In the lexicon of “revolutionary” black cinema SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG exists in a category of its own. It’s a stark and angry film, as you’d expect, but also a deeply raunchy and misogynistic one, reveling in urban squalor and doing very little to Uplift the Race. It’s no surprise that, over fifty years after its debut, people still don’t seem to know quite what to make of the film, or its creator.
The Chicago-born Melvin Peebles (1932-2021), who’s better known by his self-created moniker Melvin Van Peebles, was an authentic embodiment of the term Renaissance Man. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1953 he served a three year stint in the Air Force and then drove cable cars in San Francisco (which inspired the 1957 picture book THE BIG HEART, credited to “Melvin Van”), with his filmmaking endeavors piqued, he claimed, by a passengers’ suggestion. There followed multiple trips to Europe (Hollywood being unresponsive to his overtures) and a multi-year sojourn in Paris, where Van Peebles wrote a handful of novels and, inspired by the European Sprechgesang—or “spoken singing”—music style, became a most unlikely recording artist, starting with the album BRER SOUL (a forerunner of what we now call rap) in 1968. He also released his first self-directed feature, THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS/La Permission, that same year.
THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS was a strong, if over-directed, debut. About a
Paris-stationed black American soldier (Harry Baird) who fraternizes with a white woman (Nicole Berger) during a weekend pass, only to wind up demoted by his racist superiors, the film was steeped in the techniques of the French New Wave. This means a quasi-documentary overlay and a plethora of distracting stylistic flourishes, some of them quite brilliant (such as a blank frame into which the heads of Baird’s white colleagues slowly rise after seeing him canoodle with a white woman).
The film’s reception was strong enough that Van Peebles was able to land a directing job in Hollywood. The Columbia production WATERMELON MAN (1970) was a comedy about an obnoxious white man (the pioneering black comedian Godfrey Cambridge in whiteface) who wakes up one night to discover he’s turned black (indicated, in a quintessentially Van Peebles touch, by a close-up shot of his naked butt), with ramifications that, as you might guess, aren’t too encouraging. Of his work on the film Van Peebles wrote: “Eighty per cent of the creative energy that I put into WATERMELON MAN went into the corridors of power wrestling for the freedom to direct the film as I saw fit.”
The screenplay by Herman Raucher (of SWEET NOVEMBER and SUMMER OF ‘42) reportedly ended with its protagonist waking up to find that the whole thing was all a bad dream. Van Peebles added a more revolutionary black power angle, which drove a wedge between the director and screenwriter, who made sure to preserve his original vision in a 1970 tie-in novel. Throughout his life Van Peebles remained unrepentant about changing Raucher’s ending, although it actually fit the film’s viewpoint, of black existence as an unending nightmare, much better.
The black power gist led directly to SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG, which was and remains Van Peebles’ masterpiece. He was unable to interest Columbia (with whom he’d signed a short-lived three-picture deal) in the project, and so financed it himself, becoming an independent filmmaking pioneer long before guys like Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee.
In Van Peebles’ 1971 book THE MAKING OF SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG he claims the whole thing began with a mind-expanding masturbation session (because “they have electro-shock, so why not semen-shock?”). He set out to make a film starring “The Black Community” that was “Entertainment-wise, a motherfucker,” and bore a moniker that forsook “a subtitle about it being made for brothers and sisters. With that title they would KNOW.” He used the connections he’d made directing WATERMELON MAN and episodic television with Bill Cosby (who provided a large portion of SWEET SWEETBACK’S budget) to mount the production, and kept it going through cunning, deception and superhuman perseverance—and also because he promoted it as a porno, which kept the unions from interfering.
The pornographic specter is evident in the opening scene. Depicted is a young boy,
played by Van Peebles’ son Mario, being looked over by several doting women. Their interest in him becomes clear in the following shot, in which the boy is invited into a bedroom by one of the women, who encourages him to strip down and ravish her. She gasps and carries on about how he’s got a “sweet back,” and the boy is replaced with the grown-up Sweetback, played by the elder Van Peebles, who’s still demonstrating the sweetness of his back. In this way we’re shown the character’s one and only talent: he can satisfy any woman, and does so on multiple occasions (there’s a direct line between Sweetback and the hero of Jamaa Fanaka’s 1975 WELCOME HOME BROTHER CHARLES/SOUL VENGEANCE, who literally uses his penis as a weapon).
Sweetback is a fun-loving fellow who turns revolutionary after impulsively killing two corrupt cops, precipitating a deadly pursuit through the more sordid corners of ghetto-ville, USA, and eventually the desert. The film is essentially an extended 90-minute chase spiced with violence, profanity (“You’re as hot as little sister’s twat!”), sex (of course) and gratuitous psychedelic touches (superimpositions, flash cuts, negative exposure, etc.) that often give it the feel of a bad acid trip.
That latter element is one of the things I enjoyed about the film, which contains many inspired elements. I especially got a kick out of the off-screen “Chorus of Colored Bourgeois Angels,” provided by a then unknown Earth, Wind and Fire, who alternately taunt our hero (“If he can’t burn you out he’ll stomp you out!”) and cheer him on (“Haul your black ass, Sweetback!”). Also contained are a man (Simon Chuckster) seen taking a dump, the same man getting deafened by gunshots, a close up of a festering wound, a lizard eaten onscreen and, in a conclusion that’s nearly as shocking as the opening, two lovingly photographed dogs, killed by Sweetback, that clearly aren’t “playing” dead (they being actual carcasses provided, Van Peebles claimed, by the Humane Society).
