This offbeat and upbeat all-black musical from Melvin Van Peebles stands in the shadow of his landmark Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, but it’s a work of art every bit as feverish. As with his previous film, Van Peebles aims to put on movie screens something that no one else would or could. He turns his back on the blaxploitation boom—that he partly influenced—with a film that merely lets us in on a Saturday night Harlem house party full of good food, Christian souls and gospel music, with not one pimp, prostitute, drug dealer or gangster in sight. The party is what this is all about. Van Peebles could spend all night with these people, it seems. For conflict, he conjures up a couple of campy, red-clad demons from Hell who materialize out of thin air with the sole purpose of ruining everyone’s night in underhanded ways. It turns out to be a harder job than they thought.
This is the third version of the story. Van Peebles first wrote it as a novel that was published in 1967. Then he adapted it as a stage show, complete with his own songs, in 1972, and that shortly became this film. It’s an independent piece made on a budget that doesn’t look like it’s much better than the pennies he had for Sweet Sweetback. Van Peebles shoots it like a stage show for the most part. It’s set completely indoors and is heavy on the ensemble set pieces. Actors from the stage version reprise their roles and some of the singing performances look to be live on film, as opposed to the lip-sync and overdub jobs in most musical movies. Van Peebles’ gestures toward cinema are largely trippy multiple-exposure montages (he used those a lot on his previous film, as well) and a silent movie homage in one scene.
Hardly anyone talks about this, but it’s worth a look. There’s nothing else from the time quite like it.