Blaxpoitation Theater: 1974 Three the Hard Way

Welcome to Blaxploitation Theater. Tonight's episode: Three the Hard Way is a 1974 action film directed by Gordon Parks Jr., written by Eric Bercovici and Jerrold L. Ludwig, and starring Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, and Jim Kelly.
In American cinema, Blaxploitation is the film subgenre of action movie derived from the exploitation film genre in the early 1970s, consequent to the combined cultural momentum of the black civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Black Panther Party, political and sociological circumstances that facilitated black artists reclaiming their power of the Representation of the black ethnic identity in the arts. The term blaxploitation is a portmanteau of the words Black and exploitation, coined by Junius Griffin, president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood branch of the NAACP in 1972. In criticizing the Hollywood portrayal of the multiracial society of the US, Griffin said that the blaxploitation genre was "proliferating offenses" to and against the black community, by perpetuating racist stereotypes of inherent criminality.
Initially, blaxploitation films were black cinema produced for the entertainment of Black people in the cities of the US, but the entertainment appeal of the black characters and human stories extended into the mainstream cinema of corporate Hollywood. Recognizing the profitability of the financially inexpensive blaxploitation films, the corporate movie studios then produced blaxploitation movies specifically for the cultural sensibilities of mainstream viewers. The movie-business magazine Variety reported the films Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) and Shaft as the mainstream blaxploitation films that followed the assimilation of blaxploitation into mainstream cinema, by way of the film Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970). Blaxploitation films were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music.