Cleopatra Jones: The Glamour-Action Blaxploitation Heroine

Coffy came out in May 1973 and made a great deal of money for American International Pictures, a studio that operated out of what was essentially a shed. Warner Bros noticed. By July, Warners had Cleopatra Jones in cinemas, and the difference between the two films is the difference between an outfit that knows exactly what it is and a major studio doing an impression of one.

That sounds like a dismissal. It isn’t, quite. Cleopatra Jones is a genuinely strange object — a blaxploitation picture with a studio gloss, a heroine who works for the federal government, a villain played by a two-time Academy Award winner, and clothes that cost more than some of the films it was competing with. It fails at several things it attempts. What it accidentally invents is worth the ticket.

The model who became a special agent

Tamara Dobson was a Baltimore-born fashion model who had worked for the major magazines and stood six foot two before heels. She had a cosmetics-chemistry degree from Maryland Institute College of Art. She had done a little screen work. Warners looked at her and understood that the most valuable thing on the lot was a woman who could wear a full-length coat and make an audience gasp.

The film builds everything around that. Cleopatra Jones is a US government special agent working narcotics, introduced burning an opium field abroad and then flying home to Los Angeles to protect a community drug-rehabilitation centre run by her partner Reuben, played by Bernie Casey. Her antagonist is Mommy, a drug queenpin played by Shelley Winters in a red wig and an escalating register of hysteria. Antonio Fargas plays Doodlebug, the small-time operator who wants to move up and gets used. Jack Starrett directs; the script is credited to Max Julien — the star of The Mack — and Sheldon Keller.

The premise does something no other film in the cycle attempted. Cleopatra Jones has a badge, a government salary and institutional backing. Coffy is a nurse who arms herself because the system has failed her sister. Cleo is the system, and the film’s politics are correspondingly confused: a federal agent as the protector of Black Los Angeles, in 1973, two years after COINTELPRO’s exposure. The film never notices the problem. That obliviousness is part of what makes it a Warners picture rather than an AIP one.

Why the clothes are the direction

I want to defend the wardrobe as a formal strategy, because it is the film’s actual thesis and it gets treated as camp trivia. Dobson’s costumes are enormous — coats with fur collars that fill a doorway, hats with brims that redraw the frame, silhouettes that dominate any composition she is placed in. Starrett shoots her from low angles, in wide lenses, in doorways and against sky, and the result is that Cleopatra Jones occupies more physical space than anybody else in the movie.

That is a real solution to a real problem. Dobson was a model rather than a trained action performer, and the fight choreography knows it — her physical work is stylised, posed, closer to a photo shoot than to the grubby brawling Pam Grier does in Jack Hill’s films. Instead of hiding the limitation, Starrett converts it into iconography. She wins rooms by entering them. The camera treats her as an architectural event.

The forgotten ancestor here comes from outside the action shelf altogether: the studio-era star vehicle, the Dietrich or Garbo picture where the plot exists to deliver the entrance and the costume is the special effect. Starrett is making a 1930s glamour vehicle with a car chase in it. Once you see the film that way, its odd rhythms — long stretches of nothing, then a set-piece built entirely around a silhouette — make complete sense.

Starrett himself is an interesting hand. He came up as an actor, directed Race with the Devil two years later, and had a real feeling for the American landscape and for vehicles moving through it. The film’s best-staged sequence is a car chase, and it is well made because Starrett cared about cars considerably more than he cared about drug policy.

Shelley Winters, and the problem underneath

Winters plays Mommy as a shrieking grotesque, and she is having a tremendous time. The performance is enormous, unmodulated and completely uninterested in realism; it lands somewhere between a silent-serial villainess and a pantomime dame.

The character is also the film’s ugliest element, and it needs saying plainly. Mommy is coded as a lesbian, and her queerness is deployed as an additional layer of monstrousness — the film treats it as evidence of her depravity in exactly the way a 1973 studio picture would. Winters’s committed camp performance has kept the character alive as a cult object, and the writing beneath it is straightforwardly homophobic. Both facts belong in any honest account of why the film still circulates.

