Gordon Parks Jr's All Too Brief Career as a Director Began and Ended Strongly With Superfly and Aaron Loves Angela
The icons, movies, fashions, style and particularly the sounds of Blaxploitation are held in such regard and endlessly, infinitely influential that it can be easy to forget that there was a fairly long stretch when Blaxploitation was out of favor culturally with critics and the black establishment, represented by NAACP, for exploiting racist stereotypes of African-Americans as violent, criminal and hyper-sexual. Then the late 1980s and 1990s brought Blaxploitation in a big, overwhelmingly positive way thanks to Hip Hop (especially gangsta rap), Quentin Taranino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown (starring the legendary Pam Grier in her big comeback vehicle), the hood movie boom (including Boyz N The Hood and Menace II Society) as well as a steady stream of often inspired spoofs and satires like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Undercover Brother and Black Dynamite.
These days we tend to focus on the bold, unapologetic, uncompromising, often explicitly political blackness of these movies more than their exploitative aspects. Blaxploitation has never gone away since its big comeback but we currently seem to be in a particularly robust period of Blaxploitation appreciation.
Last year one of the biggest names in Blaxploitation, Superfly, returned sluggishly to the big screen in a remake that received mixed reviews and underwhelming box-office but that was nevertheless an Oscar-sweeping triumph compared to this year's Shaft, an appalling insult to Gordon Parks’ zeitgeist-capturing, game-changing 1972 detective movie that reduced the iconic private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks to a lazy boomer joke, wasting the times and talents of O.G Shafts Richard Roundtree and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as charming newcomer Jesse T. Usher in the process.
On a more inspired and less depressing note, Eddie Murphy scored a juicy comeback role and his best reviews in ages as real-life Blaxploitation cult hero Rudy Ray Moore, who didn’t let being too old, too raw and way too goofy-looking keep him from becoming an unlikely but beloved Blaxploitation hero and godfather of Hip Hop, in the wonderful new Netflix biopic and Fractured Mirror entry Dolemite Is My Name.
If Moore was the crazed jester of Blaxploitation, Gordon Parks Jr. was its regal prince. Parks Jr. came to Blaxploitation glory from a much different place than Moore. If the Dolemite star was the ultimate outsider, Jr. was the ultimate insider. He was the son and namesake of one of our most successful and revered black photographers and later the first black man direct a studio film, the haunting 1969 coming of age movie The Learning Tree.
In 1971 Parks Sr. made an even more profound impact on film and pop culture as the director of Shaft, a groundbreaking detective drama that along with Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, represented the twin firing shots of the Blaxploitation revolution.
A year later Gordon Parks Jr., a photographer and filmmaker like his dad, followed in his old man’s footsteps in nearly as iconic a fashion with his 1972 directorial debut Superfly, which asked audiences to take a walk on the wild side and root for the bad guy in its groundbreaking look at silky smooth drug dealer Youngblood Priest (Ron O’Neal) and his heroic quest to make a million dollars in four months so he can retire forever from the street life.
In Superfly, that passes for the American Dream because it is so Quixotic, seductive and unattainable in a corrupt system rigged to ensure that the dirty white players at the top always enjoy every unfair advantage over the hustlers, dealers and small-time hustlers caught up in the machinery of the system.
For the always impeccably coiffed, gorgeously attired, effortlessly stylish Youngblood, who transcends mere handsome in favor of an androgynous, almost feminine beauty, that million dollar dream represents freedom, transcendence, a way out of the game that doesn’t involve a body bag, prison sentence or fatal overdose.
For Youngblood, money is power, and power is freedom. He does not realize yet that money brings with it its own set of complications, that instead of liberation it promises to put him in a white man's debt for the rest of his life, to make him the flashiest slave in all of New York.
“Confidence” does not do justice to the assurance Parks Jr, brings to Superfly. It’s closer to cockiness. Parks Jr. brings tremendous swagger to the film’s legendary sense of style. Supefly depicts its protagonist’s high life as a cocaine-snorting, womanizing, fur-wearing, luxury car-driving baller and badass as spiritually empty, a moral black hole that he will be lucky to escape with his life and his dignity.
But Superfly’s high-minded moralizing doesn't make anywhere near as profound an impression as its tactile sensuality and glamour. Parks Jr. brings a photographer’s eye to Superfly and a cinema verité documentarian’s gift for finessing the messy raw material of real life into a new, more immediate and urgent kind of cinema blurring the lines between narrative filmmaking and documentaries and movie and news.
This fascinating, ultimately unresolvable conflict between the film's overt anti-drug, anti-crime message and the implicitly pro-drug, pro-crime message of its extraordinarily seductive style is reflected in Curtis Mayfield's hypnotic score, one of the greatest not just in the uniquely musical subgenre of Blaxploitation but in the history of American film.
Blaxploitation often seemed to exist for the sake of soundtracks, scores and theme songs. These are the elements that have aged the best and endured the most, in no small part because these elegant urban anthems of defiance and pride have been recycled and re-imagined endlessly by gangsta rap, its close creative offspring.
Mayfield’s poetic, profound lyrics powerfully address the bleak social conditions that lead men of substance and promise like Youngblood to devote their furious youthful energies to poisoning their communities in pursuit of a a big payday and a chance to lunge hungrily at a mirage of freedom and opportunity rather than trying to build empires the legal way.
But the seductiveness of Mayfield’s grooves and the delicate beauty of his heartbreaking falsetto can’t help but make the lurid pleasures of life outside the law seem attractive to the point of being irresistible.
