At the Movies with The Old Man: Jim Kelly, Quiet Cool

 

[Taken from our book Frontier Fisticuffs: Brawls, Dustups & Mysterious Strangers--The Martial Arts Western on Film. To see another extract from the book, this time a delightful and accurate early Jonn Wayne film, hit the link. The behind the scenes scufflin’ is worth the read alone.]

Take a Hard Ride [1975]

This 1975 Italian-American coproduction was an attempt to blend the then popular Blaxploitation and Spaghetti Western trends. It was also the 2nd of three films starring the trio of Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and our main man of interest here, Jim Kelly. [Three the Hard Way & One Down, Two to Go being the other two films.]

The director, credited as Anthony Dawson was the sometime screen name of Antonio Margheriti, a veteran of Italian exploitation cinema with Peplum, Spaghetti Westerns and cannibal films to his credit.

As per usual with Italian “Westerns” the film was shot nowhere near the American West, here, the Canary Islands stands in for the Southwest.

As is the practice here, plot details will be minimal to save that enjoyment for any who decide to screen the flick for themselves.

In precis, Pike [Jim Brown, wearing the tightest pants ever devised] accedes to his dying boss’s wish to take a saddlebag of $6,000 back to his ranch in Sonora, Mexico.

Along the way he acquires an untrustworthy but stylish gambler Tyree [Fred Williamson, wearing the second tightest pair of pants known to man.]

While on the journey they are pursued by various parties who think that $6 grand would look better in their own saddlebags.

Add to this they are being pursued by the ruthless bounty hunter Keifer [played by Spaghetti Western stalwart Lee Van Cleef.]

Also, along the way, they pick up a mute Indian scout by the name of Kashtok [played by Jim Kelly.]

Since fighting is our focus in these pages, let us turn to the non-gunplay action.

Jim Brown and Fred Williamson have a brief dustup, but neither lead seems up to really relinquishing cool status so it is a rather mundane affair.

Now, to Mr. Kelly.

Most of us remember him for his role as Williams in the iconic Enter the Dragon.

Jim Kelly, a Bonafide karateka began his study of Shorin-ryu karate in his college years. Kelly went on to perform well in Karate Championships of the early 70s, perhaps the acme being his winning of the world middleweight title at the 1971 Long Beach International Karate Championships.

Mr. Kelly parlayed this success into opening his own studio in Southern California, which led to more than a few celebrities giving karate a go, and these connections led to his debut in martial arts film.

Those of us who know Jim Kelly from Enter the Dragon, two films as Black Belt Jones plus a few others know the decision to have him play mute in this film was not because he could not deliver a line reading, oh, he could and deliver it with utter early 70’s Afro-Cool.

In Take a Hard Ride we may be denied his voice, but we do have the expressive vehicle of his body, and he uses that well here.

His easy grace fits the Indian scout role to a T. He does not mount a horse, rather, like actual Apache scouts who often preferred to “lope” vast distances afoot [see our offering on Apache Running here] or Larry McMurtry’s memorable character “Famous Shoes” from the Lonesome Dove quartet, we often see him treading easily and smoothly where our two tight-trousered stars stay ahorse.

Let’s get to what you came here for, the fights. Unlike the lackluster Brown-Williamson confrontation, we are treated to Kelly in a few brief scuffles moving smoothly, applying jump kicks on sand with facile ability and overall providing some of the more interesting aspects of the film.

Now, I adore Jim Brown, but…I don’t see this as his best film.

I’m not the biggest on Fred Williamson’s swagger style of “acting around his perpetual cigar,” so I can’t really say how he stacks up here—he always seems the same to me. Cocky and posing for the camera, never really performing.

The clear attractions, to this viewer are Van Cleef’s dependable laconic cool, and Jim Kelly’s mute grace.

It seems even without dialogue he out-cooled the main stars.

The film is no classic of the Wester-Frontier Martial Arts film but thanks to Jim Kelly it is worth a look for aficionados of the genre.

[Taken from our book Frontier Fisticuffs: Brawls, Dustups & Mysterious Strangers--The Martial Arts Western on Film. To see another extract from the book, this time a delightful and accurate early Jonn Wayne film, hit the link. The behind the scenes scufflin’ is worth the read alone.]

Old School Warrior Resources Below

The Black Box Warehouse

https://www.extremeselfprotection.com/

The Indigenous Ability Blog

https://indigenousability.blogspot.com/

The Rough ‘n’ Tumble Raconteur Podcast

https://anchor.fm/mark-hatmaker

“A Pause in the Desert” by Oliver La Farge

 

The Indian said, “No Sioux round here. They live up in Dakota. I’m ’Pache.”

The lean man looked down at him affectionately. “A murderin’, scalpin’ Apache.”

Huggins glanced at his wife, then at the man they called Steve. Apache was a word full of connotations and wonder. He felt the same discomfort he had known at Grand Canyon when he had been caught out identifying some Hopis as Navajos. It was important for him to be master of this wild country, and that was not easy when before he had always driven straight through, stopping only to eat and sleep.

Anthropologist and Pulitzer Prize Winning author, La Farge offered a book of short stories in 1957 titled “A Pause in the Desert.” The featured story from that collection is, in fact, the story “A Pause in the Desert.”

Editor and anthologist par excellence, Jon Lewis selected this story as one of his 100 Best Western Short Stories. If one is expecting horses, six-guns, steely-eyed men and other such tropes, you won’t find that here.

