Title: Sweet Sweetback�s Baadasssss Song

Year: 1971

Director: Melvin Van Peebles

Reviewed By: Garrett Chaffin-Quiray

Dedicated "to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the man," Sweet Sweetback�s Baadasssss Song was produced using Melvin Van Peebles�s salary from directing his second feature film Watermelon Man (1970). Budgeted for a few hundred thousand dollars and scheduled for a 19-day shoot, the production was later helped along by a loan from Bill Cosby when financing the project proved difficult.

To further assist in cost containment Van Peebles hired non-union labour, labelled the film a porno to avoid industry restrictions and personally took on all of its marketing responsibilities. As the movie�s star, director, writer, co-producer, co-composer and editor he then released it through an exploitation distributor called Cinemation. Pumping money into radio advertisements he targeted black audiences with the film�s soundtrack album and proved innovative in the creation of ancillary markets. Among his products were T-shirts, nightgowns, sweatshirts lettered with "I am Sweetback", a paperback book and a set of white and red table wines.

When the completed film was screened for censors, the Motion Picture Association of American gave it an X- rating to which Van Peebles responded with threats of a lawsuit though he quickly employed the decision to his advantage. Using the advertising tag line, "rated X by an all-white jury," the film�s grass roots marketing campaign helped Sweet Sweetback�s Baadasssss Song take the top box office position from Love Story (1970) for two weeks running. Its subsequent earnings were somewhere between $4 and $15 million dollars, depending on the source, and it produced certain symbols, scenes and stock characters that were central to Hollywood films for the rest of the 1970s.

Opening with a credit sequence flashback of Sweetback as a child being raised among prostitutes through his sexual initiation, the story�s action jumps forward to view his performance as a minstrel show stud. After watching a pair of cops beat a young black revolutionary, Sweetback takes revenge on the policemen and is forced to run for his life. The second half of the film concerns itself with his flight for survival and eventual escape to Mexico, including the help he receives from members of the black community, until viewers are warned to, "Watch Out. A baad asssss nigger is coming back to collect some dues."

Striking at once into the racist assumptions behind Hollywood�s most celebrated movies Sweetback�s adventure is raw, untamed and explicit. Its lead character and supporting players come from a world almost ritualistically ignored in the American mainstream. In fact, Sweetback and his ilk could only be found in mainstream movies as antagonists for Hollywood heroes like Gene Hackman�s Popeye Doyle in The French Connection where black faces were imminently dangerous to white-dominated society.

The very audacity of Van Peebles�s project to focus on a nearly mute, stoic and black anti-hero was a product of good intuition, a small budget and being in tune with changing times. That the film maintains an odd curio quality despite its many shortcomings also demonstrates how Sweet Sweetback�s Baadasssss Song is a film with brilliant historical resonance along with the right combination of weirdness to make it a true cult classic.

Still, not as many people who speak of it with authority have actually sat down to study it with a tattered videotape or 16 mm print. To those who have there is a reverberating question mark as to how this movie became the independent film to put the Hollywood juggernaut at bay in the face of long odds and certain accidents of timing. Then there is the current fact of its being unavailable on most video store shelves, its absence in film festivals centred on the 1970s and its casualty to a selective memory that prefers Shaft and Superfly even if they are two far less innovative films due to studio backing.

Having seen its release near the beginning of a highly experimental 13-year period in Hollywood beginning with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and continuing on through Raging Bull in 1980, Sweet Sweetback�s Baadasssss Song is a counter myth to the racial portraits pitched by the film industry. With its cartoonish depictions of white establishment types and sympathetic presentation of disenfranchised black people, the movie breaks new ground in selling a kind of black fantasy about itself to film audiences. Of course it didn�t hurt that nudity, blood, gunshots, loud music and a psychedelic film style were employed to enhance its mood as well.

Lacking trained actors, a strong script and a skilled production staff, however, Van Peebles� movie can be a challenging and difficult viewing experience. Likewise the inclusion of sexually explicit couplings and violent episodes jar viewers inasmuch as they increase the range of screen activities for black people while exploiting sex and violence for greater box office appeal.

In short, the film�s success lay in its ghetto view of the black American experience with particular emphasis placed on criminal activity and sensuality. Its failures, on the other hand, lay in its amateurish quality and ridiculous plot seemingly meant only to showcase Sweetback�s wardrobe, Earth, Wind and Fire�s music and the naked flesh found throughout the film.

Sweet Sweetback�s Baadasssss Song may not be piece of art but calling it a bad movie is missing the point. The irritating quality of its some of its sequences are exactly what create its after life and make it appealing in the present as an example of counter-hegemonic moviemaking. All the more so in light of black ghetto imagery as a stylistic substitute for mainstream conventions, including odd technical gaffs that still recognize the moneymaking possibilities of satisfying a group of people starved for images of themselves.

That Hollywood paid attention by inaugurating the Blaxploitation cycle is a sort of high compliment even though it also managed to create a new set of stereotypes for black representation that stripped Van Peebles� energetic film and nascent political movement of its original purpose. Regardless, all the media detritus we can sift through today from a remade Shaft to the reassuring presence of popular black male leads like Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes points to the fact of how innovative Van Peebles was with his third feature film about a stud named Sweetback.

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