Super Fly (Sig Shore Productions, Superfly, Warner Bros., 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, November 1) Turner Classic Movies ran a whole night of Black-themed films with Ben Mankiewicz co-hosting with Black film critic, historian and author Donald Bogle, who’s written six books about African-Americans in film and TV but was particularly talking about Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. The film I wanted to watch was Super Fly (1972), an example of the short-lived “Blaxploitation” craze of the early 1970’s, directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. (whose father, Gordon Parks, Sr., had directed the pioneering Blaxploitation film Shaft the year before) from a script by Phillip Fenty. Basically it’s your standard-issue gangster film about the disillusioned crook who wants to make that One Big Score that will make him so much money he will be able to leave the criminal life forever – only it never works out quite the way the good-bad guy intended. In this version the good-bad guy is cocaine dealer Priest (Ron O’Neal, who oddly doesn’t look particularly Black; he’s relatively light-skinned and has long straight hair, and only the shape of his nose gives him away as Black), and he’s navigating a landscape of accommodating women (he has at least two girlfriends that we see, one Black and one white), fellow Black drug dealers, Black militants (though we get the impression that the so-called “militants” who hit him up for money are just scammers; apparently there was a sequel, Super Fly TNT, in which Priest essentially joined the revolution) and corrupt white cops.

Part of the Blaxploitation formula was to get a major Black music artist to write the score for your film; Parks, Sr. had done that quite successfully with Isaac Hayes in Shaft, other Blaxploitation films employed major soul names like Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man) and James Brown (Disco Godfather), and in Super Fly the major soul name was Curtis Mayfield. Mayfield’s score is by far the best thing about this film; though I was irked that his backup band was called “The Curtis Mayfield Experience” (I think “Experience” as a band name should have been retired with the death of Jimi Hendrix, but it turned up in all sorts of other places after that: I have a live album by Jimmy Cliff in which his act is announced as the “Jamaica Experience,” and one by Bob Marley in which he’s called the “Trenchtown Experience”), his music has a febrile quality that the rest of the film sadly lacks. Sure, there’s a great soft-core porn scene between Priest and his Black girlfriend Georgia (Shiela Frazier) making love in a bathtub, and there’s a quite good ending in which not only are the white police officers corrupt, they’re essentially running the drug trade in Harlem and the deputy police commissioner, Riordan (played in a weird bit of plantation-style paternalism by the film’s producer, Sig Shore, billed as “Mike Richards”), is the proverbial “Big Man” in charge of the whole thing. In their final confrontation Riordan tells Priest, “I own you,” and given that the whole reason African-Americans exist was their ancestors were brought here as slaves, that phrase “I own you” understandably sets Priest off and he lashes out in the big fight scene.

Alas, Gordon Parks, Jr. decided to shoot the big fight scene in slow motion, which after Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch had become trendy but only takes the edge off a film that, for all Blaxploitation’s reputation as a genre filled with action, is surprisingly dull. Most of this film is just Ron O’Neal as Priest walking through the streets of Harlem, interacting with his Black sometimes-comrades, sometimes-rivals like Scatter (Julius W. Harris) and Fat Freddie (Charles MacGregor) – Fat Freddie is the most genuinely pathetic, in the good sense, character in the film; alas, he’s busted by the corrupt white cops for beating up a man who came on to his wife (Yvonne Delaine) and both he and Scatter end up ratting out Priest to the cops – hanging out with the various girlfriends and ultimately having an existential crisis because, while he wants to get out of drug dealing, he doesn’t know what else he could do with his life. (At least two other characters warn him about that, and Priest himself says that he doesn’t want the sort of low-paying dead-end job that is his only other real alternative.) Also, Priest not only sells cocaine he uses it himself, and in most stories about drug dealers the central character’s downfall comes when he starts getting hooked on his own product and appropriates too much of the stuff for his own use. I’d heard of Super Fly for decades, and now that I’ve finally seen it it’s a major disappointment, lacking neither the overall interest and excitement of Shaft nor the sheer campy incoherence of the Pam Grier vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown – which are terrible movies by any normal standards, but Grier’s riveting performances and the sheer perfection of her bad-ass attitude make them watchable and entertaining. If I’d been reviewing Super Fly when it was new, I’d probably have recommended that people avoid the movie and buy Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack album instead, much like the movie Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was pretty useless except for the great soundtrack songs by k. d. lang.