Dolemite: Rudy Ray Moore's Kung-Fu Pimp Comedy

There is a boom microphone in Dolemite. Not once, and not fleetingly. It hangs into the top of the frame with the placid confidence of a cast member, and at other moments you can see crew standing about in shot, watching. The fight scenes are staged by people who have plainly never staged a fight scene. Continuity is a suggestion. Sound recording is a hope.

None of this is a secret, and none of it is why the film is worth ninety minutes. Rudy Ray Moore made Dolemite because no studio in America was going to make it for him, put his own money into it, and got it into cinemas, where it made a profit and spawned a run of sequels. Judged as a piece of film-making it is barely competent. Judged as an act — a comedian building an entire distribution channel for a character the industry had no vocabulary for — it is one of the more remarkable things in this cycle, and the character’s descendants have been running popular music for forty years.

Where Dolemite came from

The origin story is the best part, and it is documented well enough to trust in outline. Rudy Ray Moore was a comedian and singer working record shops and clubs in Los Angeles, going nowhere in particular, when he encountered an older homeless man — Moore always named him Rico — who performed long, obscene, rhyming narrative poems for change. Moore recognised what he was hearing.

What he was hearing was the toast: an African-American oral tradition of rhymed narrative verse, boastful and profane and metrically strict, passed along in barbershops, prisons and street corners for generations. “The Signifying Monkey”. “Shine and the Titanic”. “Dolemite” was one of these, a superhuman braggart hero. Moore learned them, sharpened them, and started recording.

The party records did what no club booking could. Eat Out More Often and the albums that followed were sold under the counter, in Black-owned record shops, in brown sleeves, and they moved in enormous numbers to an audience the mainstream industry did not measure. Moore built a following entirely outside the structures that would have told him no. By the mid-seventies he had money and an audience and no way to get onto a screen.

So he financed a film. Jerry Jones wrote it; D’Urville Martin — a familiar face from Black Caesar and its sequel, and by all accounts fairly contemptuous of the whole enterprise — agreed to direct on the condition that he also play the villain. Moore staffed the rest largely with film students. Dimension Pictures distributed.

The film, such as it is

Dolemite is a nightclub owner and pimp, released from prison after being framed by Willie Green, played by Martin. He returns to Los Angeles to reclaim his club and destroy Green, assisted by Queen Bee, played by Lady Reed, and an all-female army of kung-fu killers.

The plot is scaffolding. What the film actually consists of is Rudy Ray Moore performing, at length, in a series of rooms. He rhymes. He insults people in rhyme. He delivers toasts to camera with the timing of a man who has done this five hundred nights running, because he has. The fights exist so that the rhyming can pause.

And here is the mechanics point that gets missed. Moore is a terrible screen actor and a superb performer, and the film’s one real formal instinct is to know the difference. Martin’s direction is inert — the camera plants itself and waits — and that inertia turns out to be the correct treatment. Nothing cuts away from Moore. Nothing covers him in inserts. He gets to run a routine to its full length, in the middle of what is nominally a crime film, and the audience gets the club act with a plot loosely stapled around it. A better director would have edited him, and would have destroyed the only thing on the reel worth having.

The kung fu is in the film because 1974 and 1975 were the years American exhibitors would book anything with a kick in it. The Shaw Brothers pictures had landed, Bruce Lee had died in 1973 leaving an enormous unmet appetite, and the cycle absorbed martial arts wholesale — Black Belt Jones and TNT Jackson are the same instinct executed by people who could actually stage a fight. Moore could not, and had the sense to keep the takes short and the rhyming long.

The ancestor, and the descendants

The forgotten ancestor here is vaudeville, and specifically the race-records and chitlin’-circuit tradition of the twenties through the fifties — the parallel Black entertainment economy of theatres, labels and touring circuits that existed because the mainstream one was closed. Moore is a chitlin’-circuit act who used the toast tradition as material and the LP as a distribution network, and Dolemite is a filmed vaudeville turn in the oldest sense: the star does his act, the plot carries him between numbers.

