By
Sergio
|
Shadow and Act
April 1, 2015 at 4:13PM
There are important movies, but there are only a few that one can say actually changed the game. One of those few films is Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 underground indie classic “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song”.
Not only did the film change independent black cinema forever, but independent cinema and even Hollywood as well.
The film was a box office monster hit with filmgoers lined up down the block and around the corner, eager to see it, at every theater it played. It was a film of its time, for its time, and it captured the black revolutionary fervor of the period like no other film had ever had (or “The good old days” as I like to them).
Made totally underground for a reported $500,000 (that figure seems suspiciously too high for me) the film was unlike anything that had ever been seen before. To say that it was a sensation when it first came out is putting it mildly. It’s one of the very few films that actually inspired another film about the making of it. I'm referring, of course, to Melvin’s son Mario Van Peebles 2003 film “Baadasssss” with Mario playing his father.
Van Peebles made the film after a bitter experience making his one and only Hollywood studio backed film for Columbia Pictures “The Watermelon Man” with Godfrey Cambridge. He resolved after to never again work in such a stifling and compromising situation, and next wrote, directed, starred in and even composed the music score for his next project, "Sweet Sweetback," independently.
Making the film non-union, with an in-the-nick of-time $50,000 donation from Bill Cosby when he started to run of out money during production, and co-starring, as the film credits proudly state, “The Black Community”, the film has been the subject of heated debate ever since its first released, with audiences on both sides of the fence.
In the film, Van Peebles plays Sweetback, a performer in underground live sex shows (yeah, it’s that kind of film) who has a radical and political awakening when he savagely beats two white cops after witnessesing them beating up an innocent black man. After that. Sweetback is on the run to Mexico for freedom, while being chased by the authorities, encountering a wide assortment of oddball people along the way, using his wits, skills and even his sexual prowess, if necessary (like I said, it’s that kind of movie).
The film’s final victorious image are the words on the screen: “A BAADASSSSS NIGGER IS COMING BACK TO COLLECT SOME DUES”. Needless to say, Van Peebles knew exactly what he was doing - stirring up trouble and outrage. Even when the film got, what was back then an “X” rating from the MPAA, the ads boldly stated “Rated X - By an all white jury”. If that didn’t get people into the theater what could?
Some critics have called the film misogynistic, negative and tasteless, and that it merely was nothing more than a modern day variation of the old stereotype of the oversexed black buck, dating back to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of a Nation". But defenders called the film the first true black revolutionary film of its day and that it should be required viewing by every back person. (Personally I like to think of it as one of my favorite childhood memories.)
Visually and stylistically, the film may be crude and "rough around the edges" but even after more than 40 years, it still retains it power to shock, anger and, yes, even inspire.
Now the DVD specialty labels, Vinegar Syndrome and Xenon Pictures, are jointly teaming up to release "Sweet Sweetback" on blu-ray DVD for the first time sometime later this year.
No details yet about extras, but it would be impossible for it not to have a ton of specials features, including a running commentary about the film by Melvin Van Peebles himself.
And what’s more, "Sweet Sweetback" is just the first of several upcoming, first time blu-ray releases of underground black indie films from the 60’s and 70’s, from Vinegar Syndrome and Xenon. I will write about them all in future articles.
In the meantime, below is the original trailer for "Sweet Sweetback":
