We said a while back after watching the blaxploitation flick The Human Tornado that we’d check out its progenitor Dolemite, and though it’s taken years and a quarantine, we’ve finally arrived where we said we would. The premise of Dolemite is simply that the titular character is released from prison in order to prove his innocence of the charges that landed him inside for, so far, two years of a twenty year sentence. The motivation behind this for authorities is that crime has shot through the roof in Dolemite’s Los Angeles neighborhood. If he can fix the problem he can earn a pardom. Sounds fine, he says, plus he plans to settle some old scores along the way.
Going into this you have to accept that man-boobed fat-ass Rudy Ray Moore is going to play an infinitely dangerous, athletically gifted, sexually irresistible urban crusader. In addition you have to accept that the low budget nature of the production means some of the acting will be face-palmingly atrocious. What you have left, then, after making concessions, is style, commentary, and comedy. Moore provides plenty of the first with his pimplike persona and occasional forays into rhyming slang, and commentary is built into the blaxploitation genre, but the comedy is dependent on how near to a sober state you are. We were far too near at first, less so later, and the film improved.
Some cinephiles will label you a cultural philistine if you dare to dislike Dolemite. They’re wrong. Except for the musical numbers the movie is empirically terrible. Truly appreciating it may depend on how deeply you can immerse yourself into a contemporaneous mindframe where what you’re seeing is unlike anything you’ve seen before (which is certainly how audiences of the era must have felt), and therefore impresses you with its freshness and grit. If you can do that, the microphones dangling in shots and bit players who struggle to remember their lines will fade, and instead Dolemite might impress you as a landmark entry in the blaxploitation canon, worth watching for that reason alone.
Then again it might not, because there are at least two-dozen better entries, and as a matter of respect for the genre that fact has to be admitted, no matter how many hipster reviewers with scraggly neckbeards tell you Dolemite is an overlooked gold nugget. It is what it is—a lower tier, lowest budget indie flick with a few legit laughs, such as when a cop sees that Dolemite has literally karate-clawed a guy’s mid-section open, says, impressed, “God damn, Dolemite,” and administers a double-tap coup de grâce. But Moore would prove those flashes were luck, not skill, when he lensed the crushingly bad sequel a year later. Dolemite premiered in the U.S. today in 1975.
