Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
Movie rating: 6/10
Widely recognized as the first blaxploitation film, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a showcase for auteur Melvin Van Peebles, who in addition to playing the title role directed, wrote, co-produced, edited, and composed the music for the film. Like a lot of influential movies, Sweet Sweetback can feel less impactful watching it for the first time decades after its release. I can appreciate the electrifying effect this movie had on contemporary audiences. Much about it remains dazzling, provocative, and unlike any other movie I’ve seen. But once you get past its historical significance I think it might be a little overrated, both as a movie and in terms of its politics.
The film start on a promising note. We begin in medias res with our protagonist Sweetback (Van Peebles) on the run. The following words are superimposed on the screen: “This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man”. It’s a great way to kick off the film. The opening credits offer a similarly radical tone. Rather than Van Peebles, whose name is buried among the rest of the cast listed alphabetically, the film announces it is “Starring The Black Community”. This isn’t false modesty on the part of Van Peebles: the title character of Sweetback gets a grand total of six, count ‘em, six lines in the entire film. It’s a largely silent performance. While other cast members have more dialogue, the fact that “The Black Community” gets top billing also reflects the fact that Sweetback relies on the support of the Black community as he flees the authorities.
The film flashes back to a young Sweetback, an orphan sheltered by prostitutes at a Los Angeles brothel in the 1940s. Van Peebles’s son Mario—only 13 years old at the time of filming, and later a successful director and actor in his own right—plays Sweetback as a boy. As the Wikipedia plot summary describes it: “Working as a towel boy, he is seduced by one of the prostitutes. The women name him ‘Sweet Sweetback’ in honor of his sexual prowess and large penis. As an adult, Sweetback performs in the whorehouse sex show.”
When a Black man is murdered and the Black community pressures police to bring in a suspect, two white LAPD officers stop by the brothel and offer to bring in Sweetback as a suspect to appease their superiors, after which they will release him in a couple days for lack of evidence. En route to the station, officers arrest a young Black Panther named Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales), then pull over and start beating him. Sweetback uses his handcuffs as brass knuckles to beat the officers and flees. Later, reunited with Mu-Mu, he kills two officers. The bulk of the film follows Sweetback running from the police pursuing him.
Huey Newton’s analysis
Before I get into my own thoughts, I’d like to offer some context on the political significance of this film. None other than Huey P. Newton, co-founder of and minister of defense for the Black Panther Party, praised Sweet Sweetback in the highest terms, to the point where he devoted an entire issue of the party’s newspaper to his analysis of the film. Newton called Sweet Sweetback “the first truly revolutionary Black film made and it is presented to us by a Black man.” While I have the utmost respect for Newton and can see where he was coming from in the context of his own time, I think he gives the film too much credit in terms of its revolutionary implications.
Let’s start with the early scenes in the brothel. Newton writes:
The women are tired, yet they are happy. This is because they are feeding a small boy. As you look at the women you see that they are strong and beautiful Black women, definitely African in ancestry and symbolic of Mother Africa. The size of some of their breasts signifies how Africa is potentially the breadbasket of the world. The women are feeding stew to a small boy who is apparently very hungry, and as he downs it they keep offering him more. These women with their large breasts potentially could feed and nourish the world, and if this is so, certainly they have the potential to raise their liberator, for that is what the small boy is, the future of the women, of Black people, liberation.
They are in a house of prostitution not of their own will, but because of the conditions the oppressor makes for us. They are there to survive, and they sell their love to do so, therefore our love is distorted and corrupted with the sale.
Here’s an example where I think Newton reads too much into the film. Of course, people are free to interpret films however they wish. Part of what makes art criticism so interesting is precisely how different people have different reactions to the same art. But finding revolutionary symbolism in the fact that these women have large breasts is a bit of a stretch. You might as well argue for the revolutionary content of the works of Russ Meyer (full disclosure: I’ve never seen any of Meyer’s films, but apparently Roger Ebert was a big fan).
Newton has similar praise for the scene in which the prostitute has sex with a young Sweetback, which he calls “a scene of pure love and therefore it was a sacred and holy act.” This scene is clearly meant to symbolize Sweetback’s ascent into manhood. Newton continues:
What happens is not a distorted act of prostitution even though it takes place in a house of prostitution. The place is profane because of the oppressive conditions, but so are our communities also oppressed. The Black community is often profane because of the dirtiness there, but this is not caused by the people, they are the victims of a very oppressive system. Yet within the heart of the community, just as in the film, the sacred rite of feeding and nourishing the youth goes on; they are brought to their manhood as liberators. […]
The oppressor would not view the love scene in the same way, because his whole introduction to sex is from a perverted perspective, divorced from his whole being. That is why he rated the film “X”, because what he saw was a sex movie. We know that it is much more than that. He is introduced to sex as something outside of himself, while it is hard for us to remember our first sexual experience. It is not something outside of us. It grows in us as any other part of our personality, and it is very integrated just as our arms, our hand or our breathing. This is why it was very necessary to have this young boy having this relationship in a place that is viewed from the outside as dirty and profane, because our community is also considered dirty and profane.
