Racial Slur

By JAY COCKS

SUPER FLY

Directed by GORDON PARKS JR.

Screenplay by PHILLIP FENTY

Priest (Ron O'Neal) is a pusher and user of cocaine. He dresses stylishly, has lots of girls, lives high and wants out, for vague reasons that have mostly to do with plot. If Priest did not want out, then the big dealers would not be after him, the cops would not be hassling him, and there would be one less dreary, sleazy movie about high jinks and low life in the ghetto.

Even according to the dismal standards established by predecessors like Cool Breeze, Super Fly seems remarkably exploitative and inept. Director Gordon Parks Jr. (his father is the photojournalist turned film maker who directed the two Shaft movies) cuts to a shot of the fancy grillwork on Priest's car whenever he does not know what else to do. Thus there is an abundance of grillwork shots. This is Parks' first feature, and some faults are customary under such circumstances. But Super Fly shows no evidence of perception, intelligence or sensitivity; there is only a kind of frivolous opportunism.

What makes a crummy little movie like Super Fly worth getting angry about is the implication behind it: that movies made for black audiences have to be, or can easily be, so casually and contemptuously awful. Such movies are not even made with the same care or craft as the 90-minute features cranked out for television. They portray all black men as diddy-boppers or street-corner hustlers, all white men as drooling, craven criminals, and women of any complexion as whimpering sex machines. They lack the energy and dignity of good action melodrama. Super Fly and movies like it demean the audiences they are made for.

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