That Man Bolt (1973)

Directors: Henry Levin and David Lowell Rich
Writers: Charles Eric Johnson and Ranald MacDougall
Stars: Fred Williamson, Byron Webster, Miko Mayama, Satoshi Nakamura, John Orchard and Teresa Graves

Index: Make It a Double.

Fred Williamson’s second Make It a Double choice is a couple of years older than Bucktown but he was already established, especially with blaxploitation staples like Black Caesar and its sequel, Hell Up in Harlem. What surprised me is that this isn’t another of them.

In fact, it rather relishes how it keeps us on the hop as to what it actually is. Sure, there’s a blaxploitation feel at points, but there’s much more James Bond, much more kung fu movie and much more general seventies thriller, the colour of the lead the most unusual aspect.

That Man Bolt is Jefferson Bolt, who’s trying to be Jim Kelly when we first see him, stripped to the waist and working through a kata even though he’s locked up in a Macao jail. He’s not Jim Kelly but he looks good anyway. And then in comes an Aussie to cut him loose and ferry him over to Hong Kong. That’s Carter.

This is a good start and it builds even better. Carter thinks that Bolt has a nice place and wonders how much it costs him. Apparently, he owns the entire building, along with other property in London, Paris and Los Angeles. It’s not bad at all for a courier, huh?

Then again, he’s former Special Forces with a black belt and a Masters from MIT. He’s not delivering packages on a bicycle. He’s the sort of courier you hire to take a million dollars in a briefcase from Hong Kong to Mexico City, via Los Angeles, even though there are lots of folk eager to take it from him on the way. And, of course, that’s what a Brit asks him to do.

Bolt doesn’t just take the job, he takes a lot of precautions too. For a start, he shows up for the money with a U.S. banking official so that it can be registered and documented. The folk handing it over get very nervous and, a phone call later, Kumada isn’t happy at all.

The Hammer is solid here. He holds his own against the Aussie and the Brit, not by beating them up but through the power of words. It’s good old fashioned acting. He’s less effective in an airport bathroom when faced with three bad guys who want his briefcase. He’s not the martial artist he wants to be but he’s capable.

The film follows suit too. There’s a car chase in Las Vegas that’s very believable indeed, the drivers appearing to be chasing each other for real against traffic and down dry canals like in Terminator 2. The only catch is that there isn’t a lot of traffic. They must have blocked off a lot of streets for this shoot.

The scenes in Las Vegas play out like crime thrillers of the day tended to, with a bunch of assassination attempts, one of which had to be while the target was in the sack with a lovely young lady. Here, that’s Teresa Graves as the gloriously named Samantha Nightingale. Bolt knows everybody, it seems, and that includes someone high up the chain, in this instance Connie Mellis, who runs a casino that’s part owned by Casino Enterprises, a.k.a. the bad guy corporation clearly behind everything.

And that’s fine, but I wish that one standard convention of the day wasn’t honoured here, namely that there isn’t any blood. An assassin manages to take out a guard with an ice pick in a hotel hallway and there’s no blood. Bolt stops him with a slice of broken mirror right to the throat and there’s no blood. Samantha gets hers in the crossfire but there’s no blood. Somehow, Bolt even finds himself tortured by an expert in acupuncture needles but there’s no blood. I have no idea how that works.

And, finding even his high up friend beaten up because of his association, Bolt decides to go back to Hong Kong so the bad guys can find him instead and suddenly we find ourselves in a kung fu movie. Enter the Dragon came out five months earlier and I have to wonder if it was long enough to have influenced this. Maybe it took from the same sources.

Either way, there’s an island monastery run by a kung fu master with a quintessential kung fu master beard, who has turned it into a kung fu school for kung fu assassins. And when that kung fu master explains at the inevitable kung fu tournament that Spider, the star attraction, is his best pupil except for one, take a wild stab in the dark as to who he’ll be facing in the inevitable kung fu boss battle.

To be brutally honest, that whole angle isn’t remotely as much fun as Bolt’s time in a Hong Kong bathhouse or indeed his big brawl in the local fireworks factory. No prizes for guessing how the latter ends, but you’d get the former wrong because there’s as much nudity in this movie as there is blood. In other words, none.

Let’s just underline that there’s not just one but two sex scenes, the other with Kumada’s delightful possession, Dominique Kuwan, who he leaves so satisfied that she’s asleep, with a “Happy New Year” message for her master on her back written in lipstick in Cantonese, but there’s no nudity. There’s even a long section in a Hong Kong bathhouse, where Bolt meets with Carter the highly uncomfortable Aussie, who’s welcomed to the establishment with the teasing words “Gentlemen wish bath thousand pleasures; chocolate man says you come”, but there’s no nudity.

Now, I’m sure I’m being over-sarcastic here, especially as I enjoyed That Man Bolt and Fred Williamson is the best thing about it. Well, OK, the dialogue in the bathhouse is better, but he carries the movie, wherever it goes. The point is that it goes everywhere but never manages to quite fit anywhere.

As a blaxploitation movie, it’s too vanilla. As a thriller, it’s too sedate. As a kung fu movie, it’s not just too bloodless but too peaceful. As a romance, we’re back to being too vanilla. As a military action movie, it’s fine but that’s only one raid on a Kumada chemical plant. Perhaps it works best as a Bond movie, which is what it was supposed to be, because Williamson has all the confidence in the world and then some for a courier who’s carrying a million bucks in a briefcase and a target on his back.

Or maybe it works best at not being any one thing, because that lends it a chameleon-like charm that’s all its own. Whatever it works as or doesn’t, it was supposed to be the first in a trilogy of Jefferson Bolt as a black James Bond movies, but maybe that was a step too far for a major studio in 1973. The Hammer has stated that Universal simply wasn’t ready for that.

But hey, he probably didn’t care too much, because he made one movie and they paid him for two. Maybe that’s why it was memorable enough for him to pick it for his Double.