All About James Iglehart
In 1973, distributors realized that blaxploitation movies and kung fu movies often shared an audience and very briefly James Iglehart seemed like the star who would straddle that space. A pro baseball player turned actor, he worked for Russ Meyer first, appearing in his electrifying Beyond the Valley of the Dolls then in his sleep-inducing The Seven Minutes before falling into Roger Corman’s orbit with Angels Hard As They Come.
He only appeared in six movies, but three of them were Corman’s Filipino productions directed by Cirio Santiago. Eddie Romero was the Exploitation King of the Philippines in the Sixties, an ambitious filmmaker who delivered superior cult flicks like The Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Black Mama, White Mama. Cirio Santiago, on the other hand, made his most famous movies in the Seventies, cranking out about 40 American films and 63 Filipino ones, but while Romero wanted to make quality movies, Santiago’s flicks featured numerous out of focus shots, scratched negatives, and the soundtrack of his life was Corman screaming at him over the phone, “You really screwed me, Cirio!”
The first Igleheart/Santiago flick was Savage! (1973) followed by the semi-martial arts movie, Bamboo Gods & Iron Men (1974) which Santiago only produced. Opening with a dude smashing cinderblocks with his head, the movie introduces us to Igleheart playing Calvin Jefferson, a boxer who’s going to be the “next world champ” according to pretty much everyone he meets. He and his wife (played by Shirley Washington) go to Hong Kong (and later Manila) on their honeymoon where they buy a tacky statue in a souvenir shop and Calvin reveals he’s the cheapest man in the world when he balks at paying $50 for an antique statue and balks again over the $2 delivery charge to his hotel.
It turns out the statue contains a leather pouch that contains a substance that will change the world and a criminal gang wants to get their hands on it which leads to shots of Calvin and his wife racing across their front yard, stark naked, shouting “Bees! Bees, bees, bees, bees. Bees!” It’s sloppy and sleepy and ends with the discovery that the mystery substance inside the statue is nothing more than gunpowder.
Next, Santiago himself took the helm to direct Igleheart in the weirdly ambitious Death Force (1978) a Vietnam vet samurai movie with the Philippines standing in for ‘Nam and pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Iglehart plays a nice guy who just wants to get home from his tour of duty and get his hands on his wife. Unfortunately, his two friends want to eat a lot of pasta and become crime lords, so they murder him, dump his body, and take over LA. Their philosophy is “You like lasagna? You got lasagna. Enjoy yourself, huh? Life is short.” Iglehart washes up on an island where two Japanese soldiers left over from World War II teach him the way of the samurai and their philosophy is “You will not beome a man until you first become a child.” Almost two hours long, with decent action and a sprawling plot, it ends on a total bummer as these two philosophical schools work out their differences via samurai swords.
After this flick, Iglehart retired from film although he did have a son, James Monroe Iglehart, who became a Broadway star playing the genie in the original production of Aladdin.