Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song

Melvin Van Peebles’ seminal, taboo-breaking Blaxploitation thriller about a young Black man on the run from corrupt cops in 1970s Los Angeles.

Sweet Sweetback is a Black orphan who grew up in a brothel and now works there as part of a sex show. After being falsely accused of murder and defending a young Black man from police brutality, he kills two white officers and decides to flee to Mexico. Along the way he is pursued by the cops, Black Power militants, and even the Hell’s Angels, in a hallucinatory and surreal journey.

Written, directed, produced, and starring Melvin Van Peebles, the film was a groundbreaking, self-financed independent feature. Mixing avant-garde arthouse cinema with raw provocation, it became both a template for Blaxploitation cinema and a landmark of radical American filmmaking. Its sexually explicit imagery and confrontational politics led to an X rating on release, and this BBFC-approved cut of the film has excised shots from a simulated sex scene featuring a 14-year-old boy (played by Melvin’s son and future Hollywood star Mario Van Peebles). Despite the controversy, it remains a seminal work of African American cinema and a crucial film of its era.