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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Play trailer Poster for Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song R Released Apr 23, 1971 1h 37m Crime Drama Play Trailer Watchlist
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73% Tomatometer 30 Reviews 48% Popcornmeter 2,500+ Ratings
Sweet Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) is a black orphan who, having grown up in a brothel, now works there as part of a sex show. When the police need a patsy for a murder in the black community, Sweetback's employer gives him up to two white cops, whom Sweetback ends up killing. Suddenly the target of a massive manhunt, he decides to flee to Mexico. As he makes his way there, he is captured by, and escapes from, both the cops and a chapter of the Hell's Angels.
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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Critics Reviews

View All (30) Critics Reviews
Penelope Gilliatt New Yorker Impossible, haughty, not likable, but sometimes rather admirable in its context. Jan 29, 2024 Full Review Gary Arnold Washington Post People who believe that all that smoke must indicate one hell of a fiery movie might be rather dismayed by the movie itself. Jan 29, 2024 Full Review Richard Brody New Yorker For all its horror, the film has an exuberant, hedonistic excitement (including a sexual showdown in a Hell's Angels den); Sweetback's spirit of outrage and revolt gives rise to bitter, exasperated ironies. Jan 31, 2022 Full Review Brian Susbielles InSession Film Van Peebles' third film was a nuclear bomb. Feb 28, 2023 Full Review Sean Axmaker Stream on Demand The unusual mix of agitprop and exploitation is directed in a jagged style that recalls what Jean-Luc Godard was doing in France and set to a funky score performed by Earth, Wind, and Fire... Mar 12, 2022 Full Review Dennis Harvey 48 Hills Farr more overtly political and experimental than anything subsequently bracketed in that ["Blaxploitation"] genre. Jul 6, 2021 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

