Cleopatra Jones (film)

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Research record

Cleopatra Jones (film) · Staged record CTL-W-1264 · Entity Depth Program · 654 words · Evidence grade: VERIFIED (canonical master, carried unchanged) · Researched 2026-10-25

Cleopatra Jones (1973), released July 13, 1973, is the blaxploitation-era action film that put a woman at the center of the genre's machinery, and the AFI Silver's catalog record — the graph's verification anchor — fixes its credits exactly: a 1973 American production directed by Jack Starrett, with screenplay by Max Julien and Sheldon Keller, starring Tamara Dobson in the title role alongside Bernie Casey and Shelley Winters. (The graph's AUTHORED_BY edge credits Starrett as the work's author; this entry states the full credits as the catalog gives them.) Dobson's Cleopatra Jones is a special agent for the U.S. government — an undercover operative working abroad who comes home to fight the drug trade devastating her own community, against Shelley Winters's crime boss, "Mommy."

The marketing knew exactly what it was selling. The Museum of Modern Art, which screened the film in 2017, quotes the original pitch: Tamara Dobson as six feet two inches of "dynamite" — the tallest and most statuesque heroine the genre produced, a former model whose height and bearing became the film's iconography. Her equipment was equally deliberate: a customized Corvette Stingray and martial-arts training, wrapped in wardrobe that The A.V. Club's retrospective singles out as the film's most lavish signature — "the most loving attention is lavished on Dobson and her fashion," every outfit looking, in the review's phrase, like it cost a fortune.

The A.V. Club's reassessment carries the film's most interesting critical claim: that Cleopatra Jones was one of the very few PG-rated entries in a genre defined by R ratings, and that it works anyway — "a pretty solid, good-natured, and even bighearted piece of escapist action filmmaking," a spoonful-of-sugar kids' adventure about a heroine taking down a drug empire of bad role models. The comparison the review draws is to Coffy, this batch's rank 145, which had beaten it into theaters by two months: where Pam Grier's Coffy is an avenger working outside the law, Dobson's Jones is the law — a government agent whose legitimacy is the point, a "prim, straitlaced goody-two-shoes of a crimefighter" by the review's teasing description. The two films, released weeks apart in the summer of 1973, mark the genre's fork: vigilante and agent, exploitation and something close to family entertainment, both built around Black women leads in an industry that had barely permitted Black male leads a decade earlier.

The production record grounds the glamour. The film was produced by William Tennant and Max Julien — Julien, the star of The Mack, writing himself into the era's other great female-led vehicle — for Warner Bros., with music by J.J. Johnson. Its commercial performance made the sequel inevitable in studio logic: $3.2 million in U.S. and Canada rentals, and Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold followed in 1975.

In the graph, the film's edges run to its title character (Cleopatra Jones, CTL-W-0935, recorded as featured in the film) and to Starrett as its credited author. Its CTL significance is the pairing it forces: filed one rank above Coffy, the two records together document the summer American popular cinema briefly organized itself around Black women action heroes — one sanctioned by the state, one answering to no one — and the Dobson record, with its AFI cataloging, its MoMA revival screening, and its fashion-forward afterlife, is the cleaner institutional trail of the two.

The film's afterlife has been curatorial as much as commercial: MoMA's 2017 screening placed it inside a museum series, the A.V. Club's Women of Action column reassessed it as craft, and the AFI's catalog keeps its credits in the permanent reference record — three institutions, three different decades, all treating a 1973 Warner Bros. programmer as a document worth keeping. That is the treatment this graph extends: the film is filed not as nostalgia but as evidence, of a summer when the American action hero was, briefly and memorably, the six-foot-two government agent its own posters advertised.

Sources for this record

• Cleopatra Jones (1973) — AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center
  Claims supported: Master verification source: 1973 U.S. film directed by Jack Starrett; screenplay by Max Julien and Sheldon Keller; starring Tamara Dobson in the title role with Bernie Casey and Shelley Winters
• Cleopatra Jones (screening, April 26, 2017) — Museum of Modern Art
  Claims supported: 1973 film directed by Jack Starrett; the original marketing description of Tamara Dobson as 6′2″ of 'dynamite'; screened by MoMA in its 2017 series
• Women of Action: Cleopatra Jones Is a Modest Action Movie with Immodest Style — The A.V. Club
  Claims supported: Dobson as a government special agent and undercover operative; her customized Corvette Stingray and martial-arts training; the film's PG rating as a rarity among R-rated blaxploitation; 'bighearted escapist action'; the film's fashion as its signature; comparison with Coffy, which preceded it by two months; Jones as a prim, law-abiding crimefighter against Mommy's drug empire
• Cleopatra Jones — Wikipedia
  Claims supported: Released July 13, 1973; Tamara Dobson as the title character, a United States special agent undercover abroad; $3.2 million in U.S./Canada rentals; sequel Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975); music by J.J. Johnson; produced by William Tennant and Max Julien; Warner Bros. production

Citations

Published October 25, 2026, from the head-verified staged record in the Entity Depth Program (Batches 004–008). Source: CultureTechLens