Starring: Jim Brown, Fred
Williamson, Jim Kelly, Sheila Frazier, Jay Robinson, Charles McGregor, Richard
Angarola
Director: Gordon Parks Jr.
Action Directors: Hal Needham, Alan Gibbs[1]
Jim Kelly saw his stock rise in the immediate aftermath of Enter the Dragon’s success. He was immediately reunited with director Robert Clouse and producer Fred Weintraub for the Blaxploitation action-comedy Black Belt Jones. Coming out on the heels of the successful Cleopatra Jones, that film helped integrate the burgeoning martial arts genre into the Blaxploitation genre. A few months later, Kelly found himself in two moderately-big productions: Three the Hard Way and Golden Needles. The latter has since drifted into obscurity, remembered by few fans of martial arts cinema. The former, however, is known as being the most action-packed film of the Blaxploitation genre. It is a lot of fun, as long as you don’t think about it too much.
We open with a black man escaping from a prison-like complex where something sinister is obviously afoot: one room he stumbles into is filled with the corpses of a dozen black men, all of whom are eerily staring out into nothing. He is shot in the attempt, but manages to find a young (white) couple who take him back to civilization and more specifically to Jimmy Lait (Jim Brown), a successful record producer. Jimmy takes the young man to a hospital and leaves his girlfriend, Wendy Kane (Superfly’s Sheila Frazer) to follow up on the man’s treatment. A pair of (white) assassins show up at the hospital to finish off the escapee and kidnap Wendy.
Jimmy Lait flies to Chicago to enlist the help of an old friend, Jagger Daniels (Fred Williamson of Black Ceasar and Black Cobra). Jagger is convinced something is down after an assassination attempt in broad daylight ends in a gunfight at an arcade. The two then go to New York to bring another friend, Mister Keyes (Enter the Dragon’s Jim Kelly), who is a martial arts expert with schools all over the East Coast. Long story short: the assassins are working for a Mr. Feather (Jay Robinson, who played Caligula in The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiadors). Feather wants to purge the black race from North America. To that end, he has sponsored the work of a scientist (Jeremiah Johnson’s Richard Angarola) to develop a poison that kills only black people. Once introduced to the water supply, millions will inexplicably keel over dead and white supremacy will be established.
Much
like Shaft in Africa, Three the Hard Way is very much a
Blaxploitation take on the James Bond formula. In this case, the evil plot to poison
the nation’s black people is similar to the sterility drug in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It was
riffed years later in Black Dynamite,
in which the villain Dr. Wu creates a penis-shrinking malt liquor to use
against black males. In terms of story structure, the movie feels a lot like Tomorrow Never Dies, the most
action-packed 007 film, in which James Bond travels to a different location and
almost immediately a new fist fight or large-scale gunfight breaks out. The
protagonist arrives in Chicago? Gunfight at the arcade. The film switches to
New York? Big karate fight with corrupt cops? Follow that with kung fu, car
stunts and gunplay in Washington D.C., Detroit and Los Angeles, respectively.
The action is a blast to watch and is appropriately varied. There are a handful of gunfights set in places like dams, mansions, arcades and car washes. Upwards to 60 or 70 white supremacists do the dance of death over the course of the film. There are car stunts galore, and the film is set in the world where cars are made of explodium and thus detonate into balls of flames at the slightest provocation.
Jim Kelly provides this film with the martial arts mayhem. His best scene is his introduction, where he beats up a bunch of policemen trying to plant drugs on him. He has another big fight at the Washington D.C. water treatment plant, and gets in some chops in a few other shorter dust-ups, too. His fighting is about on the level of Enter the Dragon, although his kicks occasionally are a bit too low. Different from what is recommended by actual martial artists in real life, Kelly often freezes in fighting formation after striking someone, mainly for visual effect. Kelly’s original training was in kempo, known for its fast, intricate handwork. Kelly throws in some fast hands in his fighting, although not on the level that later actor Jeff Speakman would do later on.
You can’t have Blaxploitation without exploitation, and this film has one of the most bizarre excuses for T&A I’ve seen in a film. When our heroes capture one of the would-be killers, Fred Williamson hires a trio of (possibly lesbian) dominatrixes to torture the information out of the man. The three women, including Irene Tsu of Women of a Prehistoric Planet, remove their tops and expose their breasts as part of the torture routine. Wait…what!?? That sequence is just one more example of the loopiness that makes this film so fun to watch.[1] - Both men were uncredited. It is
most likely that both men coordinated all of the car chases and car-based
stuntwork. It is likely that Jim Kelly choreographed his own fights.
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