Word: sweetback
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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...
...Abbey Taking Off at the Cheri Sweet Sweetback's Baadasss Song at the Music Hall
...worst and most misanthropic of the new films is Melvin van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasss Song. A portrait of the Negro as the Great American Penis (the "sweet sweet-back" of the title character). it is a vile piece of ego-tripping by a black filmmaker who hopes (presumably by default) to become the "revolutionary" mass-media force of his people...
...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...