Three the Hard Way: The Blaxploitation Team-Up

The premise is the review. In Three the Hard Way, a white supremacist organisation has developed a toxin that kills Black people and leaves everyone else unharmed, and intends to introduce it into the water supplies of Los Angeles, Detroit and Washington. Three men find out. The three men are Jim Brown, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly.

If that sentence produces an involuntary grin, the film has already worked on you. If it produces a wince, you are also reading it correctly, because this is a 1974 action picture that has taken the most explicit possible statement of what its audience feared and turned it into a plot device with a ticking clock. The subtext has been promoted to text and given a laboratory.

Gordon Parks Jr. directed it, two years after Super Fly, from a script by Eric Bercovici and Jerry Ludwig, for Allied Artists. The Impressions did the music. It runs about ninety-three minutes and it does not waste any of them.

The assembling is the pleasure

Brown plays Jimmy Lait, a Los Angeles record producer. Williamson plays Jagger Daniels, who runs things in Chicago. Kelly plays Mister Keyes, who has a martial-arts school in New York. The film’s first movement is spent getting them into the same room, and it is constructed exactly like a heist recruitment sequence: here is the man, here is what the man does, here is why you want him.

What makes it land is that the casting is doing the exposition. By 1974 all three actors arrived pre-loaded. Brown had been the most feared running back in American football and had spent seven years being the toughest man in war pictures. Williamson had come out of the same league with a nickname and an unshakable grin and had already headlined a fistful of pictures. Kelly had won karate championships and then walked through Enter the Dragon the year before with the best entrance anybody had that decade. The film can assume competence, and spend the time on momentum instead.

There is a piece of film history sitting in the director’s chair, too. Gordon Parks Jr. was the son of Gordon Parks, the photographer and film-maker who had made Shaft three years earlier and effectively opened the door the whole genre walked through. The Parks family therefore has a claim to both ends of blaxploitation: the film that proved the audience existed and the film that turned the audience’s nightmare into a matinee. Parks Jr. made only four features before he was killed in a plane crash in Kenya in 1979, at thirty-four, which is one of the genuine losses of 1970s American cinema.

That is the whole design. Nobody in Three the Hard Way has an arc. Nobody learns anything. Jimmy Lait at the end is Jimmy Lait at the start with fewer enemies. The film treats its leads as fixed quantities and asks only whether they will arrive before the valves open.

Why the flatness works

There is a real craft argument here and it runs against most received wisdom about screenwriting.

Parks Jr. shoots action with a plainness that has aged far better than the busy stuff. Wide, static, held. When Williamson walks into a room and hits somebody, you can see the room, you can see the man, and you can see the hit. There is no coverage salad, no shaky insert, no cutting on impact to hide the fact that nothing connected. It is closer to how Hong Kong was shooting fights than to how Hollywood was, and the reason is budgetary honesty: with this money you cannot fake a fight, so you point the camera at people who can actually do it and hold.

The structural decision is just as sound. Three heroes, three cities, three targets. The film splits the last act geographically and cuts between them, which gives it a rhythm that a single climax could never manage, and it means each lead gets his own finish rather than a shared one. It is the men-on-a-mission war picture reduced to its skeleton and run at speed.

The economy of the writing deserves a mention as well. Bercovici and Ludwig give each hero exactly one scene of characterisation and then never revisit it, which sounds like laziness and functions as compression. You learn what you need about Jagger Daniels from how he handles a man who has come to kill him, and the film trusts you to carry that forward for eighty minutes without a reminder. Screenwriting orthodoxy would call this underwritten. Watch it next to a modern team-up film, where every character must announce their wound in the second act, and the orthodoxy starts to look like the problem.

The Impressions’ score carries the load that dialogue would otherwise be doing. Where Super Fly used Curtis Mayfield as a moral commentary track arguing with the images, Three the Hard Way uses music as pure forward drive. It is a less interesting idea and a more effective one for this material.

