I have a very conflicting opinion on this movie.
Like most things I watch, I make no effort to learn about the product before viewing. So I had no idea of the background, the setup or any social commentary that might be associated with this film before watching.
Just going off of that. I can tell you that this is a bad film with subpar editing and some of the worst audio I've ever heard.
Yet despite that; This film in a way won me over. I don't know if it's the strange premise or if it's just the way everybody conducts themselves. But there's something about the oddity of this film that started to click with me about halfway through.
There's a man known as Sweetback who ends up going with two police officers as a material Witness to a murder of another black man that happened down the street from his place of employment*. He's told that he's only going there to make the police look good and that no real harm will come to him. But while on his journey the police pick up this other black kid, who they proceeded to beat the crap out of.
Sweet decides to murder the two police officers and let the kid run off.
This Sparks a Manhunt by the police who want to capture Sweet for killing two white cops.
The whole thing gets more heated as he kills two other cops later on.
The whole situation becomes ever more miserable as you realise that Sweet was screwed from the start.
That's all there really is to the story. It's all the stuff surrounding that story that makes it more interesting. The weird sexual escapades, the various moments of extreme racism, the monologues about a man running away from the system trying to fight against the Man. Possible connections of spirituality that are both intermixed with the Man and yet are simultaneously the Salvation against the Man. There's a whole lot to unpack here and I'm certainly not the person to do it.
There's this really weird scene in the middle of the movie Where sweet and Mu-mu (the kid who Sweet saved earlier) end up in this biker bar hiding out from the cops. But then the bikers find them they decide that they have to ''pay the toll''.
And the only way they're going to do that is if they can beat their biggest baddest biker in a game of endurance.
And it's here that we get a double curve ball. One the supposed big bad biker it's an incredibly solid and surprisingly beautiful woman*** and secondly that sweet besides the game of endurance should be sex.
So They get butt naked and screw right there in the middle of the floor, surrounded by all the bikers. And I guess Sweet wins the game? He wins at something that's for sure.
But the bikers decide to let him stay and they give him a place to hide out. Then one of them calls the cops on him anyways and this leads to the secondary death of the two extra cops.
That's one of the big reasons that this movie is looked upon so fondly. It's a film that was made by a black man for a black audience, being shown in only black theatres.
White theatres would never show this thing Studios wanted nothing to do with it the very poster itself says the film is rated X and was given the rating by an all-white jury**.
Confusion and intensity are the words of this movie. You've got Sweet trying to seal his wounds with his own urine mixed with mud. (I'm not a physician but I assume that's probably going to cause more damage than good? I don't really know.)
Then you have this weird scene earlier in the film was this one guy sitting on a toilet talking to Sweet describing how if he stays with him, he can avoid being detected by the police. But then Sweet just goes out of his house anyways and immediately is found.
Later on the guy who was giving him the speech about staying out of trouble ends up going deaf after the police shot a gun next to his ears causing permanent hearing loss. I don't know if the scene has any technical reason to be there but it's weird and once again really intense.
One more moment to show police brutality I guess.
If you don't take anything else away from this film it's that the police are incredibly brutal towards African Americans and this film's going to show you many horrible ways it can be done.
The director said that no Studio would have picked up his film. He cited racist bigotry is a possible reason for that. And I'm inclined to agree with him to a point. But I'm often wondering if he was just using racism as an excuse against the studio system because he knew no matter what type of movie he made a bunch of other people would have come in and said: ''You need to change this or you need to alter that, you'll have to fix up this problem.''
It may be that the director just wanted to make his own film without being told what to do and was possibly looking to several different excuses to do it.
Now I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm only pointing it out because when you've watched enough Elaine May or John Cassavetes you start to see little patterns with how supposedly creative people view their work.
All of these guys have made amusing pieces of art over the years. But they're also highly pretentious sometimes and will do really stupid and annoying things that anybody having to pay them would never put up with.
I'm not sure if I made anything clear with this summary. I doubt anyone would to be honest. This is one of those films where you could look at it from 15 different angles and find a reason to like or dislike it. I still maintain that it's a badly put together movie, but I'm happy that it exists.It's a film that definitely exists for its time. The early 70s. A prime moment when movies like this made the most sense. Really it's not like this is taking away from anything else. It was made cheap made a ton of money. So capitalist should be happy.
Leonardo DiCaprio got an Academy Award for eating a fish. And everybody flipped out one way or the other about it. But Melvin Van Peebles ate a lizard almost 50 years earlier and nobody cares.
I complained about the film having bad editing and sound. And if I was given the power I'd go in and only alter a little bit of it. Make it so the sound actually mix it in with the scene a little better and if the film was still in production tweak some of the encounter so they make a little bit more sense. I wouldn't alter any of the weird set-pieces, I wouldn't take away any of the weird sex. I wouldn't even alter anybody's acting or change the language. All that stuff is fine. I would just make it slightly more coherent so the film could be enjoyed both as a movie and that's a statement.
But than who am I? Just a honky running he's big mouth on the interweb.
**Although in all honesty a jury of your everyday average black community probably would have rated this movie X as well. It's just the fact that there wasn't a black person to give the call that makes this such an issue.
I also stated the no white theatres show this film which is technically true but those are the ones that had records of the film that begin with. I'm sure there were plenty of underground unregistered feeders and other places run by black white and anyone else you can think of we're more than happy to show this Oddball with a film. But their deeds aren't recorded in the annals of history and aren't here to be examined today. Such as most of the history of second grade or underground filming.
***It might be a cliche to have the big bad biker in your gang turn out to be a beautiful woman. But I'm not so sure if that was prevalent in the early seventies yet. If they made a movie like that now it would be. Although I guarantee she wouldn't then have sex with a big black man on the Floor surrounded by everyone else. There'd be something to get the ''conservatives'' in the ''Liberals'' talking for 15 minutes.
Knowing my luck the two groups would probably come out of it both hating the film for different reasons and only deciding that the only good option is to get rid of it. Maybe I'm just assuming on my part. But these people are always incredibly quick to rip something down if they don't understand or agree with it.
It's also implied that the police at the beginning of the movie we're probably the guys who murdered that black man in the beginning of the film that sparked everything.
Really it's just a bunch of bigots, victims, sex workers (also Mexicans and really flamboyant gay people.) and everyone else intermixed into this horrible world that's trying to get better but is ultimately still stuck and it's crappy past.
That's the beauty of the 70s as we attempted to try and move Beyond this crap. First by discovering that are government was a big lying sack of trash and then actually trying to move Beyond racial differences. At least until Reagan came along and set the whole thing back again. That's stupid jackass.
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