Black Belt Jones: The Kung-Fu Blaxploitation Crowd-Pleaser

The last ten minutes of Black Belt Jones (1974) take place in a car wash that has been deliberately flooded with soap suds until the floor is a white slick and every combatant is skidding, and the film treats this as a straightforward action climax rather than as the delirious thing it plainly is. That confidence — the absolute refusal to wink — is why the picture still plays, and why I keep putting it on for people who claim they do not like martial-arts films.

I found it the way most of my generation did, backwards: through Enter the Dragon first, on a rental tape, aged about thirteen, and then years later through the pull of the man in the afro who steals every scene he is in and then leaves the film far too early. Jim Kelly got a Warner Bros. star vehicle out of that performance within a year. This is it.

The team that made it

The credits are essentially the Enter the Dragon unit reassembled. Robert Clouse directs, having directed Enter the Dragon in 1973. Fred Weintraub and Paul Heller produce, having produced it. Warner Bros. distributes, having distributed it. The studio had a martial-arts hit and a supporting player who tested through the roof with American audiences, and it did the obvious commercially rational thing at a speed that would be impossible now.

Kelly’s credentials were real, which the camera can tell. He was a genuine tournament competitor — a winner at the Long Beach International Karate Championships in 1971, the same tournament circuit that made Chuck Norris — and he came to the films from the dojo rather than from stunt work. That distinction shows in how Clouse shoots him. Sequences run in wide masters with long takes because they can. Kelly’s kicks land where the camera says they land. There is very little of the cheat-cut grammar that padded out contemporaneous American action, and the picture is much faster to watch as a result. The lineage runs straight from the Hong Kong grammar of the previous year, filtered through an American production schedule.

Gloria Hendry plays Sydney, and she is the film’s other engine. Hendry had come from Live and Let Die the year before, and she is given something the cycle almost never gave its women: a fight style that is legibly different from the hero’s — scrappier, dirtier, funnier — plus an equal share of the plot. Scatman Crothers, four years from The Shining, plays Pop Byrd, who runs the dojo that everything else in the film revolves around. Luchi De Jesus wrote the score, and it is a good one, all wah-wah and horn stabs, pushing the picture along.

Why the car wash works

Action climaxes are usually about escalation: bigger space, more opponents, higher stakes. The car-wash finale works on a different principle, and it is worth taking apart because it is a genuinely smart piece of design that people remember as a joke.

The suds change the physics. Once the floor is slick, everybody in the fight has the same problem, so the choreography stops being about power and starts being about balance and timing. Kelly’s advantage over a crowd of thugs becomes his footing. He stays up; they go down, repeatedly, before he has touched most of them. That turns every exchange into a comedy of falling men, which is why the sequence is funny, and it gives Clouse a visual field of pure white to shoot dark silhouettes against, which is why it is beautiful. Foam obscures and reveals on its own schedule; bodies emerge from it and vanish back into it; the space reads instantly even when you cannot see the floor.

It is also, practically, a way to make a limited stunt budget look enormous. You cannot see how few extras there are. The set dressing is free — the suds do the work of an art department. Clouse and his team found a location that solves the problem of staging a large brawl on a Warner second-tier budget, and made the solution look like an idea. That is craft.

One more thing the sequence gets right: it keeps the geography. Clouse establishes the car wash before the fight — the tunnel, the rollers, the office, the exits — so that when the brawl breaks out you always know where everyone is relative to everyone else. That sounds elementary. It is also the single thing most modern action cinema has abandoned, and it is why a 1974 second-tier Warner picture is more legible than films made fifty years later with a hundred times the money. Kelly’s fights are readable because Clouse decided in advance where you would be standing.

The ancestor

The obvious lineage is the Hong Kong import boom and the Shaw Brothers pictures that filled American grindhouses in the early seventies alongside the domestic product — the double bills that 42nd Street ran until it stopped existing. Black Belt Jones is a direct descendant of that programming reality: the two audiences were sitting in the same room, so somebody was always going to make the film that served both.

The real ancestor, though, is older and whiter, and it is the Warner Bros. musical. The way this film treats its fights — as set pieces staged in defined spaces, each with its own gimmick, each essentially a number — is Busby Berkeley logic applied to combat. The car wash is a water ballet. The dojo sequence is a rehearsal number. The plot exists to move from one venue to the next, exactly as the plot of a 1930s backstage picture exists to get you to the next arrangement of bodies in space. Once you see it that way, the film’s cheerfulness stops being a puzzle.

Within the cycle, its closest sibling is TNT Jackson, which took the same fusion to the Philippines on a fraction of the money, and Dolemite, which took it somewhere else entirely. Neither has Kelly. Very little does.

The case against

The plot is a mess and the film does not care. Something about the mob wanting the land the dojo sits on, something about a federal agency, a syndicate boss, a redevelopment scheme; the picture picks it up and drops it as convenient, and there is a stretch in the middle where it stalls badly waiting for the next fight to be due. Kelly is a superb physical performer and a limited actor, and the film sometimes asks him for reaction beats he cannot supply. The comedy is broad, occasionally clumsy, and one or two of the gags have aged into embarrassment.

There is also the honest structural complaint. This is the least angry film of the cycle, and that has a cost. Willie Dynamite has an argument. Across 110th Street has a tragedy. Black Belt Jones has a car wash. When the genre is discussed as a body of political cinema, this one gets left out for a reason — its stakes are a community building and its politics extend about as far as “the mob should not have it”. That is a real limitation and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

And the film’s treatment of Sydney’s arrival is a small crime. Hendry is set up as a rival, given a superb entrance, matched against Kelly, and then progressively folded into a supporting role as the plot tightens. The picture that gives her the second half it promises in the first is a better picture than this one.

The verdict

Take it as what it is: the most purely pleasurable eighty-seven minutes in the whole cycle, built by professionals who knew exactly which shot they were making. It has a star with real ability, a co-star who is given something to do, a director with an unfashionable faith in the wide shot, and a finale that solves a budget problem so elegantly it became the only thing anyone remembers. There are films in this genre with more to say. There is none I have put in front of more sceptical friends with a higher hit rate.

Clouse and Kelly reunited for further pictures, none of which recaptures this. The tape circulated for decades and the film has since found its way onto the boutique labels, where the suds finally look white instead of grey. Watch it on a Friday. Watch it with people. If it takes, the blaxploitation canon will tell you where to go next.

Spoilers below

Pop Byrd dies. The syndicate wants the dojo’s land for a redevelopment scheme, leans on him through a Black gangster fronting for white money, and kills him early enough that the rest of the film is a revenge picture wearing a comedy’s clothes.

What follows is a heist, which people forget: Jones and Sydney steal the mob’s money and use it as leverage, and the film’s second half is essentially an extortion plot in which the good guys hold the cash. The car-wash brawl is the exchange going wrong.

The final beat is the one that fixes the film’s tone in place. After the fight — after the suds, the falling, the last of the syndicate men going down in the foam — the picture ends on a note of straightforward good humour, the survivors intact, the dojo saved, the money resolved. No elegy for Pop. No lingering shot of the cost. The film has already banked the grief and spent it on the plot, and it walks off whistling.

That is either the film’s shallowness or its genius, and after five or six viewings I have landed on the second. Black Belt Jones knows precisely what it is selling and it delivers it without a wasted frame, in an era when the American action picture was mostly still working out how to point a camera at a kick. It earns its cheerfulness the hard way — by being extremely good at the only thing it set out to do.