CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
HUEY NEWTON, one of the founders of the Black Panther movement, was a great fan of Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 movie Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song. He even analysed that funky box-office smash, writing that its tale of a hustler who evolves into a revolutionary was an allegory of a `street brother who moves from the `me’ doctrine to the `we’ doctrine. It blows my mind every time I talk about it because it’s so simple and yet so profound.’ Twenty-odd years later, old man Van Peebles has penned the screenplay of Panther, based on his own novel, and recruited son Mario (who appeared as a baby in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song) to direct the dramatised story of the Black Panther movement. The movement began in 1966 in Oakland, California, as a response to the harassment and violence suffered by the black community at the hands of the police. The movie has been criticised by historians and Panther veterans for its political naivety, as well as a reliance on conspiracy theories that would seem more suited to an Oliver Stone epic than to a proper record of history. All the same, I really enjoyed the trip. It’s a difficult task, telling the story of a group or a movement instead of the usual Hollywood good-guy-against-the-world narrative, and the Van Peebleses have taken certain liberties. Some of the characters have been fictionalised — for example, the leading protagonist Judge (sympathetically played by Kadeem Hardison), who interacts with true-to-life Panther members Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. Mario Van Peebles defends the strategy by saying: `[The film] is about a forest more than a tree. The Judge character enabled us to get a broader spectrum of the personal as well as the political, to show what the Panthers meant in American society.’ Beginning with black and white news footage, intercut with grainy, monochrome scenes that recount how Newton and Seale met, the film struggles to get off the ground. But 40 minutes into the story it develops into a very engrossing and tragic tale. Sure, there’s lots of political sermonising in the `we shall overcome’/ `you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution’ oeuvre; there’s also a speech from director Van Peebles, in which he says the US declared war on black people the first time a black man was abducted from Africa. The core of the drama begins when sympathetic cop Joe Don Baker recruits Judge as a spy for the FBI. The Panthers approve and he becomes a double-agent — a narrative device that comes complete with paranoid plotting. In the end, the big baddie is the white establishment and, of course, J Edgar Hoover. The film’s final statement — about the authorities flooding black communities with drugs to keep them docile — seems tailor-made for present-day inner-city youths. Although it is at times simplistic, and filmed on a relatively low budget (compared to, say, Malcolm X) which makes it feel a bit like a television movie, I enjoyed the history lesson, and the conspiracy theories. Even if it has been contrived to entertain today’s generation, a movie that has a two-minute scene with about 100 people screaming `Fuck Ronald Reagan’ can’t be all that bad.