Super Fly
Reprinted by permission of Donald Bogle from his film reference
work, Blacks in American Films & Television: An Illustrated
Encyclopedia (Simon & Schuster)
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A year after Shaft, Super Fly, independently
produced by Sig Shore and directed by Gordon Parks, Jr.,
appeared. Within two months, it made $11 million. Within the
African American community, however, many were outraged by the
glorification of its hero, a cocaine dealer named Priest (Ron
O'Neal). It has to be admitted that hero Priest, dressed like
an urban prima ballerina in long, sweeping coats and large
wide-brimmed hats, is a romanticized version of the Harlem
pimp.
Super Fly looks authentic: the Harlem settings, the
streets and alleyways, the bars, and the tenements all paint an
overriding bleak vision of urban decay, new terrain and a new
kind of social realism for commercial cinema. It's a war zone
with corrupt drug kingpins and their pushers. Priest has risen
to power by standing outside the law. The law itself, so the
picture reveals, is perverted and corrupt. The film ends with
Priest defeating his white opponents (including the drug boss)
and leaving the cocaine business with a hefty bankroll to
boot.
At heart, Super Fly sends out mixed messages. At one
point when a disgruntled Priest announces he wants to get out
of the drug trade, his friend Eddie (Carl Lee) dismisses such
thoughts. After all, so Eddie reasons, Priest has much that
America is taught to value: "Eight track stereo, color TV in
every room, and you can snort half a piece of dope every day.
That's the American Dream." Priest himself knows he has the
big car, the fine vines (clothes), and even the gorgeous women
that are part of the package. Fundamentally, the film tells
audiences that the American dream of success has become
polluted and perverted into a nightmare of cold, hard
materialism. Priest, however, is no political rebel with an
agenda of political alternatives. This grand-style
individualist just wants out. Yet he plans to take with him
his material acquisitions and comforts (represented by the
cache of money we know that he holds onto at the end of the
film).
Audiences, however, chose to overlook the contradictions,
enthusiastically accepting the wish-fulfillment ending. No one
wanted to see a black hero defeated. Thus the main point again
was that here was a black man living on his own terms.
Like Shaft, Priest was also, you might say, sexually audacious.
Curiously enough, the big sex scene in Super Fly (it's
a bathtub sequence with lots of suds covering some vital areas)
like the sex scenes in other black films---Melinda,
Slaughter, and Shaft---frequently was more graphic
and lingering than those seen in most white movies of the time
and looked as if it had been inserted to play on the legend of
blacks' high-powered sexuality. While the movies now
assiduously sought to avoid the stereotype of the asexual tom,
they fell, interestingly enough, into the trap of presenting
the hyper sexual man. Rarely was there a mature male view of
sex as depicted in a movie like Nothing But A Man. Then, too,
the women are rarely defined in any way other than as the
hero's love interest. As in Shaft, Priest also has two
women: one white (Polly Niles), the other black (Sheila
Frazier). Again the idea is that the white woman---once placed
on a pedestal in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of A
Nation---is hardly virginal or pure; indeed she can be had.
The black woman, who helps Priest make his triumph, is
depicted at least as trying to reach the hero emotionally, to
figure out what motivates him and to understand indeed who he
is. Otherwise we know nothing else about her.
Technically, Super Fly was adequate. Some of its drive
could be attributed to the musical score of Curtis Mayfield
(who makes a brief appearance in the film). There was also
actor Ron O'Neal's performance---or perhaps his perceptive lack
of one. O'Neal presented an arrogant, enigmatic hustler who
was careful not to reveal too much. In 1973, a fairly
terrible sequel, Super Fly T.N.T, appeared, starring
and directed by O'Neal with a script by Alex Haley. In 1990,
there was a sorry attempt to revive Super Fly in The
Return of Super Fly.
Producer: Sig Shore
Director: Gordon Parks, Jr.
Screenplay: Phillip Fenty
Cinematography: James Signorelli
Film Editing: Bob Brady
Art Direction:
Music: Curtis Mayfield
Cast: Ron O'Neal (Youngblood Priest), Carl Lee (Eddie), Shelia Frazier (Georgia), Julius Harris (Scatter), Charles McGregor (Fat Freddie), Nate Adams (Dealer).
C-92m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.
 
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