Alright, so you can call me a prude if you want—maybe I just don’t get it and my reaction to this scene is informed by viewing sex from a perspective “divorced from my own being.” But I thought it was weird how this movie starts with a sex scene involving a 13-year-old boy, especially when it involves full-frontal nudity for the young actor and that actor is the director’s own son. Just my two cents.
Newton’s whole analysis praises the movie’s other sex scenes in a similar way. “Every time after that when Sweetback engages in sex with a sister, it is always an act of survival, and a step towards his liberation,” Newton says. “That is why it is important not to view the movie as a sex film or the sexual scenes as actual sex acts.” Newton says of a scene in which Sweetback has public sex with the female leader of a Hells Angels motorcycle gang:
When the gang leader reveals herself to be a woman, Sweetback knows that she is no match for the weapon he chooses. The gang promises to do them in after she does him in, but in the end “the Pres” is laid out on the ground in complete submission. The Black women showed him the way to liberation and he used his knowledge effectively.
Sex is the path to liberation! That’s what Newton is saying here. But come on, this is a ridiculous scene more suited to a pornographic film. The president of the motorcycle gang challenges Sweetback to a duel, and he is allowed to choose the weapon. His choice? “Fucking.” Sweetback has sex with the woman in front of her entire motorcycle gang and is judged to have “won” the duel.
Not every critic agreed with Newton about the revolutionary content of the film’s many sex scenes. A few months after The Black Panther published Newton’s analysis, historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote a direct response with an essay in Ebony magazine, “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland”, directly rebutting the idea that Sweetback saves himself through his sexual prowess:
[I]t is necessary to say frankly that nobody ever fucked his way to freedom. And it is mischievous and reactionary finally for anyone to suggest to black people in 1971 that they are going to be able to screw their way across the Red Sea. Fucking will not set you free. If fucking freed, black people would have celebrated the millennium 400 years ago.
Bennett says the film is “neither revolutionary nor black because it presents the spectator with sterile daydreams and a superhero who is ahistorical, selfishly individualist with no revolutionary program, who acts out of panic and desperation." He describes the scene of young Sweetback having sex for the first time as the “rape of a child by a 40-year-old prostitute”.
Black nationalist poet and author Haki R. Madhubuti agreed with Bennett and called Sweet Sweetback “a limited, money-making, auto-biographical fantasy of the odyssey of one Melvin Van Peebles through what he considered to be the Black community.” I have to say I lean more towards the viewpoint of Bennett and Madhubuti than Newton in this regard.
However, there are other aspects of Newton’s analysis that I agree with, and he makes some incisive points. For example, there’s a scene where police raid a motel where a Black man is sleeping with a white woman and beat him to the point where he loses an eye. Newton says of this scene: “When [the police] realize that he is not Sweetback their reply is ‘So What?’ Melvin Van Peebles is making it plain that we are all Sweetbacks and we are all united in this victimization.” Van Peebles further drives home the idea that “we are all Sweetbacks” when police question members of the community to find Sweetback’s whereabouts. All display unity by professing to have no idea where Sweetback is.
Maybe the most interesting point Newton makes is regarding Sweetback’s almost total lack of dialogue, which shows again how movies can have different effects on different viewers. Where I saw a lack of characterization—the natural screen presence and acting talent of Van Peebles is the main thing that kept me interested in the protagonist—Newton says many Black audiences at the time were able to project themselves onto Sweetback:
This unity [among the Black community in the film] is also demonstrated by the fact that Sweetback has almost no dialogue in the entire movie. He says hardly anything at all. Why? Because the movie is not starring Sweetback, it is starring the Black community. Most of the audiences at the movie are Black and they talk to the screen. They supply the dialogues, because all of us are Sweetback, we are all in the same predicament of being victims.
I think the reason my criticism of Newton’s analysis here focuses heavily on his treatment of the sex scenes is because it gets to the very heart of what this movie is, and the blaxploitation genre as a whole.
Revolutionary or exploitative?
The main question, as I see it, is to what degree this movie is revolutionary versus exploitative. Part of the significance of Sweet Sweetback is that it was the first film produced by a Black filmmaker that focused on Black characters, as well as showing Hollywood that films targeted to Black audiences with a “militant” perspective could be highly profitable. But the portrayal of Black characters in the blaxploitation genre has often been controversial. Some critics have accused them of perpetuating negative stereotypes, while being exploitative in their lurid subject matter and heavy emphasis on sex, nudity, and violence.
