We were planning "I-Wanna-Be-Black Week"...but it's already Wednesday. Oh well. Here's Superfly!
From Roger Greenspun at the New York Times (published 1972):
"Super Fly" is the story of Priest, a successful black New York narcotics dealer who decides to quit the business—and does it. To finance his retirement he means to deal $300,000 worth of cocaine into a $1-million profit, and so "Super Fly" belongs in the company of all those crime movies that have had as their subject the one big last job.
That it does not also belong with those movies portraying the evils of drugs, must be the result of very intelligent calculation; for there is no moralizing, not even the subtle silent kind, and the film's most eloquent spoken passage is given to Priest's partner when he defends dealing as a way of life.
"Super Fly" is almost exclusively an action movie, but with the distinction that all the action means something, and is not simply a lot of running or driving or flying around for the mechanical titillation of the customers. The film's gut pleasures are real, and there are a lot of them. But, they always connect with one another in a world so precisely, cruelly, excitingly balanced that there is no movement without countermovement, no pressure without a greater pressure in return.
It is a world of the most limited options—all leading to the question of being in or getting out. For Priest merely to win some time to make choices, he must engineer an escape that inevitably creates a prison for somebody else—the bad guy as it happens, the Man, the biggest dealer of them all. But a feeling for absolute and fateful interdependence has always been the special glory of the best crime movies. The world of "Super Fly" may be hell, but it also makes sense.
Tall, handsome, with flowing hair and coat, with flashing eyes, and with a gold cross around his neck that he uses to sniff his own cocaine, Priest must embody a lifetime of fantasies, with his mammoth car, his apartment downtown, his rich and elegant women. Ron O'Neal lives the part with a kind of furious authority that is sometimes excessive; more often expressive of a role that belongs as much to current myth as to reality. Carl Lee as his treacherous, timorous partner is even more impressive, partly because he speaks, whereas Priest mostly acts, and he happens to get the best lines.
It would be possible to fault "Super Fly" almost scene by scene for its minor blunders. As a director, Gordon Parks Jr. shares with his celebrated father a difficulty in managing simple exchanges between actors, a tendency sometimes to misjudge camera placement, an occasional weak reliance on handsome cinematography. But he has gotten so many more important things right and, in his first feature, he has made such a brilliantly idiomatic films, that it would be ridiculous to do less than praise him.
"Super Fly," a very good movie, opened yesterday at the Loew's State I and Loew's Cine theaters.
Technical Information:
Title: Super Fly
Year: 1972
Country: USA
Director: Gordon Parks Jr.
Source: DVD9 Retail
Video Codec: 480p-x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 2.34 GB
Length: 1:34:21
Programs used: RipBot, tsMuxer, SubRip, mkvmerge
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: AVC H264 @ 2048 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio 1: English- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: French- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Audio 3: English Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: French, Spanish, cc-English
DVD Extras:
- One Last Deal: A Retrospective
- Ron O'Neal on the Making of Super Fly
- Behind the Threads and Behind the Hog
- Curtis Mayfield on Super Fly
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