Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.
It’s been a theme lately that the films I have watched have dealt strongly with sex. In its own way, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is both more sexually charged and less sexually relevant than the other films I’ve watched from The List in the past week. There’s no escaping the sex here, much of which is alleged to be real. In fact, writer/director/star Melvin van Peebles contracted gonorrhea during the course of the film and successfully got worker’s compensation for it, since he was injured on the job (and literally “on the job”).
The film contains a simple story, and one that would be duplicated, referenced, or given homage in the majority of Blaxploitation films for the length of the genre. It’s one of the first films to depict a black hero who didn’t conform to white American standards. Here was the sort of man that White America feared. He wasn’t educated, erudite, or polite. He was a hardcore brother who found himself constantly under the boot heel of the Man and who fought back the only way he could.
