Tag Archives: Jim Brown

Three The Hard Way

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“Three The Hard Way, three cities, three of us.” So it is decided. Three heroes are needed to save the black populations of Detroit, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles . This movie has some heroes in Fred Williamson, Jim Brown and Jim Kelly.  Failure is not an option. How they kick racist asses has many options. This movie shows the viewer quite a few.

Gordon Parks Jr. directed this film in 1974, two years after Super Fly. The soundtrack is by The Impressions who star as a band in the recording studio. Some of the stand out songs are “That’s What Love Will Do” and the theme for Jim Kelly’s character Mister Keyes. His first name is Mister so everybody will show him respect whether they want to or not. Setting this fellow up for a fall is not an easy thing for the crooked police officers to do.

I haven’t seen the film yet. Be warned, there are several versions out there.  I spotted on Internet Movie Database a thread that claims the original running time is different and a scene with the song Make A Resolution is missing from recent television and cable broadcasts. Perhaps, an editor did not cut the film for commercials in a wise fashion. Having the assignment of cutting content is at times impossible.  Thankfully , the song does play during the credits and there’s a full version on the soundtrack album (track one).

Turntabling has a copy of the vinyl LP soundtrack of Three The Hard Way for sale -first come first served.  It is a used copy, but in great shape, tough, yet sweet, just like the stars. If we find any new copies we’ll give you a heads up.

The Impressions Three The Hard Way Soundtrack vinyl Italian Import

Three The Hard Way Soundtrack LP by The Impressions

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Three The Hard Way featured the triple threat of Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, and Jim Brown…with a lot of excellent music from The Impressions.

The movie is hilarious–the villian is the same guy who played Doctor Shrinker on Saturday morning TV, which makes every one of his scenes 100% more fun to watch. The premise of this movie is basically that a villian named Feather (yes, really) wants to create a virus that will selectively wipe out only one portion of mankind. Guess which portion a crazy white guy with sinister eyebrows wants to get rid of?

Jim Kelly and company bust heads and take out the bad guys, naturally.

My favorite thing about the movie-aside from, well, everything else, is that the soundtrack basically describes the entire plot of the movie. All the lyrics tell you everything you need to know about the movie–awesomeness abounds.

It’s a shame these three guys didn’t do about 100 of these movies together, the chemistry is great and they would have made an excellent series of crazy-ass movies. Sure, this movie has its share of filler, but as an artifact of good old fashioned drive-in movie making, I give it two thumbs way up…and the Three The Hard Way soundtrack is 100% pure gold.

Check out this clip from Three The Hard Way, with Jim Kelly giving a racist cop the business–and groove to that sitar-drenched soundtrack!