‘Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films’ Review: Celebrating a Maverick

[peekaboo]

The pioneering Black filmmaker, who died Tuesday, gets a Criterion release.

A scene from ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’ (1971)

Photo: Criterion Collection

 

The list of Black filmmakers in American cinema has never been long—it remains tiny even today—so those few who have made inroads prompt particular interest. Among them is the Chicago-born multihyphenate Melvin Van Peebles, who died in Manhattan on Tuesday at age 89. The Criterion Collection had long planned to shine a light on his early features, and its effort, “Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films,” arrives on Sept. 28 as an unintended but welcome valedictory for a maverick whose bold, arguably brave, approach to cinema remains a beacon to many.

Criterion’s five-disc set, exclusively on Blu-ray, unites Mr. Van Peebles’s first four features, all in new 4K restorations, alongside an avalanche of bonus materials under the title “Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films.” And if this assemblage isn’t the equivalent of a college course on the entirety of his cinematic output, it certainly is as concerns his most influential film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971), with two full Blu-rays devoted to the movie.

American actor and director Melvin Van Peebles (center) with members of his film crew on the set ‘Sweetback’ in 1970

Photo: Columbia Pictures/Getty Images

Mr. Van Peebles led an especially colorful life, having served in the Air Force, worked as a cable-car gripman in San Francisco and enjoyed an expatriate’s life as a writer in the Netherlands and France before returning stateside following the completion of his first feature, “The Story of a Three Day Pass” (1967), adapted from his novel “La Permission.”

That black-and-white, bilingual film opens this set and charts, often painfully, the struggles of a Black U.S. soldier, Turner ( Harry Baird ), stationed in France (yes, those were the days), straddling two predominantly white societies: the American base and the French world surrounding it. Granted a promotion and some leave (hence the film’s title), Turner explores this strange terrain with legitimate trepidation. But when he meets an initially hesitant but ultimately eager paramour ( Nicole Berger ), he relaxes his guard, leaving him emotionally vulnerable—which is just where Mr. Van Peebles wants him. Using unconventional cinematic techniques, including fantasy sequences and character doubling, the director creates a New Wave film that pushes the Gallic theme of alienation to new levels.

Nicole Berger and Harry Baird in ‘The Story of a Three Day Pass’ (1967)

Photo: Criterion Collection

The success of “Three Day Pass” earned Mr. Van Peebles a major award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and brought him to the attention of Hollywood, where he became among the first African-Americans to direct a studio picture. (The very first was Gordon Parks, whose 1969 film “The Learning Tree” Criterion will issue in December.) The movie was “Watermelon Man” (1970), an arch, intentionally awkward comedy written by Herman Raucher in which a boorish white middle-class insurance salesman inexplicably turns Black overnight. Godfrey Cambridge played the complicated role, wearing whiteface in the initial scenes, with Estelle Parsons as his ostensibly liberal wife. The director altered the film’s original “it was all a bad dream” ending and instead crafted a potent indictment of systemic racism and something of a call to arms that has, unfortunately, only gained in power with the passing of years.

“Watermelon Man” emboldened Mr. Van Peebles, but his next film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” in which he assumed the eponymous lead to cut production costs, not only destroyed his nascent Hollywood career, but nearly broke him. Yet it became his defining work, as well as a box-office hit that demonstrated the economic power of African-American audiences while giving courage to independent filmmakers of all stripes. Though antiquated in many respects, it remains an often shocking, always provocative picture—in which police brutality is frankly depicted and the protagonist, having reached his limit of accommodation, opts to respond in kind to those who threaten him. It also helped usher in the blaxploitation genre. But the film’s deep reflection on Black oppression and responses to it, pioneering at the time, places the movie in a class by itself—as does its soundtrack, with the director’s own music interpreted by the young Earth, Wind & Fire. Nonetheless, the movie’s out-there cinematic effects and nearly pornographic sex scenes will continue to put off some viewers.

A scene from ‘Watermelon Man’ (1970)

Photo: Criterion Collection

As the ample supplements make clear repeatedly, Mr. Van Peebles was not one for regrets, so with his cinematic options limited in the wake of “Sweetback” he turned to Broadway. There, between 1971 and 1980, he had four shows in production, the first nominated for seven Tonys. The second, the musical “Don’t Play Us Cheap” (1972), was also filmed for theatrical release. A parable extolling the warmth and wisdom of poor Black people, it unfolds in a dilapidated Harlem apartment during a Saturday-night birthday party to which the Devil comes a-calling. It may be the least “significant” of Mr. Van Peebles’s pictures—it was also the last to garner substantial attention—but it best documents his knack for composing catchy music and pithy lyrics. It also offers a showcase for the substantial talents of Mabel King, Avon Long and the magnificent Esther Rolle.

Esther Rolle in ‘Don’t Play Us Cheap’ (1972)

Photo: Criterion Collection

Mr. Van Peebles was a bona fide disrupter whom Hollywood only flirted with embracing. This collection makes the case for his varied talents. It also makes us wonder what might have happened had the studios been more accepting of his boundary-pushing instincts, which laid the groundwork for the careers of Spike Lee and a handful of others—among them Mario Van Peebles, a son of Melvin’s who figures prominently in this box. A case can be made that the late Mr. Van Peebles was ahead of his time. But that then prompts this question: Has that time, even now, yet arrived?