What you do find is a brief tale of a husband and wife driving across the rural southwest [perhaps Route 66 nearish Seligman]. The action is minimal, a stop at a ramshackle filling station for minor repairs and an encounter with locals.

Lest one think, “Ah, here we go, the encounter leads to confrontation?” Nope.

This is an interior tale, one made up of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the faces we wish to present to the world, the impressions we hope to make versus the realities when wishes abrade and suffer against men and women who actually live in the midst.

Have I made this story sound boring? Trite? Good lord, I hope not.

This brief tale is a Masterpiece—yes, I capitalized that M. I have thought about this story every day since I read it a week or so ago. I see so much of the husband in those around me, the yearning to be more but no impetus to go beyond the yearning.

I hear echoes in conversation of the two-meanings presented in almost all dialogue and encounters, the comforting bolsters offered spouse-to-spouse and the “necessary” [perhaps] “white lies” we tell the other and perhaps the self to preserve, “I made the right choice, didn’t I?”

A story written by a Man who Sees, for adults who also See.

A Masterpiece, plain and simple.

The Violent Land by Wayne D. Overholser

 

I did not like my father Bartram Nathan. I had never disliked him more than the first day we saw Howard Valley.

Those two short sentences begin this 1954 Spur Winner by Mr. Overholser. The fatherly distaste grows from there—the disdain for a poor provider, a vain man, a lazy man is palpable—almost uncomfortably so.

The lack of respect is warranted but complicated by making the father not wholly a bad man, more simply an ineffectual man who drags a family through the consequences of his continual “It’s not my fault” lifestyle.

This is more the story of the disdainful son than that of the father, a son who wants to set himself apart as the polar opposite of the man he disrespects.

In most ways the novel is somewhat standard for the 1950s course, but the father-son dynamics and the depth of the disdain give it an added interest.

While I may not have awarded it the Spur Award myself had I been on the advisory board of the year, I did not find the reading of the tale unrewarding.

I might also mention the novel is listed among Jon Lewis’ 100 Best Western Novels, so please consider my B-ish opinion likely in the minority.

“El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional” by Willa Cather

 

People who have been so unfortunate as to have travelled in western Kansas will remember the Solomon valley for its unique and peculiar desolation. The river is a turbid, muddy little stream, that crawls along between naked bluffs, choked and split by sand bars, and with nothing whatever of that fabled haste to reach the sea. Though there can be little doubt that the Solomon is heartily disgusted with the country through which it flows, it makes no haste to quit it. Indeed, it is one of the most futile little streams under the sun, and never gets anywhere. Its sluggish current splits among the sand bars and buries itself in the mud until it literally dries up from weariness and ennui, without ever reaching anything. The hot winds and the river have been contending for the empire of the valley for years, and the river has had decidedly the worst of it. Never having been a notably ambitious stream, in time it grew tired of giving its strength to moisten barren fields and corn that never matured. Beyond the river with its belt of amber woodland rose the bluffs, ragged, broken, covered with shaggy red grass and bare of trees, save for the few stunted oaks that grew upon their steep sides. They were pathetic little trees, that sent their roots down through thirty feet of hard clay bluff to the river level. They were as old as the first settler could remember, and yet no one could assert that they had ever grown an inch. They seldom, if ever, bore acorns; it took all the nourishment that soil could give just to exist. There was a sort of mysterious kinship between those trees and the men who lived, or tried to live, there. They were alike in more ways than one.

This story from the inestimable Ms. Cather appeared in New England Magazine, the June 1901issue. Jon Lewis selected it as one of his 100 Best Western Short Stories.

Mr. Lewis had also selected Cather’s “Along the Divide” [also reviewed in this blog] and that is also a story I hold dear.

As for this one---Masterpiece!

In brief, it is a tale of how towns could appear and disappear seemingly overnight on the Frontier. We view this municipal life cycle from the view of the land itself and then personalize the lifecycle with the sole remaining citizen of the Boom-and-Bust town.

So much incident, so much character, so much heart in these few pages. Many novels pad page counts and do not come close to matching the humanity and craft displayed here.

From one man’s 100 Best List to be placed even higher on another’s.

May it serve you as well.

“Siena Waits” by Zane Grey

 

The familiar hum of flies told him of the location of his quarry. The moose had taken to the water, driven by the swarms of black flies, and were standing neck deep, lifting their muzzles to feed on the drooping poplar branches. Their wide-spreading antlers, tipped back into the water, made the ripples.

This 1920 story by the prolific, and in many precincts, quite popular Zane Grey is included in Jon Lewis’s 100 Best Western Short Stories.

I have found Mr. Lewis to be a worthy guide to many fine reads.

I must also confess that I am a man somewhat immune to the presumed charms of Mr. Grey. In fact, I find much of his prose purple, wordy, and far too melodramatic, too unreal for my tastes.

With that said, this tale has its strengths. Zane was an avid sportsman, a hunter, a fisherman. A man who spent much time in the land and on the sea. His nonfiction hunting and fishing tales tend to compel me more than his fiction.

Here, the constraints of the short story seem to reign in much of his purplish excesses. The definitions of the land and the hunting lore ring true and well-observed.

The arc of the tale itself has its merits, but there is still an air of the melodramatic to it.

With all that said, I still found the story a pleasant, if not stellar read. It would not make my 100 Best List but…the fact that I found it a step above my usual Grey experience leads me to believe that those who enjoy Grey may find more to enjoy here than I am able to detect with my own shallow regard.

If you are a Grey fan, read on!

If you are less than enamored of Grey, it is an unessential read and safe to skip.