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As you should
know by now, I love Blaxploitation films. I was raised on Blaxploitation films and still find them an endless source of excitement and thrills. 

Just the
image of the seeing a black man conquering all challenges and racist villains
still thrills me to no end. Which is why I liked Django Unchained so much, because it was nothing more but a straight
up Blaxploitation film writ large on a huge canvas. And the final bloody climax
where Django wiped out all those Confederate red necks and slave overseers was just
a more expansive and bloodier copy of the similar “wipe-out-every-motherf—–r-in-the-place climax by Jim Brown in Slaughter’s Big Rip Off.

But I’ve
never been exactly fond of the term Blaxploitation, the not-really-so-clever
mix of black and exploitation, for those films from the early to late 70s. The
word exploitation suggests something minor, cheap and tawdry. And while admittedly
many exploitation films were, but it was almost always in an entertaining way. I’ve
never found Blaxploitation films to be minor films. In many ways, many of them
were more profound and substantial than are given credit for, and they had and
still have a major visceral impact on me.

And when it
comes to Blaxploitation films, I’ve always strongly believed that the ultimate, most ambitious and most perfect example
of the genre was Gordon Parks Jr’s 1974
film Three The Hard Way. It’s a wild, loopy, illogical, James Bondian action adventure, with a great
premise, that no Hollywood studio would have the guts to make again now.

The film had a budget of $2 million, which was hyped at the time as the most expensive Blaxploitation
film ever produced ($2 million went a lot further in those days), and
the film showed off the budget with elaborate stunts and set pieces and
location shooting in L.A., Washington D.C. New York and Chicago.

It deals with
three friends (or The Big Three as they are so rightfully called in the trailer
for the film below), Jim Brown, Fred
Williamson
and the late great martial arts legend Jim Kelly, who team together to stop a mad plot by a white
supremacist millionaire to contaminate the country’s water supply with a special chemical created that will only poison
and kill off every black person in the the U.S.

You may laugh
and call it far-fetched, but who couldn’t resist the basic idea of
three black men saving the entire black race? It’s a concept that, in this current troubled day and age, even
sounds more relevant since you just know there are some Tea Partiers and rabid white supremacist groups who just salivate at the idea of
pulling off a crazy plot like that for real, right now.

The film was
the third of only four films directed by Parks Jr., the son of the legendary director, photographer, composer, author and renaissance man Gordon Parks. He had burst
onto the film scene with his first feature film, the 1972 near classic Super Fly, and, by the time he made Hard Way, he was solidly establishing a career as a major
filmmaker. 

However, his career was unfortunately cut short when he was killed
in a plane crash in Kenya in 1979, while scouting locations for a new film.
Though people will name Super Fly as their favorite film by him,  I still contend that Three The Hard Way id his best film.

And the film
gives what I call the “last full bloom” of hard core black masculinity on the
screen, with Brown, Williamson and Kelly. And let’s face it, you couldn’t make a
film like this today. Where are you going to get three black actors to pull off
those roles? Terence Howard, Kevin Hart and Michael
Ealy
?

See what I mean?
It just isn’t the same. If they tried to stop a plot to kill off all black
people, we would all be dead by now. O.K. yeah that was cold, but admit it, I’m right
aren’t I?

So when I was
asked to host another screening at the Black
Cinema House
in Chicago, I didn’t
have to think twice. The screening will happen on Sunday March 2 starting at 4PM.

And as always
seating is free, but you have to RSVP HERE.

Hope to see you

there.