Super Fly
Super Fly is a 1972 film from the USA, directed by Gordon Parks Jr., running 93 minutes. reelscum files it under blaxploitation.
- Year
- 1972 · 1970s films
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 93 min
- Director
- Gordon Parks Jr.
- Updated
- 30 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (35/100)
- Also known as
- Superfly
Defined in the glossary: Blaxploitation
Curtis Mayfield's score critiques the film it's in. Remarkable object.
A Harlem cocaine dealer wants one last big score and out, and the film would be standard if not for two things: Gordon Parks Jr's location shooting of a real 1972 New York, and Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack, which sits over the action openly disapproving of everything the hero does.
Mayfield's score is the argument the film itself will not quite make, and it outsold the movie. The result is a crime picture at war with its own cool, which is more interesting than either half alone.
Watch it for the music, then notice what the music is telling you.
Trailer
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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Written about
- Exploitation films of the 1970s, the boom and the bust
Exploitation films of the 1970s explained through the ratings gap, the drive-in double bill, the cycles that ran fast, and the censors who cut them.
- Cult films and the audiences that make them
Cult status arrives after release, through late-night television, midnight bookings and VHS trade, as The Brainiac, Walking Tall and Patrick each show.
- Blaxploitation, 1971 to 1975
Melvin Van Peebles caught gonorrhea on his own set, filed a workers' comp claim, and bought more film stock with the settlement. Four years later the studios had mined the audience out and moved on.
Filed alongside
Across 110th Street
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Hell Up in Harlem
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Cotton Comes to Harlem
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Coffy
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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
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The Spook Who Sat by the Door
The most political film the blaxploitation boom made, pulled from cinemas and buried for thirty years.
Foxy Brown
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Dolemite
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