Cleopatra Jones

Cleopatra Jones (1973)

Runtime: 89 minutes

Directed by: Jack Starrett

Starring: Tamara Dobson, Shelley Winters, Bernie Casey, Antonio Fargas, Brenda Sykes

From: Warner Bros.

I saw another blaxploitation film; this one was from Saturday night via TCM Underground. The Letterboxd review is below:

This was a real late night watch on TCM Underground (Saturday) night. As I've heard mixed opinions about this I was interested in checking it out.

The plot: the title character (Tamara Dobson) is a tall and statuesque lady who moonlights as a model... but is actually a secret agent. She orders a giant poppy field to be burned, angering a woman known as MOMMY (Shelley Winters! More on her in a bit) and they feud with each other. Other characters include Cleo's boyfriend (Bernie Casey) and a drug dealer known as DOODLEBUG SIMKINS (Antonio Fargas); sometimes characters disappear for stretches at a time... so the story's uneven but I still enjoyed this.

The movie has a lot of intentional and unintentional humor; the action scenes are pretty entertaining-although Cleo doesn't always look convincing when she's engaged in fighting-and the score from J.J. Johnson is quite groovy. The movie's ridiculous and fun, except...

With this genre, being over the top and silly is commonplace. After all, “whitey” is typically the villain and you have plenty of stereotypes, racism, sexism, and homophobia to go around. This was definitely the case here, but it has to be noted that the character of Mommy is a rather blatant example of negative connotations against the homosexual community. She was a garish-looking overweight lesbian who was loud and cruel and shouted most of her dialogue. It was definitely over the top and while I certainly understand those who found that character and all the meaning behind it to be a major turn-off, I just tried to ignore the grossness behind it and I just marveled at how Shelley Winters played the character and how she devoured the scenery.

After all, this is a movie where they specially built a Corvette for the tall hero so that when she got out the driver's side roof raised up so her afro would not get damaged; it's pretty ludicrous all around.