Super Fly

This month, TCM has been running a spotlight on noteworthy performances by black actors and actresses every Wednesday night in prime time. This gives me an opportunity to blog about Super Fly, which is on overnight tonight at 2:00 AM.

Youngblood Priest (Ron O'Neal) struts through New York City on the way to a meeting with his girlfriend Georgia (Sheila Frazier), showing that he isn't going to take any nonsense from anybody. Priest is a cocaine dealer, but as we see, he's also a user. Thanks to the illegality of drugs, it's a highly dangerous business, and Priest has been thinking of gettign out of it in order to live a life of retirement.

But to do that, one needs a substantial sum of money, especially if one is putting a bunch of that money up one's nose. As Priest's best friend and partner of sorts Eddie (Carl Lee) points out, at the rate Priest is using, the money he's got saved up to this point is only going to last him a year, and then where is he going to be? So naturally, Priest comes up with one of those classic tropes from crime movies: The Perfect One Last Score that Can't Go Wrong.

Of course, there's almost definitely going to be something, or multiple somethings that go wrong, or else we're not going to have much of a movie. Priest's plan is to take the $300,000 he and Eddie have saved up, buy 30 kg of coke, and then sell it off on the street which should more than triple their money. Now, the first obvious problem is getting that coke in the first place. Priest has an old friend in Scatter (Julius Harris) who has been in the business, but wanted to get out and is now running a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. He's got a stash for himself, but he's clearly reluctant to get those 30 kgs for Priest.

There's also the fact that it's going to take several months to deal all that coke, and in that time the other players in the business are sure to notice what's going on which of course happens when what looks like the police stop Priest and Eddie, only for it to be some higher-up white dealers who really run the cocaine business in New York.

So in some ways there's a lot in common with other gangster and crime movies, and yeat also a lot that makes Super Fly unique. It's not just because of the black protagonist, but that combined with the changing morals and an increase in location filming. TCM ran this last April as part of a spotlight on movies looking at New York City in the 1970s, and the low-budget location shooting gives Super Fly a wonderfully gritty look. I also love the production design. I've said in the past that I enjoy movies from the 1960s that are contemporary and show off the design of that decade in all its glory, while movies looking back at that era tend to look sterile. By the same token, Super Fly does the same thing for the 70s. One scene of Priest in a cafe doing a deal really reminded me of the look of another cafe scene in Panic in Needle Park.

Gordon Parks, Jr. brought other stylish direction to Super Fly as well, notably in one extended photo montage of the progression of Priest's cocaine deals set over Curtis Mayfield's "Pusherman". Some might have an artistic problem with it, but I think it works here and provides something really distinctive.

Super Fly would go well in a night of movies with the previously mentioned Panic in Needle Park and The French Connection. It deserves far better recognition than just as a blaxploitation movie.