Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles
Written by Melvin Van Peebles
1971/US
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental
One of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
Tagline: You bled my Momma–You bled my Poppa–But you won’t bleed me.
This may be historic, revolutionary and all that but I hated almost everything about it.
A boy (Mario Van Peebles) is raised in a brothel. When he is about 13, he is initiated into sex by one of the prostitutes. We watch at length as the little boy mounts a woman twice his size and gets to work. His prodigious endowments earn him the nickname “Sweetback”. Sweetback grows up to be Melvin Van Peebles and he is now the main attraction of a live sex show. We get to watch some of the “acts”.
Eventually white LAPD officers raid the club and coerce its owner into supplying a man who can be temporarily used as a suspect in a case the police are getting nowhere with. He is assured the man will not even be handcuffed and will be returned in a couple of days. Sweetback is the patsy. He escapes later after killing a couple of cops. Now he is the subject of a major manhunt and will make his way to Mexico for the rest of the film. If you think the graphic sex stops during this part you would be wrong.
From the unsimulated sex, to the amateur acting, to the murky photography, to the graphic violence, this movie had nothing to offer me. The score is by Van Peebles and the band Earth, Wind, and Fire. They sound nothing like they did when they began to sell records.
Fun Facts: Bill Cosby lent Van Peebles $50,000 to make this thing. The director also reportedly collected worker’s compensation from the Director’s Guild for contracting gonorrhea during one of the sex scenes.
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