Ironically, the most significant criticism of blaxploitation I’ve read in that regard also comes from the Black Panther newspaper! The book The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, which compiles many old articles and selections from the party paper, does not include Huey Newton’s analysis of Sweet Sweetback. I only learned about Newton’s praise of the film and in-depth review from Wikipedia. But the book does include a 1972 article that harshly criticizes the entire blaxploitation genre. “The Black Panther Party denounces this silver coated form of oppression,” party co-founder and chairman Bobby Seale said of blaxploitation films.
The article—which mentions a range of blaxploitation titles such as Shaft and Super Fly, but interestingly not Sweet Sweetback—expands on Seale’s criticism:
By turning our oppression into fantasies, by making Black people look like fun-loving, love-making, hustling freaks, Hollywood would have us walk away from the theatre feeling that all of the problems we saw were of our own cause. The dehumanization of our communities comes in black and white, or technicolor, as the mad dog moguls of Hollywood grind out negative images of Black people, destroying the positive ones.
Through blaxploitation, the article continues, “the racist stereotypes of old have just been updated and placed in a contemporary setting.” It adds, “We believe that Black actors and actresses should represent more thoroughly the real lives of people in our communities without the sensationalism and excessive sex.”
It’s hard to see how Sweet Sweetback, as ground zero for blaxploitation, does not highlight the exact qualities this article in The Black Panther criticizes. The hero, after all, is a well-endowed Black man whose primary skill is his sexual prowess, but who barely speaks at all. On the other hand, Wikipedia notes a good point made by critic Donald Bogle in a New York Times interview that “the film in some ways met the Black audience’s compensatory needs after years of asexual, Sidney Poitier-type characters and that they wanted a ‘viable, sexual, assertive, arrogant black male hero.’”
In that context, Sweet Sweetback might be a case of swinging too far in the opposite direction. Compare Sweetback to a contemporary ‘viable, sexual, assertive, arrogant” white male hero, James Bond, who actually has a personality and substantial dialogue, and Sweetback comes off less a character and more an archetype.
Meanwhile, a good portion of the Black male characters in Sweet Sweetback are gangsters, and the Black female characters prostitutes. The movie is full of the “sensationalism and excessive sex” that the 1972 Black Panther article associated with blaxploitation. For these reasons, my view is that the movie is less revolutionary than Newton’s analysis would have us believe.
Overall impressions
The fact that we can have these arguments about the meaning of Sweet Sweetback, I’ll admit, does indicate that the film has more substance than your average exploitation flick. But let’s answer the question: How is it as a movie?
My gut response is: it’s OK. The near-silence of the title character didn’t make him the most fascinating character for me—though Sweetback is less passive than, say, Clark Kent in Man of Steel. I thought the sex scenes were excessive and at times bordered on the pornographic.
Despite being only 97 minutes long, the film still drags at times due to the monotonous quality of certain elements, such as scene after scene of Sweetback running. The music, performed by a then-unknown Earth, Wind & Fire, is funky, but unfortunately the same snippet is used over and over to the point where it becomes grating. On the hand, we also hear a choir singing hymn-based vocalizations in the Black gospel tradition, which serve as a sort of Greek chorus addressing Sweetback.
The film is striking and innovative visually, especially considering its low budget. Being less well-versed in the technical side of filmmaking, I’ll leave a more detailed assessment to author S. Torriano Berry. In his book The 50 Most Influential Black Films, Berry praised the movie’s “odd camera angles, superimpositions, reverse-key effects, box and matting effects, rack-focus shots, extreme zooms, stop-motion and step-printing, and an abundance of jittery handheld camera work” which help express the “paranoid nightmare” Sweetback’s life has become.
One of the film’s more unique aspects—and it says a lot that this remains so rare in U.S. cinema—is its negative portrayal of police, who harass, beat, torture, and kill Black people. The police commissioner (John Dullaghan) openly hurls racial slurs at a meeting of fellow officers, two of whom are Black. More than 50 years later, this is still a sharp contrast to the vast majority of films and TV shows which present police as heroic and benevolent. If it’s refreshing today to see a film willing to depict police brutality, I can only imagine how it must have felt in 1971.
Despite Sweetback’s taciturn nature, it must be said the hero is resourceful and clever. He switches clothes with a hippie at one point to throw police off his trail. He eats a lizard in the desert to survive, and uses his own urine mixed with soil to make a mudpack that he applies to a wound to accelerate healing. It’s a credit to Van Peebles that he manages to make us care about Sweetback despite having so little dialogue. The actor also performed all his own stunts.
Sweet Sweetback has enough artistic value and historical significance to merit at least one viewing. Whatever your thoughts on the film’s politics, they’re clearly substantial enough to provoke some interesting debate, which is more than you can say about most exploitation films. I give Van Peebles credit for his ambition, radical perspective (at least in certain respects), technical experimentation, and willingness to take creative risks. Any movie that kickstarts an entire genre is worth a look.