RIP Jim Brown

 

Jim Brown, NFL Great and Star of Films Including ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ Dies at 87

Variety

By Camel Dagan

May 19, 2023

 

Jim Brown, the NFL titan who appeared in “The Dirty Dozen,” a number of Blaxploitation films and Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday,” The Running Man,” Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks” and Spike Lee’s “He Got Game,” to name a few films, died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 87.

His wife Monique posted the news of his death on Instagram, saying, “He passed peacefully last night at our L.A. home.”

In nine extraordinary seasons as a fullback with the Cleveland Browns, Brown set an array of NFL records. In 2002 the Sporting News named him the greatest professional football player ever. That phenomenal athleticism and a charismatic personality made him bankable as the first African American action star.

Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr. and Bill Cosby had come before, but they were not action stars, and Fred Williamson was a Blaxploitation star like Brown in the 1970s, but he did not get the chance to appear in mainstream studio action films in the 1960s like Brown did.

Despite the strength of the cast in Robert Aldrich’s 1967 World War II film “The Dirty Dozen,” a tribute to the enlisted man that starred Lee Marvin, Brown was fourth-billed. An enormous commercial success, the film raised the fortunes of everyone involved, including Brown.

The football star-turned-actor next starred alongside Rod Taylor as a pair of mercenaries in Africa seeking to heist some diamonds in Jack Cardiff’s “Dark of the Sun,” then was first billed in the little-known mystery-drama “Kenner” as well as in the heist film “The Split,” starring alongside Diahann Carroll; his final film of 1968 was the fairly anemic but high-profile submarine thriller “Ice Station Zebra,” starring Rock Hudson.

Next was the far meatier “Riot,” Buzz Kulik’s grim, realistic prison drama in which Brown starred with Gene Hackman. Roger Ebert was underwhelmed by the film but declared: “‘Riot’ does demonstrate in Brown’s case that he can now move on from simple action roles to more challenging parts. He has an easy, humorous way of delivering a line that wins spontaneous approval from the audience.”

The 1969 Western “100 Rifles” starred Brown as an Arizona lawman who ventures into Mexico to find Burt Reynolds’ Yaqui Joe, a Native American who robbed a bank to buy rifles for his people. There he tangles with a beautiful native leader played by sex symbol of the day Raquel Welch; much was made in the press of the interracial love scene featuring Brown and Welch, but Brown apparently grew impatient with the actress because of the control her people exerted over the film. “When I’m on a picture,” he told Ebert at the time, “I have two bosses, the director and the producer. My co-star is not my boss.”

After playing Jacqueline Bisset’s husband in “The Grasshopper,” Brown starred opposite Lee Van Cleef in the Western “El Condor.” He was about to turn a page in his career: The actor starred in a series of Blaxploitation films starting with 1972’s “Slaughter,” in which he played a former Green Beret captain in Vietnam, referred to only by his last name — the title of the film — who seeks to avenge the murder of his parents by the Mafia (a sequel, “Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off,” followed in 1973). But also in 1972, he’d also made “Black Gunn,” in which he played a successful nightclub owner whose brother is part of the militant African American organization BAG (Black Action Group); the Mafia was again the enemy. In 1973 he starred in the Roger Corman-produced, “Papillon”-like exploitation film “I Escaped From Devil’s Island” and in prison picture “The Slams.”

For 1974’s “Three the Hard Way,” director Gordon Parks Jr. teamed the three biggest blaxploitation stars — Brown, Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly  — in the story of a team that battles white supremacists plotting to somehow kill the black population of the U.S. by poisoning the water.

Brown, Williamson and Kelly were reteamed the next year in a largely bland spaghetti Western called “Take a Hard Ride” in which the villains, led by Lee Van Cleef, were mostly white; the film was released not by one of the exploitation distributors but by 20th Century Fox.

Brown did another Western with Van Cleef, “Vengeance,” in 1977, and then made an unexpected move for an action star: He appeared in James Toback’s directorial debut “Fingers,” starring Harvey Keitel as a pianist and collector for his loan-shark father.

Scott Tobias of the Onion A.V. Club wrote: “Keitel’s character gets involved with a sexually pliant sculptor who’s drawn more powerfully toward womanizing stud Jim Brown, whose supreme confidence throws Keitel’s weakness and uncertainty into sharp relief. Produced independently by George Barrie, ‘Fingers’ delves into racial and sexual territory that was considered taboo even in the more permissive and adventurous studio system of the ’70s.”

After action film “Pacific Inferno” in 1979, Brown appeared in the Fred Williamson-written and -directed “One Down, Two to Go” in 1982. On screen the film reunited Williamson, Brown and Jim Kelly and also starred Richard Roundtree (the star of “Shaft”).

During the early to mid-’80s Brown made appearances on TV shows including “CHiPs,” “Knight Rider,” “T.J. Hooker” and “The A-Team.”

He played one of the villains in futuristic Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “The Running Man,” and he was among the stars of Keenen Ivory Wayans’ 1988 parody of Blaxploitation films, “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.”

Brown then spent years doing straight to video films before another effort to revive the genre, 1996’s “Original Gangstas,” starring Williamson, Brown and the top female Blaxploitation star of the ’70s, Pam Grier.

That same year he appeared in Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks” as a former heavyweight champion who works in a casino.

BROWN, Jim (James Nathaniel Brown)

Born: 2/17/1936, St. Simons Island, Georgia, U.S.A.

Died: 5/18/2023, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A

 

Jim Brown’s westerns – actor:

Rio Conchos – 1964 (Franklyn)

El Condor – 1969 (Luke)

100 Rifles – 1969 (Lyedecker)

Take a Hard Ride – 1975 (Frank Pike)

Kid Vengeance – 1976 (Isaac)