Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was Melvin Van Peebles’s second feature film, after he walked away from a contract with Columbia in order to make his next film on his own terms. Acting as producer, director, writer, composer, editor, and star, Van Peebles created the prototype for what Hollywood would eventually co-opt and make into the blaxploitation hero: a taciturn, perpetually blank-faced performer in a sex show, who, when he’s pushed too far by a pair of racist cops looking to frame him for a crime he didn’t commit, goes on the run through a lawless underground of bikers, revolutionaries, sex workers, and hippies in a kill-or-be-killed quest for liberation from white oppression. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’s incendiary politics are matched by Van Peebles’s revolutionary style, in which jagged jump cuts, kaleidoscopic superimpositions, and psychedelic sound design come together in a sustained howl of rage and defiance.
Available In
Collector's Set
Cast
- Melvin Van Peebles
- Sweetback
- Simon Chuckster
- Beatle
- Hubert Scales
- Moo Moo
- John Dullaghan
- Commissioner
- Mario Van Peebles
- Sweetback, age ten
- Rhetta Hughes
- Old girlfriend
- Johnny Amos
- Biker
- Megan Van Peebles
- Kid
Credits
- Director
- Melvin Van Peebles
- Written by
- Melvin Van Peebles
- Camera operators
- Bob Maxwell
- Bob Maxwell
- José Garcia
- Production manager
- Clyde Houston
- Assistant director
- Clyde Houston
- Makeup supervisor
- Nora Maxwell
- Assistant editor
- Jeremy Hoenack
- Sound
- Clark Will
- Special effects
- Cliff Wenger
- Second unit director
- José Garcia
- Sound editors
- John Newman
- Luke Wolfram
- Orchestra and orchestrations
- Earth, Wind and Fire
Trailer for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
