As you can tell, that exhaustive white-guy’s-take-on-black-cinema has tapped me out, hence we have resorted to pet blogging again. This is Jenni’s cat, Zeus Oliver, also known as Pooh. He’s got mild epilepsy, we can’t quite figure out what triggers it. He’s still a lot of fun.
SO how you all feeling about this Alito problem? Are you worried?
“This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the man.”
I’m back… Could just be coincidence, but my pathetic number of hits has dropped off in the past two weeks with no new posts. Are you all actually reading this?
So, I initially promised a review of “A Bullet for the General’. But I’ve found that if I don’t write the review that very next day, I tend to forget the details. Soooo, instead we’re going to talk about the film that is considered by many to be one of the most important in black cinema, ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song’, by Melvin Van Peebles. This is often the film credited with kicking off the whole ‘Blaxploitation’ genre of which I am so fond. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this film. Last night, however, I saw ‘Baadassss’, a recent film by Melvin’s son, Mario (of ‘New Jack City’ fame). Mario plays his father, and it is basically a dramatization of the making of Sweetback. I have a much greater appreciation for the original after seeing this film; I’ll get into that in a moment.
>The original Sweetback was a no-budget film shot on 16mm around 1970. The protagonist is a sex performer who, when brought in on an arrest, ends up killing two corrupt racist cops as they are beating another wrongfully accused black man. The rest of the film is basically about his escape. The film was rated X (‘by an all-white jury’ as Melvin put it). There’s the obvious foul language, and violence and the sex scenes, according to Van Peebles, are real (he even says he got the clap from one of the actresses). It’s not like a porno movie (gratuitous genital close-ups, etc), but you can kinda tell it’s really going on. The sex subplot, as we learn in ‘Baadassss’, was so Van Peebles could get around having to use and pay union actors, because the union wasn’t interested in porno movies. They thought he was filming some kind of Afro-porn, so they left him alone. Sweetback eventually makes it to the Mexican border, alive. The movie ends and we are told, “WATCH OUT. A BAAD ASSSS NIGGER IS COMING BACK TO COLLECT SOME DUES.”
Van Peebles had already had a successful mainstream Hollywood picture, called ‘Watermelon Man’, a comedy about a white guy who somehow turns black. Columbia was ready to offer him a three picture deal. But he was disgusted as to how blacks were portrayed in Hollywood; the mammy, Jack Benny’s Rochester, the bug-eyed comic relief to the white movie star, etc. Columbia expected more of the same from him. He wanted to make a film that showed the reality of it all, of ‘trying to get the Man’s foot out of my ass’. He assembled a crew of disenfranchised Latinos, whites, blacks and Asians, who were traditionally shut out from working in Hollywood, and shot Sweetback. As we see in ‘Baadassss’, everything that could have gone wrong, did. The film crew was arrested. Peebles continually ran out of money, and his health even deteriorated. When he finally found a distributor, he could only premiere in two theaters in the entire country (Detroit and recently desegregated Atlanta), and could hardly advertise, for most newspapers wouldn’t run an ad for an X-rated movie, let alone print the title. But after the first two showings to empty theaters in Detroit, the film caught on fire, thanks to the support of the Black Panthers (who ended up making this film mandatory viewing for the membership). When it was all said and done, Sweetback brought in something like 15 million dollars, and ended up being the highest-grossing independent film ever as of 1971
When I originally saw Sweetback, maybe a year ago or so, I didn’t really care for it. It had the feel of a disjointed, psychedelic art film at times. The opening scene, in which a 13-year old Sweetback loses his virginity, got me off on the wrong foot (Mario was the 13-year old). I felt like I might have been watching kiddie-porn, and there is no way in hell this could be released today. The soundtrack by the then-unknown Earth, Wind and Fire, was pumping, though. You wouldn’t know it was EWF, because it was raw, gritty funk, not the slick EWF they would later become. When I was done watching it, I was wondering what the big deal was. Maybe I was expecting something a bit more mainstream, a la ‘Shaft’. After watching ‘Baadasss’, I now understand. When put in the context of what it meant to the black community at that time to have a movie they could relate to, to see the white racist cops they were so accustomed to, the dirtiness of the ghetto, and to have the black hero stick it to the man and not die in the end- that spoke to them in volumes. Audiences would interact with the movie screen, yelling at it and agreeing with it, and cheering on Sweetback. There was no ‘yowsa/mammy’ B.S. going on here. No dapper and polite Sidney Poitier wanting to be accepted by the white man. This was a black film, on black terms and after seeing the dramatization of its making, and all the bullshit involved, I do have a greater appreciation for this film and am going to go back and watch it again with a slightly different perspective. If I were you, I would rent the original Sweetback, then watch ‘Baadasss’ shortly after, and then go and watch the original again. They’re both available on Netflix.
