Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) is an apolitical African American sex performer who becomes a reluctant hero when he kills the white policemen who brutalized a young prisoner for racist reasons. On the run to Mexico, he encounters numerous interesting characters. Putting black cinema on the map and ushering in the 1970s blaxploitation genre, Van Peebles's thrilling work is also a historically and ideologically significant essay on race relations.