Some writers call this the first blaxploitation film, but it’s so much weirder than that. It’s uncomfortable, sexed-up to the max and visceral enough to make you dizzy. Double-feature it with Super Fly or with El Topo. Either would be a perfect fit.
Director/writer/producer/star Melvin Van Peebles has no budget here, but he makes up for that with endless reserves of racial anger. He also offers fearless glimpses at the seamy side of the city, where live sex show performers, prostitutes, gender-benders, crooks and crooked cops beat the street. The style bears similarities to the French New Wave, with the use of unconventional cutting, jarring music cues, frames-within-frames and frantic indulgence in cinematic tricks (heavy use of trippy multiple-exposure here).
Meanwhile the basic story is as old as the first pulp magazines. Another guy is on the run after assaulting a cop. It’s also the same story as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, but Sweetback (played by Peebles himself, saying about nine words) here has no time for lounging around and discussing philosophy for half the film. Nope, he’s on the run and dealing with a host of Los Angeles underworld oddballs and brutality-happy police.
Also, while Godard dedicates his crime story to Monogram Pictures, Peebles dedicates his to “all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man”. Peebles is not out to pay homage to old movies, where black people were always the butlers, maids and fools. Instead, he’s tearing the shit down and starting over, page one, Chapter One. Appropriately, its first scene is young Sweetback losing his virginity. The part there is played by the director’s 13-year-old son, Mario Van Peebles, and no filmmaker could get away with its unapologetic flesh today. It’s the first outlaw moment in a movie full of them.