No one seen in the film is capable of following an action or thought to its end. Granted-Forman is dealing with limited people. But he doesn't show us why he chose them. Odets and Miller at their best also dealt with "the ordinary," but at those points of confrontation which showed their transcendent qualities or possibilities for change. If Forman fells the social limits his characters run up against are those of the human condition, there is no reason for him to have delineated such a steadfastly minor group of people as those he presents here-unless, as John Simon claims, he really is a misanthrope in sheep's clothing.
Reviewers were wont to acclaim Forman's earlier filmed anecdotes for exposing the drabness of life in an industrial socialist state. His method: to depict characters whose development is short-circuited by necessary compromise to the social structure. That Forman would make the same kind of film in the United State indicates that his vision is more suited to the acceptance of a restrictive state than criticizing it.
The film is not unamusing. Buck Henry has some nice pratfalls as the father (though I found Lynn Carlin labored as the wife); there is a Village rock audition featuring teen-age girls who struggle to ally themselves with crude and hopeless romantic lyrics; and an SPFC meeting during which evening-jacketed bourgeois folk turn on for the first time. But there is so little control over the film that even these go wrong: Henry often becomes a cipher; the SPFC scene is both cruel and whimsical in a mix that doesn't mesh; and I even may be mistaken about the purpose of the songs the girls were singing: I am told that one of them, Tom Eyen's "Ode to a Screw," passes for chic these days.
IV But by far the worst and most misanthropic of the new films is Melvin van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasss Song. A portrait of the Negro as the Great American Penis (the "sweet sweet-back" of the title character). it is a vile piece of ego-tripping by a black filmmaker who hopes (presumably by default) to become the "revolutionary" mass-media force of his people.
White critics. it seems, are running so scared that they either praise the film as art or write it off as necessary agit-prop. And the fantastic box-office success has probably compounded their intimidation. I would assume, however, the cause of the film's popularity lies in novelty: this is probably the first feature in which ghetto gangs burn a police car and are praised for it. Otherwise, the racially mixed audience I saw the film with snickered throughout van Peeble's "serious moments" as well as his hamhanded satire.
It should be vehemently denied that this is a film that speaks to the heart or mind of the American black militant; and it should be emphasized that it fails solely because of its creator's ineptitude, not because of studio interference or distributor cutting. Van Peeples doesn't know either politics or people, so his agit-prop is neither uplifting or arousing-only sickening. And it smells like a phony.
Van Peeble's first film, The Story of a Three-day Pass, dealt with "integrationist-assimilationist attitudes now eschewed by the adherents of the Black Arts Movement." Van Peebles, who lived in Paris and made that first film there. has clearly gone through the alienating expatriation process experienced by many black artists; but where a gifted artist like John Williams can reveal his frustrations openly (in The Man Who Cried I Am ), Van Peebles merely jumps into what he feels to be the black mainstream without knowing what he's getting into. "You're as hot as little sister's twat" says a street minister to Sweetback; but when Van Peebles has his characters talk like that, he's speaking from a small part of today's ghetto.
No, Sweetback is not only bad, but dumb, and full of dumb, ineffective violence. And to be afraid of reviewing it because of the color of one's skin-or even to make that distinction a qualifier for a review-is to glibly cop-out on universal standards of decency, as well as admit to racial hermeticism.
V On first appraisal I could think of no common factor among these films. As I look back, they seem to share a storefront determinism much in vogue today among tired philosophers and frustrated students.
It's enough to scare one back to scholarship.