One Yr After Enter The Dragon, Its Director & Co-Star Reunited For A Martial Arts Gem

Black Belt Jones served as a shock religious successor to Bruce Lee’s martial arts masterpiece, Enter the Dragon. Lee’s remaining accomplished movie earlier than his demise in 1973, Enter the Dragon was a end result of the work that Bruce Lee was doing in Hong Kong with movies like The Huge Boss and Fist of Fury.

A mixture of the rising reputation of martial arts motion pictures and the actor particularly led to Bruce Lee getting his personal Hollywood martial arts movie. Being afforded a much bigger finances than his earlier movies and a robust forged helped Enter the Dragon flip into a world success and encourage a good larger curiosity in martial arts motion pictures within the Seventies.

Along with its wider affect on the film trade, Enter the Dragon additionally led to related tasks from these concerned with the film. As a result of regardless that Enter the Dragon was primarily a car for Bruce Lee, it was additionally a boon to the skills of each its director and the forged. Many members of the forged and crew went on to take pleasure in a variety of success after Enter the Dragon. One instance of that is Black Belt Jones, which was an instantaneous follow-up to the 1973 film and a collaboration between two of its most integral gamers.

Black Belt Jones Is A 1974 Cult Basic From Enter The Dragon’s Director And One Of Its Most important Solid Members

Black Belt Jones Sees Jim Kelly Attempt To Emulate Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee was clearly the principle attraction of Enter the Dragon, however the movie’s story was designed to comply with three completely different martial artists on the island, with the opposite two being John Saxon’s Roper and Jim Kelly’s Williams. Jim Kelly’s involvement with Enter the Dragon prompted the studio to signal him to a three-movie contract, which resulted in Kelly getting a starring function in Black Belt Jones.

Black Belt Jones, now thought to be one of many movies that fueled the Blaxploitation aspect of the martial arts style, reunited Jim Kelly with Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse. Like Kelly, Clouse was using a wave of recognition set off by the 1973 movie.

In what was his first starring function, Jim Kelly performed the titular hero of Black Belt Jones, a film that noticed the actor play a martial arts grasp who makes a dwelling as a mercenary. Within the film, Black Belt Jones takes a job that requires him to defend a dojo from gangsters making an attempt to grab the property by scaring off its occupants.

On this manner, Black Belt Jones comes throughout as a Blaxploitation tackle the story of a very completely different Bruce Lee film, Method of the Dragon. Within the film, the objective of Bruce Lee’s character is to guard a cousin’s restaurant from thugs.

Like Bruce Lee’s motion pictures, Black Belt Jones depicts Jim Kelly’s character as a pressure to be reckoned with. After showcasing a few of Kelly’s martial arts abilities in Enter the Dragon, the director takes this to the subsequent degree in Black Belt Jones, permitting the actor to get his hordes of enemies to plow by means of.

Its martial arts choreography, embrace of campy parts, and the way in which through which it made use of its star’s martial arts background helps it simply stand out as one in all Jim Kelly’s finest motion pictures – arguably his second-best after Enter the Dragon.

Each Robert Clouse & Jim Kelly Continued To Make Martial Arts Films After Black Belt Jones & Enter The Dragon

Jim Kelly Starred In A number of Seventies Martial Arts Films

After Black Belt Jones and Golden Needles, Robert Clouse and Jim Kelly went their separate methods, however continued their associations with the martial arts style. Jim Kelly stayed related all through the Seventies, showing in a number of Blaxploitation martial arts motion pictures, together with Sizzling Potato and Black Samurai. Sadly, Kelly’s time as a martial arts star proved to be solely a short-lived part that did not lengthen into the Eighties.

Robert Clouse, for his half, remained lively in motion pictures for years, often pumping out a martial arts movie between his different works. In 1980, he notably directed one in all Jackie Chan’s earliest efforts to make a splash in America, The Huge Brawl, and was additionally behind the infamous try to complete Bruce Lee’s Recreation of Dying. 1992 noticed the director helm his remaining film. Just like Black Belt Jones, Ironheart allowed Clouse to as soon as once more direct one of many forged members from Enter the Dragon, who on this case was Bolo Yeung.