’s their own money that was stolen from them. The raid is accomplished with the help of some gymnasts who usually spend time jumping on a trampoline on the beach outside Jones’ house, although most everyone else involved in the mission seems fairly unnecessary, since he just beats up all of the guards anyway.

It probably wasn’t necessary to go into so much detail about the plot, but it’s worth doing to highlight how ridiculous it all is. That’s by design though; the movie has a purposefully comedic tone, with Jim Kelly making everyone who stands up against him look like fools. There are lots of wacky moments and goofy sound effects, making it more of a slapstick comedy than a hard-hitting action movie. Aside from Pops’ death, there’s little sense of danger here, and while the bad guys occasionally pull out guns, they usually get disarmed pretty quickly as Jones and his pals beat the shit out of them. Fortunately, this doesn’t get monotonous; the movie keeps coming up with new, enjoyable ways for thugs to get their asses handed to them, such as a scene in which a group of guys pursue Jones through a train car, and he sends them crashing out the car’s windows one by one.

To finish things off in gloriously silly fashion, the final fight of the movie takes place after a car chase in which the bad guys pursue Jones and Sydney through a car wash, which gets damaged and starts pouring out soap suds. As the suds pile up, the bad guys look more and more ridiculous, but Jim Kelly stands strong, throwing lots of slow-motion punches and kicks that send the thugs and suds flying. It’s pretty hilarious stuff, but Kelly somehow still comes off as a badass rather than looking goofy.

I can’t claim that this is great cinema or anything, even within the Blaxploitation canon, since it’s so wacky and lighthearted that it doesn’t carry any weight. But it’s still a lot of fun, providing an excellent showcase for Kelly’s martial arts talents while still letting him show off a goofy side, such as when he does some mock karate moves before pushing an elevator button. The score is solid, a good example of the funky beats and horns that set the mood for so many of these movies. It’s a fun time all around, with most everyone in the cast doing everything they can to add humor and keep things moving quickly. Even if it’s slight, it’s solid enough action-wise to make Kelly one of the leading Blaxploitation stars, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, no matter how many soap suds get sent up people’s noses.

Blaxploitation Education index:

UpTight
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Watermelon Man
The Big Doll House
Shaft
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Super Fly
Buck and the Preacher
Blacula
Cool Breeze
Melinda
Slaughter
Hammer
Trouble Man
Hit Man
Black Gunn
Bone
Top of the Heap
Across 110th Street
The Legend of N***** Charley
Don’t Play Us Cheap
Shaft’s Big Score!
Non-Blaxploitation: Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues
Trick Baby
The Harder They Come
Black Mama, White Mama
Black Caesar
The Mack
Book of Numbers
Charley One-Eye
Ganja & Hess
Savage!
Coffy
Shaft in Africa
Super Fly T.N.T.
Scream Blacula Scream
Cleopatra Jones
Terminal Island
Gordon’s War
Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off!
Detroit 9000
Hit!
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The Slams
Five on the Black Hand Side
The Black 6
Hell Up in Harlem
I Escaped From Devil’s Island
Blackenstein
The Bad Bunch
That Man Bolt
Willie Dynamite
The Arena