Black Film by Hannah

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is a film that was directed, written, co-produced, and edited by Melvin Van Peebles. It was released April 23, 1971. 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.

This movie starts off controversial. The young version of Sweetback gets coerced into having sex with a much older woman. From that incident he turns into a grown man. He identifies himself with his manly hood. Everyone around him does too. He’s a sex worker. There were scenes where women had no top on and their breast were not censored or blurred. That was explicit. This whole movie was pretty explicit. Sweetback only had about 5 lines throughout the whole film which was intriguing.

Despite the sex exploitation the film was dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man. The man is white supremacy and anti-Blackness. He covered that issue but the sexual exploitation definitely over shadowed that in my opinion. I think Pebbles wanted to do the exploitation because he’s black and he was tired of white people doing it.

After watching this film I watched the behind the scenes film for this movie and it created another perspective of the original film. Learning about Peebles and what it took to create this film was incredible. I’ll talk about that in the next blog 🙂

Thank you for reading my review on Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song.