Dolemite (1975) on Netflix
Dolemite, a pimp and club owner, is serving twenty years after rival Willie Green and detectives frame him. Queen Bee lobbies the governor, who frees him to trace the city's drug trade.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.7/107,347 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes57%
Trailer
Plot summary
Dolemite runs the Total Experience, a nightclub, and works as a pimp and a comedian. A rival, Willie Green, sets him up, and two police detectives, Mitchell and White, plant guns, drugs and stolen furs in his trunk at the direction of Mayor Daley. The frame brings Dolemite a twenty-year prison sentence. Queen Bee, another pimp, lobbies the governor on his behalf, and a warden helps arrange his release. He walks out with a task attached: to find who floods the Fourth Ward of the city with drugs and to take his revenge on the corruption that put him away.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dolemite (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Rudy Ray Moore, who played Dolemite and co-wrote it, first heard the name in a rhymed toast about an urban hero, told by a regular at the record store where he worked, and turned it into his stand-up alter ego.
- In 1973 Rudy Ray Moore decided to make a film about Dolemite, paying for most of the production out of his own pocket and staffing it with his friends, student filmmakers and fellow comedians.
- Filming on Dolemite began in January 1974 and stretched over more than a year, stopping and starting again whenever the money allowed.
- A biographical film about Rudy Ray Moore and the making of Dolemite, Dolemite Is My Name, starred Eddie Murphy as Moore and was released in cinemas and on Netflix in October 2019.
- Early VHS and DVD releases were transferred with an open matte that often revealed the boom mic, which amused viewers for years; the Blu-ray acknowledges this with an alternate open matte "boom mic" presentation.
- The 2009 action comedy movie Black Dynamite parodies Rudy Ray Moore's Dolemite, the character he played, along with other blaxploitation films.