The film was distributed by sleaze-meister Jerry Gross’s Cinemation Industries with a self-imposed X rating (from, as the advertising tagline trumpeted, “An All-White Jury”). Initially just two theaters in the entire country were willing to play the film, but it was a record-smashing smash in both, and given that “the Man has an Achilles pocket book,” other venues were inspired to take it on. The result was the most successful independent film of its time, which may seem difficult to believe today. SWEET SWEETBACK is, after all, self-indulgent, oft-incoherent and painfully under-budgeted, but it has a propulsive energy that hasn’t dimmed in the fifty-plus years since its initial release.
Van Peebles’ post-SWEETBACK life furthered the renaissance air of his earlier years. He had trouble finding work in Hollywood, whose gatekeepers reportedly treated Van Peebles the same way casino owners would somebody who wins too much money in their venue (although his claims that he got no work in
SWEETBACK’S wake were inaccurate, as he was signed on to direct the 1977 Richard Pryor vehicle GREASED LIGHTNING, only to get fired). No matter: he became a successful playwright with AIN’T SUPPOSED TO DIE A NATURAL DEATH (1971) and DON’T PLAY US CHEAP (1972), and an options trader on Wall Street (which inspired the 1986 book BOLD MONEY: A NEW WAY TO PLAY THE OPTIONS MARKET).
In his filmmaking career Van Peebles continued the staunchly independent road established by SWEETBACK. Unfortunately his follow-up feature DON’T PLAY US CHEAP (1973), which preceded the similarly titled stage musical, was a bust. About a pair of mischievous imps invading a Harlem house party, it was well-received in its stage-bound form, garnering a Tony nomination, but doesn’t work at all as a movie.
The Van Peebles short VROOOM VROOM VROOOOM, included in the 1996 anthology TALES OF EROTICA, was rather interesting. It featured a young black man (Richard Barboza) given a motorcycle that due to a voodoo curse transforms into a beautiful woman. An energetic and perverse little film with a quintessentially Van Peebles funkiness.
Alas, subsequent Van Peebles productions like the straight-to-video IDENTITY CRISIS (1989) and the made-for-TV GANG IN BLUE (1996) were bummers–although an enjoyable making-of book, NO IDENTITY CRISIS (1990), was written about the former film. The problem may have been that both films arrived too late, with Van Peebles’ streetwise sensibilities feeling out of place in the politically correct era. Note how PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY had a hissy fit over the “Vulgar self-promotion” of NO IDENTITY CRISIS, and decried Melvin-isms like “My chicken-shit sons over there think you’re fine. Now are you going to give them some play or not?”
Another issue was with one of those “chicken-shit sons” Mario, who partnered with Melvin on both films. The two men’s sensibilities are not entirely complimentary, Mario being far more refined than his ghetto-bred father. That dichotomy was further evidenced in PANTHER (1995), scripted by Melvin and directed by Mario, which offered a disappointingly conventional history of the Black Panthers that, with its ever-present Hollywood gloss, represents everything the elder Van Peebles opposed. There was also BAADASSSSS! (2003), which is another story entirely.
BAADASSSSS! dramatized the making of SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG, with Mario Van Peebles directing, co-scripting and playing his dad. The film is lighthearted and affectionate, and thus far removed from its less forgiving inspiration. That being said, BAADASSSSS! must be counted as a success, an unfailingly entertaining and affectionate film that’s almost certainly the best work Mario Van P. has ever done behind the camera.
His onscreen emoting is also quite strong, replicating his old man’s temperamental self-righteousness and elusive charm with pinpoint accuracy. Mario is sure to add his own childhood perspective, devoting a fair amount of time to his participation in SWEETBACK’S opening sex scene (the particulars of which are recreated here). Showing the young Mario (Khleo Thomas) constantly at his father’s side throughout his odyssey doesn’t feel entirely accurate (as Mario barely figures into THE MAKING OF SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG), but we get a good sense of the hardships and sacrifices it took to get SWEETBACK made. The film has the structure of a ROCKY movie, being a follow-your-dreams odyssey filled with hardship yet concluding on a note of unambiguous triumph.
Did BAADASSSSS! do anything to further the reputation of SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG? Not really. SWEET SWEETBACK seems destined to be the ugly cousin of black cinema, getting deliberately overshadowed in critical
dissertations by the more easily digestible likes of Gordon Parks’ THE LEARNING TREE (1969) and Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP (1978). Until recently finding it on home video was a difficult prospect, with the 1997 Criterion laserdisc and 2001 Xenon DVD (both long out of print) being its most readily available versions. Note a scholarly discussion of SWEET SWEETBACK contained on the 2021 MELVIN VAN PEEBLES ESSENTIAL FILMS Criterion DVD set, whose participants grudgingly acknowledge the film’s historical value while tip-toeing around its darker, more politically incorrect elements.
Not that SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG needs critical approval to maintain its power. The shocking charge it evokes gives it a definite edge, and I predict that edge will remain sharpened long after those other films have been forgetten.