The ancestor is a war film

The genealogy people reach for is Shaft, and it is wrong. Three the Hard Way has no interest in the private-eye picture at all: nobody investigates anything, and the plot is handed to the heroes rather than uncovered by them.

The real ancestor is Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) — a film that starred Jim Brown, which cannot be a coincidence. The Aldrich template is the whole architecture: assemble specialists, brief them on an atrocity, send them at a fortified target, kill most of the opposition in the last reel. Parks Jr. has taken the men-on-a-mission war picture, cut the cast from twelve to three, and moved the enemy from a French château to an American water board.

There is a Western in the mix too. Three gunmen riding into a town that has a problem is a shape as old as the form, and the film’s willingness to give each man his own showdown is straight out of the ensemble Western. What blaxploitation did with that shape was change who was allowed to ride in, which is the genre’s entire trick and the reason it worked commercially. I have argued the broader case in blaxploitation, genre cinema and the studio that followed the money — the studios did not fund these films out of conviction, and the films are frequently better than the motives behind them.

Kelly’s presence is the other bloodline. He is the point where the American genre and the Hong Kong boom shake hands, and the martial-arts strand of blaxploitation runs directly from him through Black Belt Jones and out into the low-budget Filipino productions of the following years.

The case against

The film is thin, and its thinness is not always a virtue.

The villain is a problem. Monroe Feather, played by Jay Robinson, is pitched at a register somewhere between a Bond antagonist and a pantomime, and the film’s decision to make its supremacists silly undercuts the seriousness of what they are attempting. A plot to commit chemical genocide deserves either genuine menace or genuine rage. What it gets is a man in a nice suit explaining his scheme.

The women in the film are treated appallingly, even by the standards of 1974 action cinema, and the sequence in which a trio of bikers extracts information from a henchman is played for laughs in a manner that is hard to sit through now. It is also, awkwardly, one of the film’s most memorable stretches, which is exactly the problem with dismissing exploitation cinema on a single axis.

The middle sags too. Once the recruitment is done and the threat is established, the film has to fill time before it can start knocking over reservoirs, and it fills it with a kidnapping subplot that generates motion without tension. Ninety-three minutes is a tight running time, and this one still finds ten minutes of slack.

And the plainness that makes the action legible makes the rest of the picture inert. Parks Jr. had a genuine eye — Super Fly proves it — and there is very little of it here. This is a film made to fill a bill, at speed, for a market that wanted exactly this.

The verdict: it works. Three the Hard Way is the purest team-up the genre produced, it moves like nothing else on the shelf, and it has the courage to name the thing everyone else was gesturing at. The film’s cheerful stupidity about its villain is the price of its clarity about the threat, and that is a trade a lot of more respectable pictures never had the nerve to make.

Where to find it: it has been in print on disc for years from the catalogue labels and turns up regularly on the streaming services that carry the Allied Artists library. Watch it in a double bill with The Spook Who Sat by the Door, released the year before, and the contrast will tell you more about 1973–74 than either film does alone. For where it sits on the shelf, the blaxploitation canon has the full argument.

Spoilers below

The last act splits the three men across the three cities, and each of them reaches his reservoir. Kelly takes Detroit and fights his way through it with the film’s best choreography. Williamson takes Washington. Brown takes Los Angeles and the confrontation with Feather.

The detail that stays with me is the ending’s refusal to be about anything. The plot is stopped, the villains are dead, and the film simply concludes. There is no scene where anyone reflects on the fact that a group of Americans built a poison designed to kill a race and got close enough to a water supply to use it. No newspaper front page, no speech, no coda.

Read that as a failure of nerve and you have a fair point. Read it as the film’s actual argument and it becomes something stranger and more interesting: a picture that treats a genocidal conspiracy as an ordinary Tuesday problem, solvable by three competent men, requiring no comment afterwards. Nothing about the threat surprises anyone on screen. That absence of surprise is the most pointed thing in the film, and it is delivered entirely by silence.