'Rated X by an All-White Jury'

“This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the man."

I’m back… Could just be coincidence, but my pathetic number of hits has dropped off in the past two weeks with no new posts. Are you all actually reading this?

So, I initially promised a review of “A Bullet for the General’. But I’ve found that if I don’t write the review that very next day, I tend to forget the details. Soooo, instead we’re going to talk about the film that is considered by many to be one of the most important in black cinema, ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song’, by Melvin Van Peebles. This is often the film credited with kicking off the whole ‘Blaxploitation’ genre of which I am so fond. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this film. Last night, however, I saw ‘Baadassss’, a recent film by Melvin’s son, Mario (of ‘New Jack City’ fame). Mario plays his father, and it is basically a dramatization of the making of Sweetback. I have a much greater appreciation for the original after seeing this film; I’ll get into that in a moment.

The original Sweetback was a no-budget film shot on 16mm around 1970. The protagonist is a sex performer who, when brought in on an arrest, ends up killing two corrupt racist cops as they are beating another wrongfully accused black man. The rest of the film is basically about his escape. The film was rated X (‘by an all-white jury’ as Melvin put it). There’s the obvious foul language, and violence and the sex scenes, according to Van Peebles, are real (he even says he got the clap from one of the actresses). It’s not like a porno movie (gratuitous genital close-ups, etc), but you can kinda tell it’s really going on. The sex subplot, as we learn in ‘Baadassss’, was so Van Peebles could get around having to use and pay union actors, because the union wasn’t interested in porno movies. They thought he was filming some kind of Afro-porn, so they left him alone. Sweetback eventually makes it to the Mexican border, alive. The movie ends and we are told, “WATCH OUT. A BAAD ASSSS NIGGER IS COMING BACK TO COLLECT SOME DUES.”

Van Peebles had already had a successful mainstream Hollywood picture, called ‘Watermelon Man’, a comedy about a white guy who somehow turns black. Columbia was ready to offer him a three picture deal. But he was disgusted as to how blacks were portrayed in Hollywood; the mammy, Jack Benny’s Rochester, the bug-eyed comic relief to the white movie star, etc. Columbia expected more of the same from him. He wanted to make a film that showed the reality of it all, of ‘trying to get the Man’s foot out of my ass’. He assembled a crew of disenfranchised Latinos, whites, blacks and Asians, who were traditionally shut out from working in Hollywood, and shot Sweetback. As we see in ‘Baadassss’, everything that could have gone wrong, did. The film crew was arrested. Peebles continually ran out of money, and his health even deteriorated. When he finally found a distributor, he could only premiere in two theaters in the entire country (Detroit and recently desegregated Atlanta), and could hardly advertise, for most newspapers wouldn’t run an ad for an X-rated movie, let alone print the title. But after the first two showings to empty theaters in Detroit, the film caught on fire, thanks to the support of the Black Panthers (who ended up making this film mandatory viewing for the membership). When it was all said and done, Sweetback brought in something like 15 million dollars, and ended up being the highest-grossing independent film ever as of 1971.

When I originally saw Sweetback, maybe a year ago or so, I didn’t really care for it. It had the feel of a disjointed, psychedelic art film at times. The opening scene, in which a 13-year old Sweetback loses his virginity, got me off on the wrong foot (Mario was the 13-year old). I felt like I might have been watching kiddie-porn, and there is no way in hell this could be released today. The soundtrack by the then-unknown Earth, Wind and Fire, was pumping, though. You wouldn’t know it was EWF, because it was raw, gritty funk, not the slick EWF they would later become. When I was done watching it, I was wondering what the big deal was. Maybe I was expecting something a bit more mainstream, a la ‘Shaft’. After watching ‘Baadasss’, I now understand. When put in the context of what it meant to the black community at that time to have a movie they could relate to, to see the white racist cops they were so accustomed to, the dirtiness of the ghetto, and to have the black hero stick it to the man and not die in the end- that spoke to them in volumes. Audiences would interact with the movie screen, yelling at it and agreeing with it, and cheering on Sweetback. There was no ‘yowsa/mammy’ B.S. going on here. No dapper and polite Sidney Poitier wanting to be accepted by the white man. This was a black film, on black terms and after seeing the dramatization of its making, and all the bullshit involved, I do have a greater appreciation for this film and am going to go back and watch it again with a slightly different perspective. If I were you, I would rent the original Sweetback, then watch ‘Baadasss’ shortly after, and then go and watch the original again. They’re both available on Netflix.

After seeing the runaway success of Sweetback, the movie bigwigs finally realized there was a niche that they had been missing out on. There was a detective story in pre-production at the time. They changed the setting to the ghetto, made the hero a black man, and ‘Shaft’ was born. Many other successful films followed, such as “Foxy Brown’, “Superfly’ and others. The ‘blaxploitation’ genre was born. That, my friends, is another posting in itself. But to get you going, go here. This is an ‘everything you need to know about Blaxploitation films’ kind of place. Enjoy.