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Like Father, Like Son
FILM: Baadasssss! (R)
DIRECTOR: Mario Van Peebles
STARRING: Mario Van Peebles, David Alan Grier
WHERE: Canal Place
GRADE: B+
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Mario Van Peebles and Joy Bryant in Baadasssss!.
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Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has hardly been realized. White racism still exists. Hard feelings between the races continue to fester. And yet we have made progress since Dr. King called for a color-blind society in 1963. For evidence, we can turn to Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss!, an account of his father Melvin’s heroic struggle to make the breakthrough film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971.
Today, Denzel Washington owns two well-deserved Oscars while Morgan Freeman, Danny Glover and Will Smith, just to name three other prominent African-American actors, routinely land roles that are not tied to their race. But when Melvin Van Peebles was trying to make a film that played against racial stereotypes, the world of that era required the great Sidney Poitier to be seen kissing his white screen wife in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner only for a fleeting instant and even then only in the reflection of a cab’s rear-view mirror.
Fictionalized for dramatic effect, Baadasssss! is based on Melvin’s autobiography and written for the screen by Mario, who was 13 at the time Sweet Sweetback was enduring its guerilla production. Mario plays his dad, and Khleo Thomas plays Mario as a teen. The younger Van Peebles clearly admires his father’s courage, vision and determination. But this is a balanced portrait of an artist whose hardheaded pursuit of his goal sometimes made him callous to the needs and feelings of others.
As Baadasssss! opens, Melvin is the successful director of the popular Godfrey Cambridge comedy Watermelon Man and has just landed a three-picture studio deal. Along with Ossie Davis (who plays Melvin’s father here) and Gordon Parks (who would soon direct the Shaft movies), 38-year-old Melvin is the most prominent African-American filmmaker in America. But the studios want more comedies, and Melvin wants to do something serious. In an era heavily influenced by the black power philosophy of such groups as the Black Panthers, Melvin wants to move beyond victimization and create a black character who resists racism with his fists instead of just his prayers. Sweet Sweetback was seminal because he defies white authority, kills corrupt cops who have brutalized him and gets away with it. But not even Melvin’s own agent (Saul Rubinek) is comfortable with such “inflammatory” material, and the studios will have nothing to do with it at all.
And so ensues the struggle and the daring stratagem, a success story that remains not just a landmark in so-called black cinema but in the history of independent filmmaking. The beginning is a comic look at the Hollywood wannabes of the time. Melvin needs independent financiers. But the kooks his producing partner Bill Harris (Rainn Wilson) comes up with include frauds, stoners and a man (played by Adam West) who thinks he can deliver dollars in exchange for a homosexual tryst. Eventually, Melvin turns to porn producer Clyde Houston (David Alan Grier).
This source of money has the added advantage of freeing Melvin from oppressive union oversight and wage requirements, since the film unions of the day disdained involvement with the adult-movie industry. To sustain the fiction that he’s making a black porn film, Melvin begins production with a steamy sex scene that is more explicit than he intends for his final cut.
A tornado of problems persists throughout the shoot, until eventually Melvin has his entire net worth invested in the picture and even then only a late $50,000 investment by Bill Cosby (T.K. Carter) enables Melvin to prevail. Along the way, he proves a stern taskmaster for those working with him. He fires Houston for an arguably forgivable mistake. He threatens a sound man for a moment of surliness and slaps into submission an exhausted, unpaid editor who announces his intention to quit. And he forces a shy and inexperienced Mario to perform in a sex scene to depict Sweet’s loss of his virginity at a young age. Director Mario presents all these instances of questionable judgment and fairness without sugar-coating and without providing Melvin much maneuvering room for excuse.
In the end, of course, Sweet Sweetback gets completed and released, and it soon finds its way into film history. Baadasssss! perhaps relies unreasonably on today’s viewers’, even today’s black viewers’, knowing why Melvin’s film was so important. Seen today, Sweet Sweetback shows its low budget and no longer seems the revolutionary work it was in its own day. The strength of Baadasssss! lies in its clear-eyed characterization of Melvin, a man easier to respect than love. And therein lies a mysterious failing. Baadasssss! ends with Sweet Sweetback’s triumph and gives us no accounting of what happened to Melvin subsequently.
In fact, though none of his other work in American film has brought him as much notoriety as Sweet Sweetback, Melvin has continued to direct, write, act and compose in the United States and in France and has captured awards at an array of film festivals. Now in his 70s, he’s still an artistic force to be reckoned with.
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