“(Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) made being a revolutionary hip,” Mario Van Peebles said a former Black Panther and Congressman once told him, “but Super Fly made being a drug dealer hip. Big difference.”
Van Peebles, whose father Melvin was the auteur behind Sweetback, makes a quite strong statement of how Hollywood capitalized on his pop’s movie and created an assembly line of action pictures starring Afro-American actors. However some of these films deserve a more fair shake. Super Fly, directed by Gordon Parks Jr., the story of a coke dealer who wants out of the biz, isn’t like the others, and even stands out in the gangster genre.
Super Fly is the story of Priest, a successful black New York narcotics dealer who decides to quit the business—and does it. To finance his retirement he means to deal $300,000 worth of cocaine into a $1-million profit, and so Super Fly belongs in the company of all those crime movies that have had as their subject the one big last job.
That it does not also belong with those movies portraying the evils of drugs, must be the result of very intelligent calculation; for there is no moralizing, not even the subtle silent kind, and the film’s most eloquent spoken passage is given to Priest’s partner when he defends dealing as a way of life.
Ron O’Neal plays Priest, a Harlem hustler who gets tired of his chosen profession and well, you know the rest. Others aren’t supportive of it and this creates a conflict. Not even the cops want him to quit. Unlike the doomed hero of Carlito’s Way, there is no plan to go legit or make lemon aid out of a lemon. His plan involves swimming through the same sea of sharks he deals with daily. While the film makes the life he leads appear so stylish and laid back-when we first meet Priest he is in bed with a naked white chick, the songs by Curtis Mayfield are like Priest’s inner thoughts. Maybe he uses blow and women, and wears the fancy threads to feel better about him self.
From the first notes of the impossibly cool soundtrack you’re were in the groove. A film like this makes you feel cool to be a human. The ability to swing your arms as you walk, to hear that funky beat and put it in your steps. The look of the world of seventies black film is fantastic. Every bit as startling as Victorian England, but for completely different reasons. The feel for the film is authentic, because well it is authentic. Super Fly’s outfits rock, as do his hair and sideburns. Oh yeah, and the car. What a cool car? As neat as the Batmobile is, it just doesn’t hold a candle to a Super Fly-mobile! Everything related to Super Fly reeks of fun and cool.
In the post-credits opening scene Priest furiously chases down a junkie after he and another vandal beat Priest up and steal his stash. The dapper dealer seems pulled down to the dope fiend’s level running like a scared rabbit after the same substance the user has stolen for his own desperate use. The late O’Neal, a trained theater actor, at times appears over-the-top playing a common criminal with the voice and power as if he were playing King Lear.
It would be possible to fault Super Fly almost scene by scene for its minor blunders. As a director, Gordon Parks Jr. shares with his celebrated father a difficulty in managing simple exchanges between actors, a tendency sometimes to misjudge camera placement, an occasional weak reliance on handsome cinematography. But he has gotten so many more important things right and, in his first feature, he has made such a brilliantly idiomatic films, that it would be ridiculous to do less than praise him.