The descendants are the reason any of this matters beyond a midnight screening. Moore’s rhyming braggart — first-person, metrically aggressive, obscene, funny, self-mythologising — is a recognisable ancestor of rap, and the people who built rap said so out loud. Snoop Dogg, Big Daddy Kane, 2 Live Crew and Ice-T all pointed at him; his records got sampled; the “Godfather of Rap” tag came from the artists rather than from a press release. The line from a homeless man’s street toast, through Moore’s brown-sleeved LPs, into a form that took over the world, is one of the cleanest cultural transmissions on record, and this film is where the character got a face.

1975, and the end of the wave

Timing explains a lot about why Dolemite looks the way it does.

By 1975 the cycle was closing. The wave had run four years, the majors had extracted what they wanted and moved on, and the NAACP and CORE campaigns against the genre had done real reputational damage to a form the studios were never committed to anyway. Jaws arrived that summer and rewrote what a profitable American film looked like, and the economics that had made a cheap Black-led crime picture attractive evaporated inside eighteen months. Pam Grier’s own trajectory tells the story — by the time of Sheba, Baby the same year, American International was sanding its biggest star down to a PG.

So Moore was financing a film into a market that was already shutting. That is either terrible judgement or the whole point, depending on how you read him, and I think it is the point. He had never been operating inside that market. His records had been selling to an audience the industry did not count, through shops the industry did not stock, and the film was made on the same principle: find the people who already want this, sell it to them directly, keep the change.

It worked well enough that he made three more. While the studios were exiting the genre, the man with the boom mic in shot was running a small, profitable, entirely self-owned franchise out of Los Angeles. The industrial history of this whole period — a Hollywood that followed the money in and then followed it straight back out — is the subject of blaxploitation, genre cinema and the studio that followed the money. Moore is the footnote who never needed them in the first place.

The case against

It is a bad film. That has to be said plainly, because the affection this thing attracts tends to blur it.

The technique is beneath discussion. More seriously, the material has an ugly streak that the fondness of its cult tends to skip over: the treatment of the women in Dolemite’s stable is proprietorial and the film finds it funny, the homophobia in some of the routines is casual and vicious, and the toast tradition’s misogyny is imported whole without a moment’s examination. Moore is a warm and generous presence, which makes the coldness of the material about him stranger rather than better.

There is also an honest question about whether the film’s cult is entirely respectful. A substantial share of Dolemite’s twenty-first-century audience is laughing at the boom mic. Moore was in on the joke about his budget and was not in on the joke about his talent, and there is a version of this film’s reputation that treats a serious oral tradition as camp.

The counterweight is that Moore won. He got the character onto screens, kept the rights, made The Human Tornado the following year with Cliff Roquemore directing and considerably more energy, then Petey Wheatstraw and Disco Godfather. He toured for decades. Eddie Murphy — who had been carrying a torch for Moore for years — produced and starred in Dolemite Is My Name in 2019, directed by Craig Brewer and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and it is a genuinely good film about exactly this: a man with no permission making the thing anyway. Moore died in 2008 and did not see it.

Spoilers below

Dolemite gets his club back and Willie Green is dealt with, which surprises nobody. The corrupt white police officers propping Green up are exposed. The kung-fu army does what the kung-fu army is there to do.

The plot’s resolution is beside the point, and the film knows it — the last movement plays less like a climax than like a curtain call, with Moore addressing the room. The most telling beat in the whole picture is Martin’s Willie Green being defeated by a man Martin himself thought was a joke, in a film Martin directed for the money. Moore financed his own victory and cast his sceptic as the loser, on screen, permanently.

That is the film’s real content. Every frame of Dolemite is a man demonstrating that the door he was told to wait at did not need to exist.

The verdict: shoddy, offensive in places, technically hopeless, and completely alive. It survives because Rudy Ray Moore is in it and because he is doing something two hundred years old with total command. Watch it for the act and the audacity; the boom mic is the least interesting thing in the frame.

Where next: The Mack for the same milieu taken entirely seriously; Willie Dynamite for the studio version with a conscience bolted on; and the blaxploitation canon for the shelf it sits at the end of. It circulates on disc and streams; the records are the better introduction.