Word: sweetback
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...shot in 20 days on a wheezing budget with a crew recruited largely from skin flicks and the streets. Critics hated it, distributors shunned it. But black audiences loved Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, a foxy film centering around an outlaw from the ghetto who throws down girls-white and black -the way Billy the Kid tossed back sarsaparilla. In the end he gets away with everything. Huey Newton, Black Panther defense minister, called it "the first truly revolutionary black film...
...movie was produced, written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles, who also stars as Sweetback, the outraged and outrageous hero. The scion of a Los Angeles whorehouse, Sweetback graduates to an obvious profession: pimping. He "goes bad" while watching two white policemen cudgel a black youth wrongly accused of inciting riot. Sweetback reacts by mashing the cops' skulls with their own handcuffs. He then sets off on a ghetto version of the traditional Wild West chase. He fights and fornicates, leaving behind a trail of bodies in various stages of disrepair. When cornered by two cops, Sweetback responds with...
Chartreuse Suits. An aggressive and often affronting movie, Sweetback is also irreverent, scatological and crude. "It's for those dudes in the chartreuse suits," explains Van Peebles. "Those cats who want to be card-carrying whites -man, they...
...like John Williams can reveal his frustrations openly (in The Man Who Cried I Am ), Van Peebles merely jumps into what he feels to be the black mainstream without knowing what he's getting into. "You're as hot as little sister's twat" says a street minister to Sweetback; but when Van Peebles has his characters talk like that, he's speaking from a small part of today's ghetto...
...Sweetback is not only bad, but dumb, and full of dumb, ineffective violence. And to be afraid of reviewing it because of the color of one's skin-or even to make that distinction a qualifier for a review-is to glibly cop-out on universal standards of decency, as well as admit to racial hermeticism...