A glib way to thumbnail Melvin Van Peebles, the groundbreaking filmmaker who died yesterday at the age of 89, is to say he was Spike Lee for an America that wasn’t ready for Spike Lee (and America still isn’t ready for Spike Lee). That gets across the magnitude of Van Peebles’s status as a fearless and uncompromising voice of Black identity, cultural and cinematic, but it doesn’t begin to convey the uniqueness of the man – the boldness and daring, the wild-ass humor, the sheer unyielding anger. His movie are too few, but their breadth is astonishing, including a debut, “The Story of a Three Day Pass” (1967), that’s essentially a lost French New Wave film with a racial bite; an outrageously subversive studio comedy, “Watermelon Man” (1970); and the cult hit “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971) that in style and rhetoric is an artifact of its revolutionary times yet as timely as today. (It’s not Van Peebles’ fault that Hollywood ground the razor’s edge of “Sweet” down to the blunt come-ons of Blaxploitation cinema.)
A dive into his biography reveals a Renaissance man with an absurdly wonderful span of accomplishments, including five novels written in French during Van Peebles’ youthful Paris years – where he was editor-in-chief of the French edition of MAD Magazine for all five of its issues – and stage musicals whose spoken songs prefigured rap. But “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” was the linchpin, a self-financed, self-produced, self-distributed, and self-starring Molotov cocktail that blew up conceptions of what Black American cinema was and could be. The generations of directors who followed rightly called him Godfather.
How can you see Van Peebles’ movies? “The Story of a Three Day Pass,” “Sweet Sweetback,” and “Don’t Play Us Cheap” (1973), Van Peebles’ filming of his Tony-nominated play, are available on the Fandor streaming service, which you can currently only subscribe to through Amazon Prime. “Watermelon Man” can be rented on most VOD platforms, as can “Baadasssss!” (2003), son Mario Van Peebles’ fond re-envisioning of his pops’ original. But all of the above – plus rare early short films and a lot more – are part of the Criterion boxed set “Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films” that was already slated to come out September 28 and that now serves as a combination tutorial/memorial to one of this country’s great originals.