One of the better-aged blaxploitation classics, despite no one behind the camera seeming to know what they’re doing. This is grimy, low-budget stuff with hacksaw editing and clumsy action. What makes it work is that this is a comedy more than anything else. A comedy can be all fucked up and none of that matters as long as it’s funny.
And this is funny. Really funny. The experience of seeing this in a 70s grindhouse with a black audience must have sounded like a bomb going off.
48-year-old Rudy Ray Moore is an instant star here in his first film, firing out quotable lines by the dozen and owning the screen with no apparent effort. His Dolemite is your usual pimp in a loud suit and with an entourage of women who fawn over his every move. He’s so good at what he does though that after he’s arrested and sent to the big house (because of two scuzzbucket cops who planted drugs in his car), crime in the city gets worse solely because he’s not around to run things right. The streets NEED Dolemite. He and his karate moves are all that can stop the new big pimp on the block, the nefarious Willie Green (played by the film’s first-time director, D’Urville Martin). So, the warden does the natural thing and lets him go. Makes sense to me.
This independently produced film was Moore’s next step after his success with underground comedy albums in which he told X-rated stories in rhyming verse, often over music (for that, some call him one of the godfathers of rap). The film brings the same raunchy, anti-establishment spirit. Also, like other movies from black filmmakers during this time, from Melvin Van Peebles to Bill Gunn, there’s a delicious feeling here that the makers are getting away with something. They’re as much outlaws as they are artists and entertainers. The old rules of filmmaking and good taste no longer apply. They’re rewriting the book.
And in this chapter of that book, it’s perfectly fine that the hero is a chubby marital arts master who, in reality, looks like he’d be wheezing for breath after one high kick.
One more important note: Everybody makes fun of how the boom mic is visible in several scenes here. Not only is the boom mic visible, but sometimes the crew member who’s holding the mic is visible. People have been laughing about that for decades, as if it was the director’s mistake. What a lot of them don’t know is that pretty much all of the home video releases for thirty years were sourced from an open-matte version of the film that ISN’T in its original aspect ratio that came out in theaters. When the detail-crazy maniacs at the Vinegar Syndrome label put this out on Blu-ray, they finally gave us a version that’s in its proper screen dimensions. And those boom mics were mostly gone (though they did include the open-matte version as a bonus feature for old time’s sake).