In this entertaining blaxploitation flick, it’s a pimp and a pusher’s world. Or at least it is for the smart ones.
Our (anti-) hero, the deliciously named Youngblood Priest (Ron O’Neal), has fierce eyes and long hair that makes him look like a lion. He’s imposing and ruthless, the kind of guy you don’t want to cross. He’s got money, good looks and flashy clothes. A cocaine spoon dangles from a gold chain around his neck. The first time we see him, he’s laying in bed with a naked woman whom he doesn’t love, but who is so devoted that she all but clings to his leg when he gets up and heads out.
Priest is more than just a successful crook. He’s a goddamn conqueror. The black Attila the Hun in New York City. A guy who, when we first meet him, seems to have found his place in the universe.
And, yet, he wants out.
The curse of a criminal who has at least half a brain in his head is that they’re often also smart enough to see that there’s no future in it. Priest has never personally killed anyone before and he never wants to do that. He also would prefer to not be gunned down in the streets someday.
His big problem though is the same one that’s in every movie about a criminal who wants to retire on blood money: he may be done with the life, but the life’s not done with him. He knows too much. Also, his plan to earn a quick fortune on one last mother of a cocaine buy means hooking up with gangsters who aren’t going to just let him live quietly in a beach house after this. No, they want to own the people who work for them. Their claws are long and they sink deep.
You’ve seen it all before. See it this time through the fierce eye of Gordon Parks Jr. (son of Gordon Parks, who directed Shaft). It’s a terrific piece of low-budget style in the grimy big city. There’s always something here to catch your eye or your ear, whether it’s the whole section of the story that’s related via a delirious montage of still images or the aching Curtis Mayfield songs turned up so loud that they sometimes smother the dialogue.
One remarkable thing about it is that its most important scenes pivot on the acting. Parks lets master shots run long sometimes. Conversations have room to stretch out. The actors get real characters to play.
By contrast, the action scenes are clumsy to the max. The climactic fist fight happens in slow-motion. Maybe first-time director Parks didn’t know how to shoot an action scene. Maybe he didn’t care about how to shoot an action scene because he knew that they didn’t matter here.
We don’t need to see Priest beat the fuck out of everybody. We’d rather see him outsmart everybody. We need to know if he has any chance of surviving this next phase of his life that he’s envisioned. It’s gonna take more than fists.
This film was a big hit, but was also controversial in its day. Some black activists hated its glorification of the criminal life. In the midst of the civil rights movement, a film like Super Fly was wrong on at least fifty-two levels, they felt.
In other words, it got pretty much the same criticisms that 1930s Depression-era gangster films, such as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, did when they came out.
Meanwhile, time has smoothed out all of these matters and Super Fly is now an imperfect classic that defines a genre and paints a colorful picture of a glamorous dead end.