***1/2 (out of ****)
Directed, written, produced, and starring Melvin Van Peebles
1971
97 min X
I could start out “Sweet Sweetback” talking about its historical significance, with what it was the first to do, but doesn’t that always imply that a film only holds up when you take its place in history into consideration? Doesn’t that always imply that it’s a little bit, well, boring and incomplete if you don’t have a history book right next to you? Certainly “Sweetback” is a groundbreaker, but let’s not think about all that now. Let’s think about what it IS, which is an intense and startling montage of sounds and images, powered and driven by indignation, about a people sick of getting trampled on. Or, as the movie puts it, “all the Brothers and Sisters who are tired of being held down by the Man.”
Another title card that appears after that one claims the movie is “Starring The Black Community.” Ostentatious, perhaps, but this is back when movies could make grand and sincere statements, as opposed to now when a movie can be as big as it wants, perhaps even win 11 Academy Awards, only if it can be easily proven to mean nothing at all. “Sweet Sweetback” is not about character or story—neither Sweetback himself nor any other character is really developed—so much as it is a journey through the iconography of the urban 1970s, which was largely poor and black and, up until this point, hadn’t gotten much silver screen time. Oops, I played the history card after I said I wouldn’t.
The basic plot is simplicity itself, the kind of thing that would take about five or ten pages in Toni Morrison and then pop up again for a couple of paragraphs fifty or sixty pages later. A street hustler—that’s a nice name for “male prostitute who only has female clients”—sees two corrupt and dirty cops beating the crap out of a helpless suspect. The hustler, named Sweet Sweetback (writer-director Melvin Van Peebles), wallops the cops within inches of their lives. Soon Sweetback is on the lamb and the net is closing, while swarms of dirty cops beat and bludgeon their way through the black community.
Nighttime during Sweetback’s flight is a neon Babylon of “XXX” and “All Nude Girls,” with the occasional “Jesus Saves.” Daytime is an economically depressed wasteland of blackened factories, abandoned warehouses, shabby houses, and chipped paint. Sweetback visits a church where heaven is preached from the pulpit and revolution is preached behind closed doors. He seeks help from his pimp, who is deafened for his troubles, from the local mob, who treat him as the walking dead, from an old girlfriend, who wants a piece of him, and eventually from a white biker gang. And everywhere he turns, there’s a woman waiting to get a little action, although the fact that Sweetback obliges them joylessly probably means something. At every step, we catch glimpses of Sweetback’s neighbors telling police officers that they haven’t seen him or even know who he is.
Sweetback is eventually joined on his exodus by the suspect he rescued, who is apparently a political revolutionary, although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to read the back of the box to figure that out. He’s called the “ringleader” by a cop in a quick line of dialogue, but there’s nothing to indicate the cop isn’t just making fun of him in a “crown-of-thorns” kind of way.
“Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song” is very much a movie of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with real locations instead of sets, detached, almost documentary-style camera angles, and plenty of experimentation with lighting, overlapping images, conversations directly to the camera, and even some animated negative images. It’s as trippy as “Easy Rider” from two years earlier and in many ways not unlike what Nicholas Roeg was doing on the other side of the world with “Walkabout.” It is also a dirty cheap production entirely shot in 19 days; to call it rough around the edges would be merciful. Certainly a lot of the script was probably built around necessity, around which locations the filmmakers could access and their limited ability to record sound. But even Leonardo da Vinci was limited by the colors that he had.
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