Black History Month: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG
Written and Directed by Melvin Van Peebles
Starring Melvin Van Peebles
USA, 1971

After WATERMELON MAN was a box office success, Paramount Pictures wanted to sign Melvin Van Peebles to a three-picture deal. Instead he decided to take the independent route and SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG was born, starring Melvin Van Peebles himself as the title character, Sweetback, who grows up in a brothel and goes on the run from the LAPD after he saves a Black Panther from a brutal beating by the police.

On paper, this sounds like the ingredients for a fairly straightforward action movie, but it is actually Van Peebles’ most experimental film yet. He’s not satisfied to settle down into genre clichés (while also inadvertently creating new ones) and opts instead for crazy shots and even crazier editing.

This, along with the generally seedy and unpleasant characters, locations and situations featured in the film, does not make SWEETBACK an easy watch, and it won’t be for everyone, though it is worth it from a historical point of view, not only as a predecessor to the entire Blaxploitation genre but also as an important moment in Black cinema. Here we have an unapologetically sexual and militant Black man the likes of which the big screen had never seen, especially positioned as a folk hero. Or maybe he’s a folk anti-hero. I suppose it depends on your point of view.

In some ways the film’s unpleasantness (for lack of a better word) is its strength and the thing that separates it from many of the copycats who followed – Van Peebles is not afraid to show all kinds of violence without judgment, and doesn’t clean it up for easy consumption because it shouldn’t be easy to consume in the first place, and any judgment would ring false. 

It should be noted, if you want to give this movie a watch, it begins with a difficult-to-watch scene in which Melvin Van Peebles’ son, Mario, is cast as the younger version of Sweetback, who, at the age of 14, stars in a sex scene with a grown woman, so if you don’t want to see that – either skip the opening or skip the movie altogether.