Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)

 

Fifty years ago, Melvin Van Peebles dropped an incendiary cinematic bomb with the release of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a film that is often misclassified as blaxploitation. Blaxploitation is the label given to '70s films with Black themes that were created by white filmmakers, targeting Black audiences. Sweet Sweetback was an independent satirical protest film, funded and directed by a Black man, that has relevance two generations after its initial release.

The film was written and directed by Van Peebles, whose earlier film Watermelon Man (1970) was trashed by The New York Times as a messy, unfunny waste of his talent. Sweet Sweetback is a disjointed and uneven tale of political pandering, police corruption, community disintegration, religious fraud, false arrests, narrow escapes, violent retaliation and sex. Van Peebles is the title character, a man raised and exploited by prostitutes, who finds himself friendless after he is targeted by police needing an arrest after the murder of a Black man. Van Peebles's character spends most of the film running from the police.

Sweet Sweetback was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry last year, and, to my mind, is more important for what it says than how it says it. It is not a model of great filmmaking, but, in many other ways it is a great film to see and discuss, to wrestle with Van Peeble's sardonic vision and dark defiance and the picture's warning that those wronged will eventually return to "collect some dues."