Super Fly (1972)
Directed by Gordon Parks
Written by Phillip Fenty
Starring Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Julius W. Harris
Release Date August 4th, 1972
Published June 11th, 2018
With a newly modernized take on Gordon Parks’ provocative 1972 movie Superfly having arrived in theaters this past weekend, I took the opportunity to look back on Parks’ original film and came away shocked and very impressed. While the film’s low budget keeps it from rising to the level of great cinema, the pieces are in place, and Parks’ incredible direction stands out more today than it did when the film was written off as a low budget drive in movie in 1972.
Superfly may seem like a silly movie on the surface. It’s easy to dismiss Gordon Parks’ 1972 action drama about a drug dealer trying to escape the criminal life with one last big score as just a Blaxploitation movie, or a low budget, b-movie. People underestimated and discounted Gordon Parks throughout his brief career and often without giving his low budget movies the kind of chance that did go to bigger budget movies with white directors and white lead actors.
What was missed by dismissing Parks and his low budget, indie aesthetic was the authenticity and earnest quality of his work. Parks was unfairly and incorrectly accused of glorifying criminal life and making drug dealing look like a lifestyle worth pursuing. In reality, Superfly is a character piece about a criminal that carries an air of detachment about crime, similar to the approach taken by big budget movies like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Obviously, Superfly is not as rich or epic as The Godfather but both movies are about charismatic criminals, one just happens to be high toned and big budget while the other is gritty and low budget.
Superfly stars Ron O’Neal as drug dealer Priest Youngblood. Priest has grown into a successful cocaine dealer through the liberal use of violence and a stake from his mentor, Scatter (Julius W. Harris). With his partner, Eddie (Carl Lee), he’s managed to gather $300,000 which is just enough to trade for more cocaine, a high quality product that they can then sell with the aim of making a cool million dollars, split 50/50.
The key to the scheme is getting the now retired Scatter to put them in touch with The Man. Unfortunately, what Priest and Eddie don’t know, ‘The Man’ happens to be a cop named Reardon and once you are in business with The Man, you are in business for good, or you go to jail. This puts Priest in a tough spot: work with The Man and risk getting arrested when he tries to get out of the game or walk away with nothing.
Ron O’Neal’s tough guy posturing is electric. O’Neal’s eyes are brilliantly convincing, his wheels are always turning and there always seems to be a whole other story going on behind those eyes. O’Neal oozes charisma and charm and this is likely what people who reacted negatively to Superfly were thinking when they came to believe the movie was a glorification of drug dealing. O’Neal’s off the charts charisma is mistaken as Parks’ glamor.
O’Neal’s Priest as a character indicates that he doesn’t think drug dealing is cool, it’s merely a means to an end. Racism pushed many black men of Priest’s age, and especially of his ambition, into the world of crime because they believed that legitimate avenues were not open to them because of race. It’s not a justification, it’s a character trait, not unlike the way members of the Corleone family believed that crime was the only avenue for an Italian in their corner of New York City.
Superfly is outsized and over the top in how it portrays Priest but it is not to a comic degree. Gordon Parks was in touch with the style and fashion of the streets of New York City and at times his Superfly feels like as much a fashion shoot as a movie. The fashion of Superfly influenced fashion among black culture in New York City for years but it was the drug dealers of New York that inspired Parks who then captured the zeitgeist.
You can argue whether you find it acceptable that Parks glorified the style of the street dealers and kingpins of New York City, but it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t authentic and that authenticity was Parks’ goal, not celebrating drug dealing. Portraying a drug dealer authentically, the high fashion and the low crime is no different and no less provocative than what Francis Ford Coppola did for Italian gangsters in The Godfather or what William Friedkin did for dirty cops in The French Connection.
The big difference between Superfly and those two Academy Award winners is a much lower budget and the lesser talented performers that come from that lower budget aesthetic. Parks’s style, the gritty cinematography, the authentic production design, are top notch given the restrictions that Parks was working under in terms of budget. The camera work is lively, the editing keeps the pace humming throughout and the script by Phillip Fenty is lively, colorful and clever.
Is Priest a sympathetic character? Yes and no, he’s a complicated character. Gordon Parks shows us everything about Priest, his dark and dangerous side and the frightened side that longs for a life away from drugs and criminality, the kind of life he believes only white people get to have. That’s the harsh undercurrent of Superfly, the one polarized audiences and critics in 1972, the presentation of Priest as neither hero or villain but as a character who believed, right or wrong, that his race drove him to be a criminal.
Parks’ provocative approach came from not judging Priest but observing him. Audiences prefer the simplicity of taking sides, of clear cut right and wrong and Priest was a criminal battling other criminals, battling corruption among people in power and using his wits to build his escape. The ending of Superfly is a thrilling bit of misdirection that Parks lays in beautifully without tipping his hand before the big reveal at the end that may make Priest seem heroic but is much more subversive and murky than a happy ending.