View All (226) audience reviews
Audience Member This film is just plain bad. I’m sorry to say it because this film is incredibly important to cinematic history, but there’s no way around it. It’s really unfortunate that this films message still has just as much relevance as it did 53 years ago. It doesn’t save it from being a bad movie though, for starters the opening scene is quite shocking. 11 year old Mario Van Peebles rubs up on a naked adult lady (for a good amount of time too). The film also includes a lot of visual effects that look like a little kid just learned about windows moviemaker. Worst of all the movie just feels kinda unfocused at times, in favor of showing lots of intercourse scenes. Maybe I’m just not the target demographic, but I don’t like this movie. .5/5 stars. Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 06/30/24 Full Review Wayne K Considered by many to be the original Blaxploitation film, and so influential that it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2020, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was obviously a passion project for Melvin Van Peebles, who goes full Ed Wood and produces, writes, directs and stars in the film. I can see the message it's getting across, and I liked how it doesn't shy away from the degradation that members of the black community, who are actually credited at the beginning, were living in. Sadly, the actual composition of the films leaves a lot to be desired. It was clearly made on a small budget, but even the aforementioned schlockmeister Ed Wood produced movies that were at least somewhat comprehensible. Sweetback looks like it was filmed illegally, either by the cameraman who ducks behind inanimate object and sways around as if in a drunken stupor, or by someone with a second-hand camcorder recording it off the cinema screen. Everything about the production is unpleasant, be it the crackling audio, barely audible dialogue, the grainy and often overexposed visuals, the insanely repetitive soundtrack, the endless montages of driving or running or the colossally bad editing, courtesy of Mr. MVP himself. Much of what happens is utterly incoherent due to the combination of factors I just mentioned, and whatever struggles the lead goes through often fall by the wayside as the story goes on whatever asides it can find to extend the runtime. It's gone down in history for its political messaging and ground-breaking onscreen representation, but in terms of everything else that makes a movie work, it falls markedly short in nearly every department. Rated 2 out of 5 stars 07/06/23 Full Review Audience Member American blaxploitation at its toughest and brutal. This is a picaresque story during the Black Panther Party movement in the 1970s with Mario Van Peebles directing. A man named Sweetback, was a boy who grew up an orphan in a brothel in 1940s Los Angeles. His name came from his unique sexual prowess. As a grown up he performs seductive art for audiences. The white police force needs a patsy for the murder in the community. Sweetback is hauled in to take the fall by his boss and two white officers end up dead. Now he's on the run fleeing to Mexico. Some of the editing is bizarre and trippy, the handheld camera techniques give the movie a sense of realism but can be nauseating, and there's a plethora of sex scenes if you're uncomfortable with that. I will give the movie credit that it is an entire chase from beginning to end with this man avoiding the authorities at almost every turn. He turns to radicalism with each person who knows him defending his good name. Not for everyone but it is one of the most influential flicks made by an African American filmmaker. Captures the rough exterior of the ghetto life through the lens of a community that's still struggling. Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 01/22/23 Full Review William L Far from a great film in terms of production values, with rough audio quality, cinematography, supporting performances, and editing (though it seems that this has some intent behind it, matching the tempo of the story), but notable for its influence, being among the first successful films to cater to black audiences by black directors; Sidney Poitier no more being the sole (some would say token) representation in mainstream movie production. The final "pursuit" segment is so unnecessarily drawn out and long, you'll likely be checking a clock once or twice. Rather on the nose and less than subtle with the treatment of its subject matter, glamorizing and commercializing its racial themes in the manner that blaxploitation would come to be known for. But without Sweetback as that first step, none of the black Hollywood headliners (actors, directors, writers alike) would be where they are. (3/5) Rated 3 out of 5 stars 09/28/20 Full Review Solomon M Avante garde film which precludes the "blaxploitation era" of the late 60s/ mid 70s. Filmed on the fly and is rough, it does deserve it's then X rating for sex(there is a scene in which the director's Melvin Van Peebles' underage son Mario has simulated sex with an older actress), violence and language but this film showed Hollywood that black film makers could make products that were commercial viable. A landmark film. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 05/24/19 Full Review Audience Member This is, to say the least, a challenging film. Worth watching if just for it's historical importance, the movie is hard to swallow and is rarely gratifying. There is a serious lack of plotting and characterization, and the movie is practically pornographic at times-from the first scene on, it is hard to watch, as a 15-year-old boy is practically raped, and that rape serving like Peter Parker's spiderbite, turning a boy into a (super)man. To a degree, the movie plays into the dual fantasy space of the American racial imagination: The hypersexualized Black man, who is both threat and hero, criminal and paragon-is this hard to watch because I am a well-meaning white liberal in a very different political context, or was this a true catharsis for its intended oppressed audience? Is the camera indicative of a white gaze or a black one? The editing has a hazy, jazz-like quality, flashes of technical artistry bordering on the avant-garde-again, hard to watch, hard to look away, hard to dismiss, hard to accept, forcing the question of my own spectatorship. REWATCH: It begins with the rape of a child and ends with the murder of a police dog, yet what happens in between, while no less scandalous, violent, and shocking—the rape and murder of a whole community, billed as the star by MVP—gets typically played as heroic without a second thought every day across our various screens, from local news to Oscar-bait dramas to social media. (To quote Brecht: "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?") Yet such offensive bookends, unlike actual exploitation cinema, are not meant to draw in prurient eyes, but (so the legend goes) worked instead to keep racist obstructionists out of the production: You simply could not have such a revolutionary ending without such a transgressive beginning. In both a practical and psychoanalytic sense, it is the white gaze—rather than directorial depravity—which creates the myth of the hyper-sexual Black radical, a figure that MVP embodies to its most subversive ends. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/30/23 Full Review Read all reviews
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

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Movie Info

Synopsis Sweet Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) is a black orphan who, having grown up in a brothel, now works there as part of a sex show. When the police need a patsy for a murder in the black community, Sweetback's employer gives him up to two white cops, whom Sweetback ends up killing. Suddenly the target of a massive manhunt, he decides to flee to Mexico. As he makes his way there, he is captured by, and escapes from, both the cops and a chapter of the Hell's Angels.
Director
Melvin Van Peebles
Producer
Jerry Gross, Melvin Van Peebles
Screenwriter
Melvin Van Peebles
Distributor
Image Entertainment Inc., Direct Cinema Limited, Criterion Collection, New World Pictures
Production Co
Yeah
Rating
R
Genre
Crime, Drama
Original Language
English
Release Date (Theaters)
Apr 23, 1971, Wide
Release Date (Streaming)
Apr 17, 2020
Runtime
1h 37m
Sound Mix
Mono
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