Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 film from the USA, directed by Melvin Van Peebles, running 93 minutes. reelscum files it under blaxploitation.
- Year
- 1971 · 1970s films
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 93 min
- Director
- Melvin Van Peebles
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (28/100)
- Also known as
- Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song
Defined in the glossary: Blaxploitation
Financed independently, structured like nothing else, and it changed the industry.
Melvin Van Peebles financed it himself when no studio would, shot it fast with a mostly non-union crew, rated it X by an all-white jury and put that on the poster as a boast. A Black man kills two cops who are beating a suspect and runs, and the film runs with him, angry and formally wild.
It made a fortune independently and proved the audience existed, which is the entire reason the studios chased the next two hundred films on this shelf. It is also a genuine piece of avant-garde filmmaking, dedicated to all the Black people who have had enough.
Historically the most important film here, and still confrontational.
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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.
- Exploitation film examples, cycle by cycle
Exploitation film examples grouped cycle by cycle, from Freaks in 1932 to the video nasties, with the real dates, cut durations and censorship rulings.
- 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.
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