In honor of Black History Month, TIME critic Richard Corliss surveys nearly a century of cinema, and reflects on 25 defining works that broke down the walls of intolerance on the big screen
Here’s where Sidney Poitier got to talk back. As Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia police detective drawn into a murder case in rural Mississippi, he is addressed with contemptuous familiarity — “Tibbs,” “Virgil Boy” — until he finally tautens up in front of the local lawman, Sheriff Gillespie (Rod Steiger) and hisses, “They call me Mister Tibbs.” Poitier issues the line not as an emotional explosion, but as a warning and a vital piece of information. It says, in effect: The only way you crackers are going to realize you need my expertise is to understand that I’m your equal. At the very least. The Mister Tibbs line became so famous it was used as the title of this film’s sequel in 1971.
But Heat, scripted by Stirling Silliphant and directed by Norman Jewison, had more immediate recognition: it was a substantial popular and critical hit, a true Zeitgeist movie. And it won the Best Picture Oscar, less for its quality as crackling entertainment than because the Academy members recognized it was time to give its top award to a film that showed a black man holding to his lofty principles under tremendous social pressure — under fire, if you will. The ceremony was to be held on April 4, 1968, but was delayed at the last moment. On that day, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot and killed.
It’s easy to explain the acclaim. For a start, Heat is a canny melodrama, building its tension through character as much as incident. The audience loved Tibbs and Gillespie — not as individuals but as a battling, bantering pair, getting on each other’s nerves before they got the job done. They were like an old married couple, and even more a kind of comedy duo, with Tibbs as the impeccable straight man and the Sheriff as the explosive wise-cracker. Steiger, in the showier role, playing the one who learns (slowly) about racial equity, took the Academy Award as Best Actor. But Poitier, who didn’t get nominated, was the anchor, the abider, the controller. And he already had an Oscar, for the 1963 Lilies of the Field.
Liberation or exploitation? Radical politics or violent nihilism? Mature sexuality or child pornography? Modernist narrative or incoherent narrative? Trailblazer or piece of crap? Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback answers to any and all of these descriptions. The Black Panthers made it mandatory viewing, while Ebony magazine denounced it. Moviegoers responded with cheers or outrage. And, frankly, I’m not taking sides.
But three matters are beyond debate: 1. It was like nothing seen before in a commercial movie house. 2. It instantly shifted the dominant tone of black films from liberal to anarchist, from uplifting message movies to fables of ghetto smarts and stickin’ it to the man. 3. The movie was an out-of-nowhere hit, earning about $20 million on Van Peebles’ personal $50,000 investment. Its success spawned a new and lasting genre: blaxploitation, with SuperflyBlack Caesar and Menace II Society and Bad Boys and dozen of others as its brawling progeny. All these factors make Sweet Sweetback, without question or competition, the most influential movie by a black filmmaker.
Van Peebles, a novelist who moved to France, where he directed and starred in the very genteel romance Story of a Three Day Pass, said he made Baad Asssss because he wanted to see a slice of black society, of black manhood, never, ever shown on the screen. Sweet Sweetback — his nickname is the ultimate compliment from one of his many bed partners — is not just an antihero, he’s the anti-Sidney. To some blacks, the Poitier figure was a messiah of masochism, enduring insults from ignorant whites so that other whites, in the audience, would be convinced that he was superior enough to be allowed to buy a house next to them, He was Martin Luther King, Jr., to Sweetback’s…whom? Not Malcolm X so much as Malcolm Little, the violent pimp who had to go to jail and be converted to Black Islam before he could preach his more elevated doctrine. Sweetback’s message: If you want it, take it. If it feels good, do it. And if whites in the theater feel angered or threatened, who cares? Let them feel excluded from the movie, as blacks did from virtually every film made before this one.
Sweetback (played by Van Peebles, who also wrote, produced, directed, edited and scored the movie) is a sex hustler, and not one like the soulful yokel Joe Buck of Midnight Cowboy. Having sex for money doesn’t demean him; it expresses him. At first he has an easy understanding with the police: they arrest him, he gets out. One night he agrees to be taken in just so they can make their quota. But on their way to the station, the cops pick up, then beat up, a black revolutionary. That sets Sweetback on his crimson revenge spree, and gets the cops to pursuing him in the chase that consumes the rest of the film. In structure, Sweetback is close to Native Son: ghetto guy is charged with an act of unpremeditated violence and goes on the run. The difference here: he gets away! The black man isn’t killed for transgressing the white man’s law. Even more improbably, Van Peebles got away with, profited greatly from, making this little Molotov cocktail of a movie.
And the child pornography? In an early scene we see a boy having sex with an adult woman. The kid was played by Van Peebles’ son Mario, who seems to have survived OK. He became an excellent actor, and his first film behind the camera, New Jack City, is one of the most vivid and stylish directorial debuts I know.
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