Parks Jr. doesn't shy away from showing the consequences of Youngblood’s unfortunate line of work. Superfly is a film of extraordinary grit as well as glamour that uses hand held cameras and grimy location shooting to ground the action in a grubby New York full of junkies and crime and corrupt cops with unfathomably complicated and ultimately parasitic relationship with the black criminal underworld.
Parks Jr., Mayfield, editor Bob Brady and cinematographer James Signorelli, who would go on to direct the cult comedies Easy Money and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark but otherwise spent pretty much his whole career at Saturday Night Live, combine sound and image in radical, revolutionary and sublime ways.
Superfly is a masterpiece of style over substance but also style as substance, most notably in a rightfully revered photo montage sequence that makes a series of artfully composed still images at once wildly cinematic and unexpectedly rhythmic and propulsive.
In O’Neal, the preternaturally assured director had not just an actor, as opposed to the moonlighting athletes and musicians who often filled the action hero roles in Blaxploitation, but an Actor, a heavyweight thespian who plays the anti-hero with a seriousness and majesty befitting a tragic Shakespearean hero rather than a garden variety anti-hero.
O’Neal lends the character an underlying air of bittersweet melancholy, a sense that all of the money and cocaine and beautiful women and fancy cars in the world can’t fill the vast hole at the core of his being.
With Superfly, Parks Jr. knocked it out of the park his first time at bat as a feature film director with an instant classic that was, if anything, too exciting, too fun and too glamorous, in that it could not help but make a very bad man's evil existence look pretty damn good. Superfly made the criminal life seem way too seductive for some cultural gate-keepers, to the point that it completely undercut and contradicted its anti-drug message.
It’s not easy being the son of a great man, particularly when you go into the same line of business with the same name but with his hypnotic, captivating directorial debut Gordon Parks Jr. didn’t just meet the high standards that came with being Gordon Parks Sr.’s son: he exceeded them.
Gordon Parks Jr.’s extraordinary career as a feature film director lasted just three more years and three more films. It’s always a tragedy when a parent buries their child, particularly if they go on to outlive them by a period of decades. That’s what happened when Gordon Parks Jr. died in a plane crash at 44 in 1979 while his father lived to the ripe old age of 93 in 2006.
By 1975, the Blaxploitation boom was changing and evolving in new and fascinating ways. The Superfly hit-maker was maturing along with it. Gritty, violent, sexy tales of pimps, players and private eyes remained the core of the subgenre but Blaxploitation proved durable and versatile enough to include not just action movies but also horror movies, family movies, historical biopics and tragic romances like 1975’s Aaron Loves Angela.
With Aaron Loves Angela, Gordon Parks Jr.'s final film, Blaxploitation met Shakespeare in a gritty, powerful romantic melodrama that re-imagines the star-crossed love affair between Romeo and Juliet as a racially explosive romance between Aaron (Kevin Hooks), a sixteen year old black kid in Harlem whose life revolves around basketball, and Angela (Fame’s Irene Cara), a fifteen year old Puerto Rican girl whose family and community is none too enthused about her dating outside her race.
Aaron is torn between wildly different father figures, both wildly inadequate and tragic. The great character actor Moses Gunn turns in one of his most powerful and nuanced performances as Aaron’s dad Ike, a high school and college athlete athlete who came heartbreakingly close to making it in the big leagues.
Ike grasped desperately at that big brass ring, his American dream, only to have it just elude his grasp in a way that crushed his spirit and killed his soul, reducing him to an angry, sad, bitter alcoholic cursed to live forever in the endless, chilly shadow of his abandoned aspirations.
Aaron’s other father figure is even more problematic. Kevin Hooks’ father Robert is riveting as Beau, a pimp, cocaine dealer and all-around bad human being who nevertheless takes an interest in the talented young ballplayer that is mostly, but not entirely, sinister.
Life in a 1970s Harlem was so decimated by urban blight that it looks like a war zone, an American Beirut, but when Aaron falls hopelessly in love with Angela, suddenly a grim world comes alive with music and life and romance.
Like Superfly, music is central to Aaron Loves Angela, only this time the icon providing the soundtrack and score is Jose Feliciano. Like Curtis Mayfield in Superfly, Feliciano does more than just provide the music for an unusually musical tale of life and death in the inner city. Feliciano is the heart and soul of Aaron Loves Angela, in addition to providing a cameo as a singer at a nightclub whose song articulates Aaron’s inner struggle just as uncannily as Curtis Mayfield was very explicitly singing about Youngblood Priest’s pain during his cameo in Superfly.
Aaron Loves Angela is an unmistakably Blaxploitation spin on the archetypal tale of star-crossed lovers where Romeo decides to lose his virginity to the high-priced neighborhood call girl so that he won’t embarrass himself the first time with his Juliet, Romeo proclaims his love for his Juliet via graffiti rather than monologues delivered in iambic pentameter, and escape from a world of ugliness and strife takes the form of $250,000 in purloined drug money that presents more problems than it promises to solve.
Parks Jr’s romantic and deeply sad final film finds beauty, romance and truth in the ugliness and despair of 1970s Harlem, in neighborhoods the non-Blaxploitation world pretended didn’t exist but that Parks Jr. captures with a sense of verisimilitude and craft that lends the film an unmistakable air of truth.
With sensitive, socially conscious and substantive outliers like Aaron Loves Angela, Blaxploitation began to move beyond exploitation and sensationalism towards something artier and more ambitious. It had come so far in such a short amount of time and the Parks were at the very forefront of the movement.
Parks Jr.’s life was a tragedy because he died so young, seemingly with so many more stories to tell and movies to make, but a triumph as well because he made so much of his very limited time on earth, proving, like his father, that you do not need to make a large number of movies to leave behind an impressive and influential legacy.
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