After seeing the runaway success of Sweetback, the movie bigwigs finally realized there was a niche that they had been missing out on. There was a detective story in pre-production at the time. They changed the setting to the ghetto, made the hero a black man, and ‘Shaft’ was born. Many other successful films followed, such as “Foxy Brown’, “Superfly’ and others. The ‘blaxploitation’ genre was born. That, my friends, is another posting in itself. But to get you going, go . This is an ‘everything you need to know about Blaxploitation films’ kind of place. Enjoy.
My mother’s coming to visit for two weeks, so it might be slim pickin’s around here for a few days. Anyways, I wanted to let you all know about a great, irreverent blog by a man named Joe Bageant. One could best describe him as an angry, old cracker. He grew up in a total white trash existence(and doesn’t hide from that fact), and has some really interesting insights into the culture. And he can be rude, too (not as rude as the Rude Pundit, of course, but rude enough).
For a great introduction to Joe, check out his take on the ridiculous fundamentalist favorite, the ‘Left Behind’ series, here. And be sure to bookmark his site when you get there.
Also, Chris Mooney over at CSICOP has a great commentary about the recent Dover/ID ruling(see my ‘ Behold His Noodly Appendage’ post a bit further downon this blog – page down a bit). You can read his article here.
Ok, gonna put a film review up shortly, but first a bit of background….
I’m not much of a movie guy. I don’t like Star Wars. When growing up, it was the horrible ‘slasher flick’ stuff I was into. I know, complete crap. Since then I have come to appreciate good film, I swear. I love many of the great American films of the 70′s; the Godfather flicks, a lot of Al Pacino’s stuff from that era, and the jury is still out for me on Scorsese. Never been much of an ‘art film’ kind of guy, either. My attention over the past year or so has shifted to two particular genres… ‘blaxploitation’ films and so-called ‘spaghetti westerns’. Don’t roll your eyes.
I’ll go into the blaxploitation at a later post (it’s so much more than just Shaft and Superfly). A bit of background on spaghetti westerns for you now… Basically a spaghetti western refers to a ‘western’ (as in ‘old American west’) made by Italian filmmakers, generally between 1965 and 1975, although the bulk of the noteworthy ones were made before 1970. Funny thing about the Italian film industry back then (maybe now, too, I don’t know)- apparently when one type of film did well, it was copied ad nauseum by the rest of the film industry, with a notable decline in quality as it went on. For example, the ‘swords and sandals’ epics of the late 50′s-early 60′s produced hundreds of really bad films. It started with ‘Maciste’, the Italian version of Hercules-like character. It was quite successful. Next thing you know, there are hundreds of Maciste films out, such as ‘Maciste vs. The Vampires’ and “Maciste vs. the Moon Man’. I’m not making this up.
Anyways, after the runaway success of director Sergio Leone’s ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ in 1964 (the film that launched Clint Eastwood’s film career), many Italian filmmakers followed suit and there was an explosion of Italian westerns. Some were great, others were terrible. Many were filmed with an international cast, and since sound was overdubbed afterwards, often the actors would speak in their own languages (so basically you’d have a dialogue being read by Klaus Kinski in German, Clint Eastwood in English, and Gian Maria Volonte in Italian). They were often filmed in Rome and in the desert of Almira, in Spain(which I hear looks nothing like the American southwest).
Sergio Leone deserves his own post, so I’ll work on that at a later date. But what, you ask, made the Italian westerns so different from thier American counterparts?
Well, the striking difference to me, as one who could never stomach the John Wayne kind of western, was the moral ambiguity of its central characters, and the underlying social commentary of the changes going on in the world of the 60′s. In the traditional western, we knew who the good guys were, and yes, they often wore the white hats. In the Italian western, we’re not so sure if the good guy is so good. If we look at Eastwood’s ‘man with no name’ from ‘A Fistful of Dollars’. he is playing both sides of the forces in town against each other. He doesn’t do it for the people of the town so he can ride off into the sunset feeling good about himself. He just wants to take advantage of a situation, make that ‘fistful of dollars’ and get the hell out of town. Maybe that’s why these films resonate with me whereas the cheesy American themes, which romanticized another West that never existed, don’t. Granted, as has been said before, the spaghetti westerns weren’t necessarily an accurate depiction of the west either, but at least they were dead-on in not painting a pretty picture of it either.
The current events angle is not so easy to put my finger on. It’s obvious when you see it, so I’ll deal with that as they come up. The surprising thing about these films is how artistic some of them are, especially the Leone films. The unusual camera angles, wide background landscapes, extreme closeups and such make these films really stand out to me. I am often surprised, as I venture past the highly regarded Leone films into others of the genre at how good they are as films. Last night, I saw Damiano Damiani’s ‘A Bullet for the General’, a fantastic film of a decidedly more political bent. I’ll have a review coming shortly….
Your homework is to rent Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy, there will be a test….
A Fistful of Dollars
For A Few Dollars More
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
If you like this, please click below and visit my spaghetti western site, where you’ll find more reviews and other great stuff.
