This review contains spoilers.
Shaft (1971), starring Richard Roundtree and directed by the great photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, more or less created the modern African-American screen hero—a man of action, cool, smart, and virile. “We were trying to emulate . . . what white movie stars we admired were doing,” remembered actor Ron O’Neal, who played Priest in Super Fly. “Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds. . . . We were trying to show a mature, intelligent black man, operating with all the panache and verve of James Bond.” Yet Super Fly, directed by the 38-year-old Gordon Parks Jr., turns this endeavor into a giant provocation. Priest first appears onscreen in bed with a rich white woman who buys coke from him; one outrageous composition shows, in the right background, the nude woman lounging in rumpled sheets and, in the left foreground, a close-up profile of Priest’s crotch, his ample package visible through his shorts.
Priest is the same debonair character O’Neal played in 1972—a stylish dresser, a skilled martial artist, a consummate ladies’ man—but of course the leather-clad street dealer is a fairly mundane figure now that stories of the international drug trade are ubiquitous in movies and on TV. (Bored with this film? Next week brings Sicario: Day of the Soldado.) Priest’s philosophical debate with Eddie has been eliminated, though echoes of it reverberate through the hero’s amoral voice-over narration. By the end of the movie, Priest has triumphed over the Mexican drug lord, the Snow Patrol, and a pair of corrupt Atlanta police detectives, mainly by ratting them out to other parties; the last shot, indulging one of the movies’ hoariest cliches, shows him and his lover Georgia (Lex Scott Davis) sipping cocktails on their yacht off the coast of Montenegro. “Yeah, I left America,” Priest concludes on the soundtrack. “And I took the dream with me.” Black films do travel, we’ve learned, only some of them travel downward. v
Directed by Director X. R, 116 min.