There is a second structural oddity worth naming: putting a white Hollywood veteran in the villain slot let Warners make a Black-led action picture with a marquee name for the exhibitors who wanted one. It is a hedge, and you can feel it.

The Warners problem

It is worth being precise about what a major studio brought to this cycle, because the answer explains most of the film’s virtues and all of its faults.

Warners brought money, and you can see it. The locations are properly dressed, the negative is clean, the opium-field prologue involves helicopters, and the whole picture has a surface that AIP could not have bought at gunpoint. I wrote about that industrial scramble — a Hollywood in genuine crisis discovering a market it had spent fifty years ignoring — in blaxploitation, genre cinema and the studio that followed the money, and Cleopatra Jones is the purest specimen of the phenomenon. It is a film made by people who read a box-office report.

What Warners also brought was a set of nerves. AIP’s pictures are rude because AIP had nothing to protect. A major studio has a reputation, a distribution arm and a relationship with exhibitors in markets that would not book a film about a Harlem heroin dealer. So the drugs in Cleopatra Jones are abstract, the violence is bloodless enough to keep the rating manageable, the hero works for the government, and the community is saved by a rehabilitation centre. Every edge the cycle had is sanded off, and what remains is a costume drama with gunfire.

The specific loss is anger. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was made by a man who wanted to frighten people, and the whole cycle inherited that voltage. Two years later, a studio had worked out how to sell the coat without the current running through it. Cleo’s Los Angeles has no police brutality in it, no housing, no economics. The problem is a foreign drug supply and one deranged white woman, and once she is dealt with, the community is fine.

The case against

The film is slack. Its pacing is wrong for a ninety-minute action picture, with long expository stretches and set-pieces that arrive on a schedule rather than out of pressure. The rehabilitation-centre plot is sentimental in the way studio product gets sentimental when it wants a message. J J Johnson’s score is professional and anonymous next to what Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes were doing in the same eighteen months — the theme song, performed by Joe Simon, is fine, and “fine” is the harshest word available in this company.

And Dobson, who is magnificent to look at, is given very little to play. Cleo has no interior life, no fear, no cost. Grier’s characters bleed and get frightened and improvise. Cleo arrives, wins and leaves. The film mistakes invulnerability for strength, which is the most common failure mode in action cinema and the one Jack Hill spent his whole career avoiding.

What survives is the image. Dobson in that coat, framed against a burning field, is one of the two or three most durable pictures the entire cycle produced.

Spoilers below

Doodlebug’s attempt to break away from Mommy’s operation gets him killed, which triggers the final act. Cleo works her way up through the organisation, the film disposes of the corrupt police lieutenant on Mommy’s payroll, and the climax delivers Cleo and Mommy face to face in a scrapyard with cars being crushed around them.

The scrapyard finale is the best-directed sequence in the film precisely because it plays to Starrett’s strengths — vehicles, machinery, space, the flattened geometry of stacked wrecks. Winters goes out at maximum volume. Cleo walks away in another coat.

Warners went back for Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold in 1975, directed by Chuck Bail, which took Dobson to Hong Kong for a co-production with the Shaw Brothers and paired her against Stella Stevens’s Dragon Lady. It is the more entertaining film and it made less money; by 1975 the cycle was closing, and the studios were already backing out. Dobson made a handful of films afterwards and died in 2006, having never been handed anything remotely as good again — a waste that says more about the industry than about her.

The verdict: a slow, gorgeous, politically incoherent film that survives on a single unrepeatable performer and one director’s instinct for how to photograph her. Watch it for the entrances and the scrapyard, and go elsewhere for the argument.

Where next: Foxy Brown for the same year’s opposite approach — grubby, dangerous, driven by a star who does her own falling over; TNT Jackson for the low-rent version of the martial-arts heroine Warners was too respectable to attempt; and the blaxploitation canon for the wider map. It turns up on disc and streams intermittently.