The F-Bomb. Today, it’s ubiquitous so in movies, stand-up comedy, and even television, that pop culture is desensitized. But there was a time when it was downright obscene, so much so that it’s still offensive enough to be spelled F-Bomb or F**K in polite articles like this one. Forerunning comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx shocked Americans with their bawdy scatalogical routines, pressing F-Bombs deep into vinyl tracks, long before Samuel L. Jackson made Mutha F-Bombs his signature quip. Those daring entertainers that first dropped F-Bombs in public were pioneers of the crass, taunting the system, and sometimes paying the price. And riding their coattails was Rudy Ray Moore.

When it comes to Blaxploitation, Moore is legendary. He wasn’t the first in the field, but he took it to a whole other level. Beyond his comedy records, which were veritable F-Bomb minefields, Moore capitalized on the action movie trend, following films like SHAFT (1971) with his self-made indie cult classic, DOLEMITE (1975). And yet, despite being in the wake of those trendsetters, Moore was a pioneer in his own right, bringing his mastery of the Dozens to vinyl and celluloid, and earning the title as 'The Godfather of Rap'.

In Netflix's DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, Eddie Murphy pays homage to Moore with a performance that has generated some Oscar buzz. Alongside Murphy, Wesley Snipes co-stars with a scathing alcoholic satire of DOLEMITE’s director and villain, D'Urville Martin. Broadway Diva Da'Vine Joy Randolph appears as Lady Reed and making respectful cameos are Chris Rock and Snoop Dogg (Moore was honored with a role in Snoop’s 1994 video SNOOP DOGGY DOG WORLD).

But does Murphy do Moore justice? He certainly puts him back in the spotlight, but Moore was a complicated man whose story is hard to contain within a single film.

 

No Titties, No Funny, and No Kung Fu

“This movie had no titties, no funny, and no Kung Fu - the stuff people like us want to see,” quips Murphy as Moore. When engaging the Blaxploitation genre, these elements are the three treasures. DOLEMITE IS MY NAME is funny. With Murphy as lead, even the tragic scenes are injected with some comedy relief, perhaps too much sometimes. Murphy has always had a chameleon-like talent for impersonation. It’s what allowed him to redeem SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in the early eighties when the show was faltering towards cancellation. It gave him the bandwidth to tackle seven different roles in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1996). However, he never quite vanishes into the character of Moore. While he never brays with his signature Donkey laugh, 58-year-old Murphy fails to capture Moore physicality, even though Moore was only about a decade younger when he made DOLEMITE. There are references to Murphy’s character being too overweight for action films, pointing out Murphy’s Buddha belly. However in 1975, Moore wasn’t really fat. He was a big man, thick but not chubby. As for titties, yes, there is some full frontal nudity in DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, although it feels like less than in DOLEMITE itself. The toplessness isn’t presented with that same gratuitous sensibility as it was in Moore’s original movies. It comes off as more of an acknowledgement than a titillation. Just as audiences are numb to F-Bombs nowadays, there’s so much nudity, especially on television, gratuitousness just doesn’t carry the same impact as it did in the seventies.

From the perspective of KungFuMagazine’s fight-focused reviews, the biggest oversight is the Kung Fu. Moore wasn’t a Kung Fu master and that is overtly addressed within DOLEMITE IS MY NAME. However, despite tepid fight choreography (especially by today’s standards), the original DOLEMITE had some noteworthy martial artists in the cast. Moore’s film gave ‘Special Thanks’ to Chuck Norris Karate School in the end credits. The credits also read “Special Appearances by Howard Jackson, Lightweight Champion Karate and Master Samari [sp] Swordsman Hugh McDonald.”

Master Jackson is the reason for the Chuck Norris acknowledgement. Jackson began in Kung Fu, but achieved far more notoriety as a 6th degree black belt in Tang Soo Do under Chuck Norris. He was a veteran of the U.S. Marines and a full-contact fighting champion. Jackson went on to serve as the Martial Arts Fight Director for the first Dolemite sequel, THE HUMAN TORNADO (1976), which reunited many of the key players from the original film and is widely considered as the cinematic epitome of Moore’s Dolemite character. DOLEMITE launched Jackson’s cinematic career and he went on to be in featured in over a dozen films, most notable Norris’s mid-eighties actioners like THE CODE OF SILENCE (1985), INVASION U.S.A. (1985), and THE DELTA FORCE (1986), as well as WALKER TEXAS RANGER (1996-2001).

The “Master Samuri” is also noteworthy. Master Hugh McDonald was from Jamaica and taught Bob Marley and his sons as well as training with Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh. He also associated himself with Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, Benny ‘the Jet’ Urquidez, and many others. Additionally, the Martial Art Assistant Director was Curtis Pulliam. Master Pulliam was one of the early members of the Black Karate Federation, or BKF Kenpo, founded in the 60s by leading African-American martial arts masters, mostly from Southern California. So the Dolemite franchise did have some impact upon the martial arts genre, more so than DOLEMITE IS MY NAME propounds.

The Dolemite franchise maxed out on Kung Fu in Moore’s 1999 direct-to-video movie SHAOLIN DOLEMITE, although despite the title, Moore played Monk Ru-Dee, not Dolemite. In another coat-tailing move, Moore made SHAOLIN DOLEMITE by inserting himself in a 1986 Taiwanese Kung Fu flick titled NINJA: THE FINAL DUEL, directed by an old Shaw Brothers player, Robert Tai. NINJA: THE FINAL DUEL is a weird film on its own, and Moore amps that up by overdubbing it to English akin to Woody Allen’s directorial debut feature WHAT’S UP TIGER LILY? (1966), and then splicing in random scenes of himself as Ru-Dee like Raymond Burr in the American-version of GODZILLA, KING OF MONSTERS! (1956) or even the Americanized MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS (1993-1996). The fight choreography is gratuitous, very much in the wake of those classic golden age Hong Kong Kung Fu movies, and the plot is barely coherent, even less so with Monk Ru-Dee’s rambling cameos. By now, Moore is rather chubby, and his inserted scenes only add to the randomness of the movie.

But back to DOLEMITE IS MY NAME, Netflix’s homage to Rudy Ray Moore is a feel-good film, almost like a Hallmark movie, except with a few titties and some funny (but little Kung Fu sadly). For those that know, those who watched it play out, it doesn’t quite jive with what really might have happened, or even with the spirit of Blaxploitation – those wide lapel suits, Dolemite's ostentatious bow ties, those set and costume color schemes, all that plaid, the lava lamps, the rotary dial phones. It was a time when everyone, cops and drug dealers, were sticking their fingers in confiscated baggies of white powder to taste its purity (so dumb - so many drugs can come in powders - even LSD can be powdered so anyone handling unknown powders knows to be more cautious).

However, Murphy does honor Rudy Ray Moore with a stylin’ swagger of his affectatious walking stick. In that way, it’s better than going back and watching the original Dolemite movies because those are horribly dated now. The Blaxploitation genre was very rich, but stuck in time. It would be better to read Michael Chabon’s 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue to get a sense of it all. Chabon’s character of Luther Stallings captures the spirit of a faded Blaxploitation star in a manner that might echo Moore’s real life. Nevertheless, a tip of the furry pimp hat to DOLEMITE IS MY NAME for bringing the spotlight back onto the extraordinary Rudy Ray Moore for today’s F-Bomb saturated generation.