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Popular Culture Review
of $500,000 and shot in only nineteen days, Sweetback grossed over $10
million. Melvin Van Peebles wrote, directed, and starred in this picture, which
the filmmaker credited as featuring the black community. Esse ntially, the film
tells the story of a black pimp and sexual performer whose consciousness is
aroused when he sees a community activist beaten by the police. Sweetback
attacks the police officers and becomes the subject of an intensive manhunt.
Through his ingenuity, sexual prowess, and, most importantly, support from the
black community, Sweetback is able to flee the authorities and escape into
Mexico. The film concludes with the caption: “A Baadasssss Nigger is Coming
Back to Collect Some Dues.”^^ Film scholar Don Bogle concludes that with
Sweetback, film audiences were “introduced to the new style black film (based
on dissent and anger) in which the black male’s sexuality, for too long
suppressed, had come to the forefront.”^*
While the New York Times expressed surprise regarding Sweetback"s
acceptance with a younger hip white audience,^^ the film’s primary appeal was
with the black community seeking to define its identity. Huey Newton, co
founder of the BPP, was especially fond of the film and prepared a piece on
Sweetback for the Black Panther newspaper. In “He Won’t Bleed Me: A
Revolutionary Analysis of Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song,'' Newton
argued that the Van Peebles film reflected an insurgent black community and
presented “the need for unity among all the members and institutions within the
community of victims.” Newton echoed the claims of Van Peebles that
Sweetback constituted “the first truly revolutionary” film made by a black
filmmaker.^®
However, not eveiyone in the black intellectual community agreed with
Newton’s analysis. In an influential piece for Ebony magazine, Lerone Bennett
argued that Sweetback was neither revolutionary nor black. Portraying
Sweetback as an opportunist who offers no revolutionary program for the black
community, Bennett maintained that Sweetback tended to reinforce stereotypical
imagery of blacks. Bennett concluded his Ebony piece by noting,
Mr. Van Peebles is a winner now. Like Sweetback, he has
proven that you can mess with the man and escape, if not win.
But his escape, like Sweetback’s, is tinged with a thousand
ironies; for, in the final analysis, he won or escaped, not on his
own terms but on the man’s terms, and in terms of the man’s
myths and philosophy. And the white man, who will market
anything if it entertains and sells, is going to imitate him, for
his formula of sex-violence-degradation . . . is by no means
new or revolutionary.^^
Bennett’s analysis proved to be prophetic as white filmmakers rushed
to fill a market void in the 1970s with what came to be termed “blaxploitation