A boxer's body and a disc jockey's ease: Leon Isaac Kennedy is a lead you want to win, in films that seldom deserve him, and when he writes the script himself he hands his character every virtue and nothing to pay for them.
Fi1m perspective
There is a moment in Body and Soul (1981) when a reporter insults Leon Johnson and Kennedy, instead of bristling, grins. It is a small thing and it is most of what he has as a performer. He moves well in a ring, he can sit through a quiet scene without asking us to feel sorry for him, and he carries himself like a man who spent years talking into a microphone and never doubted the listener was still there. We grinned back. By the midpoint we had stopped worrying whether he would win, and that is the other half of the story.
He came to film late and sideways. He was a radio DJ in Cleveland and Detroit from his mid-teens, billed as Leon the Lover, then a television host and producer, then a small-part actor and producer in the 1970s. The breakthrough was Penitentiary (1979), Jamaa Fanaka's prison boxing picture, in which he played Martel "Too Sweet" Gordone and served as associate producer. He went back to the part in Penitentiary II (1982) and Penitentiary III (1987), producing both, and the three films with Fanaka are the spine of the career. Around them sit Body and Soul, which he wrote under a deal with Cannon Films, Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) with Chuck Norris and David Carradine, and Knights of the City (1986), which he also wrote and produced. By the early 1990s he had largely stepped away.
The parts are nearly all the same part: a boxer or a hard man in an independent or exploitation picture, asked to take punishment and look as if it costs him. He trained properly for Penitentiary and the work shows in how he holds himself. The trouble comes when he holds the pen. In Body and Soul he gives Leon Johnson every decent quality going and then builds a plot in which none of them is tested for an hour, so the hero is never tempted long enough for us to fear for him. Jayne Kennedy, his co-star in two films, is handed a character made of two questions and a look. Other critics have said much the same of the Penitentiary films, that the plotting is formulaic and the sex and violence crowd out the people, and that is roughly the shape of our complaint too: the films are thinner than the man at the centre of them.
What we felt, watching Body and Soul, was a fond impatience. Kennedy the actor had earned our worry by the end of the first reel, with that grin and the way he takes a quiet room, and Kennedy the writer then spent an hour making sure we had nothing to worry about. If you want to see what he can do, start with the Fanaka films, where somebody else wrote the trouble he was in. Then watch Body and Soul for the grin, and forgive the rest.
Biography
Leon Isaac Kennedy is an American actor, screenwriter, film producer and former radio personality. He began his career as a disc jockey in Cleveland, Ohio, later working in Detroit under the name 'Leon the Lover', before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s.
Kennedy produced and appeared in films from the mid-1970s. He wrote the screenplay for and starred as Leon Johnson in the 1981 remake Body and Soul, alongside Jayne Kennedy. He is known for portraying Martel 'Too Sweet' Gordone in the Penitentiary films (1979, 1982 and 1987), and for his role as FBI agent Marcus Jackson in Lone Wolf McQuade (1983). He also wrote, produced and appeared in Knights of the City (1986).
